River Talk - What Should the Future Minneapolis Riverfront Be? Ask the Public!

From River Talk:

Public participation in planning/design projects is a funny thing.  Everyone talks about it; lots of people do something that they think of as "public engagement"; few practitioners really take it seriously; fewer still make public participation central to the project itself.

This isn't the time or venue for a full-blown treatise on public engagement for riverfront projects, but let me say that the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition has employed three strategies in particular that are noteworthy:  youth involvement through a design imagination exercise, a "designer ask" survey, and collection of comments regarding the four finalists' proposals.

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