Getting Started (Part1):
Find Your Planner
So, you’re intrigued, maybe you’ve read one of my previous posts about the potential power of museum-planning partnerships and you want to start your own collaboration. Maybe you’ve just always been interested in your community’s future plans. Either way …
You’ve become a little planning-curious. (Yipee!) Now what?
Find Your Plan…
No surprise, I recommend you start by having a conversation – hopefully the first of many, just as you do for any other potential partnership. But first, you might want to know what planning looks like in your city, town, or region. Look online for your community or regional plan. Which can be slightly trickier than it sounds. The nomenclature isn’t consistent. It could be called the General Plan, Long-range Plan, Regional Plan, or Master Plan. Or, it may have a catchy title, such as MetroCommon2050, Worcester Now/Next, or Imagine Boston 2030, to cite three Massachusetts examples. However, these are public documents, so a little digging should bring up the relevant plan.
…(s)
In fact, you will probably bring up a number of plans. While there will be an all-encompassing master plan that lays out planning intentions for several decades into the future, most likely your municipality or region will also have several sub-plans of a variety of vintages. These can include specific district plans (for a particular neighborhood, village, or business district), a climate resilience plan, housing plan, downtown revitalization plan, transportation plan, land use plan, green infrastructure or parks and recreation plan, and they may also have their own catchy titles. If your planners aren’t currently updating the big general plan at the moment, they are certainly working on one or more of these sub-plans. You are very likely to find a connection between one of these plans and your museum’s mission and future projects.
Find Your Planner
Introduce yourself (and your museum) to your planner(s)! Like the master plan itself, planning professionals can have a number of titles, such as urban or regional planner, city architect, infrastructure planner, planning engineer, etc. It can take some research to figure out exactly who is responsible for planning in your community. It is often a combination of a regulatory planning board (either elected or appointed) and an administrative planning office, or in small towns, an individual town planner. In very small towns here in New England, the elected planning committee or planning board may share a staff member with another board, such as the Conservation Commission, so your town planner may also be your conservation officer. Finally, there are can be regional planning agencies as well. Again, these folks work in the public sector, so shouldn’t be too hard to find. My gut feeling is that you want to start with the administrative person or office, but if your first connection is through the planning board - please tell me about it!
Find out which plans are in the works and what issues are on their horizon. Introduce them to the sorts of education and engagement work your museum does. Explore together where their future work and yours would have natural intersections:
Could you host community visioning meetings? Create a pop-up placemaking installation in a vacant lot or public plaza? Co-create a civic educational campaign to increase public awareness of planning and of every resident’s right to help shape future plans?
To whet your appetite, here are a couple of examples: In Massachusetts, the Lynn Museum hosted a forum on their city’s downtown plan. And in California, Riverside Art Museum’s Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture hosted a city design event for the public put on by the urban planning firm PlaceIt!, as did the Exploratorium in San Francisco, with PlaceIt! staff serving also as DJ.
Or Not
This is where the caveats come in. Planning staff are government employees. They are busy, and they have to move forward regardless of the direction the political winds are blowing. So maybe they can’t really work with you at the moment. Don’t let that stop you.
In my next post, I’ll share some ideas for forging ahead anyway.
~ Betsy Loring1
The Planning-Curious Museum Person
Sharing stories and ideas for other Planning-Curious Museum People and for Museum-Curious Planning People.
Betsy Loring is founder of expLoring exhibits & engagement. She has over 20 years’ experience in project management and exhibit development in multidisciplinary, indoor and outdoor museum settings. Her services include exhibit master planning, content and interactive development, and writing, with a focus on hands-on STEM. She also offers staff training in exhibition planning, formative evaluation, and prototyping. Special interests include multi-institutional collaborations, peer-to-peer professional development, and of course – collaboration with municipal planning practitioners.