While rendering many great planning concepts to reality, we planners have often been unsuccessful in involving people's participation to a great extent. Many great neighborhoods designed have come to reality with failures or success, but without full satisfaction of people actually living there. Introducing ways of encouraging people's participation in planning neighborhoods is very essential for shaping our urban fabric in a way that majority appreciates and enjoys the built environment rather than a few admiring and rest taking the brunt. A lot many efforts have already been made to reach out to peoples preferences through surveys and research but yet what is really missing is, direct participation of people in design process for better satisfactory results. The technology of virtual reality, where a user can interact with computer simulated environment gives a good scope for involving third person's opinion in design. This technology provides visual experiences, displayed either on computer screens or through stereoscopic displays. However these techniques are not easy to avail when large audiences are expected to vote.
Harrison County comprehensive planning process has explored a simple but yet very effective way of reaching to people's view on designing their neighborhood. A detachable model blocks system is made for the master plan, which can be laid in many ways on model base(Printed master plan) for trying various compositions of layouts in 3D. This allows better visualization for people to see their neighborhood design at a smaller scale in three dimensions and gives them a chance to rethink of what they want. This concept of toy modeling is faster and easy to play with, providing various design options by encouraging public participation. Planners can develop and evolve certain prototypes of design on a master plan based on people's participation by playing with these building toys. The toy building blocks can be given to people to rearrange on a part of master plan and their preferences can be recorded. The most common preferences thus can be included by designers for planning the neighborhoods. This way there will be more choices people can opt for their built environment before it is simply imposed in their neighborhood by planners and decision makers. People's participation will bring better results thus inculcating strong feeling of belonging to the neighborhood as they would have had their roles in designing it.
I had first tried this concept of modeling in a class I took in summer 2008 to explore and understand computer aided design resulting in computer aided manufacturing processes. (figure1&2) 3D models were created to first analyze the best possible detailing for the detachable models and then the model blocks were made with wood, using laser cutter, table saw and hand saw. However I came to know through my professor, Jennifer Evans Cowley a similar modeling system made by Richard McLaughlin in 2004 (Figure3).With her advice, I used the same process to produce the model blocks for Harrison County including all scaled dimensions of commercial, residential and institutional building blocks. A total of 1235 blocks were cut from Pine wood that made one complete model kit for a part of neighborhood. The model Kit was used at the Lyman Elementary School to engage children in thinking about and planning for their community (Figure 4&5). It was also used in a regional planning commissioner training session allowing the planning commissioners to work together to imagine their communities future. The remaking of this model system for Harrison County master plan helped people get a chance to visualize and reform their community spaces as they liked and not simply get restrained to accept what has been drafted by a few people in a Comprehensive plan. We hope this will help develop more interactive design options for communities by encouraging people's participation in many more planning models.
