A Planning Charrette Brings Together Brainstorming and Focus

In a charrette, over a period of days, hours, or an hour and a half, people brainstorm to design something from scratch or react to other people's designs.

The term and concept are from architecture, and the original idea was that a short, intense burst of energy (often involving all-nighters) would give a range of solutions to energize a public or private decision-making process.

Over the last 30 years or so, the process has become much less demanding. My first charrette required an all-weekend commitment, an announced intention not to waste any time sleeping, and working in an empty building with no heat.

Only design fanatics would do something like that now. Plan for a basic level of comfort.

Sometimes only design professionals are involved, and the technique is used to expedite teams of people who otherwise might be multi-tasking or who are not accustomed to working together.

This would be about the only instance when a charrette would be appropriate for working out technical and financial details.

However, charrettes now have been adapted to planning, and often include open community engagement. They also have become considerably more versatile in their length, detail, and format.

We think it's a huge waste of time to try to apply this type of workshop philosophy to broad-based metropolitan area challenges, though. All this accomplishes is allowing people to ventilate a little bit, but a charrette really is not the place to try to solve complex social-political dysfunction.

What Happens at a Charrette

Often a city planning consultant or architect leads the charrette (which also may be written correctly as charette).

If you have a very small budget, choose an able facilitator or someone knowledgeable about the key issues, but not directly involved. A respected leader from a nearby town would be ideal.

To be successful, it's wise to give people the same initial information, often a handout describing existing conditions and any limits that the event sponsor or government wishes to impose.

For example, constraints could be zoning, deed restrictions, floodplains, needs of a proposed user of the property, cost, or simply the desires of the sponsoring organization.

Typically participants begin with an introductory presentation of the basic information and ground rules. If participants are aleady very familiar with the problem at hand, you can let people come in whenever they want and drop in on conversations.

After the introduction, often the participants break into small groups voluntarily or by assignment. They may be working on different aspects of the issue, or developing independent ideas or solutions that then will be reported to the entire group.

One of the traditions of charrettes is that people are asked not to backtrack and change their minds, but to keep pressing forward toward new and ever more appropriate solutions.

Like most rules of thumb, this idea of not revisiting earlier decisions has some utility. Our opinion is that this works best in coming up with innovative architectural solutions, and not as well when trying to find a middle ground among well-entrenched political and social positions of the people who will be the decision makers.

A representative of each group often is asked to draw and/or express their conclusions visually.

The process I like best is the three or four day event where close neighbors of a prospective development are invited to participate each evening, and during the day a design team works to draw up, vette, and incorporate the community engagement record from the previous evening.

Obviously this is aimed at a small group of seriously interested folks, but it also can work when there is a fairly large neighborhood to be impacted by an institutional land use, say a new community college. The neighbors then somewhat take turns in attending the evening event.

Taking a weekend for this activity works well also, although it's increasingly difficult to obtain public commitment to attend and participate. Two consecutive Saturday mornings usually are better attended than a weekend event.

This technique works also, incidentally, when two different governments or a government and a university, major utility, railroad, or other large player need to iron out a plan for property in which they both have an interest.

You may then plan about three sessions two weeks apart, perhaps from 4-6 pm. In the intervening weeks, the designers draw options and/or refine plans based on the previous discussion.

Obviously, your charrette should be as brief as feasible for arriving at a solution, or at least a short list of options for further study.

For more information, consult the National Charrette Institute. A final piece of advice is to assure that your planner or consultant either has experience in this method and feels comfortable with planning logistics such as meals, or that you find a good event planner among your stakeholder group.

If you'd like to share a success story with the world, whether you're a participant, consultant, or leader, visit our best charrette page and tell us what you did.

Return from Charrette to City Planning

Useful Community Development home

Copyright 2012,www.useful-community-development.org.
All rights reserved. This site is not legal advice. Click to view privacy policy.