People-Centered Planning: A Case Study in Virtual Participatory Design with Chicago Residents

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates how neighborhood planning decisions can move from the purview of developers, engineers, planners and politicians to community members themselves through participatory design. Amid the stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 pandemic, I explore how digital tools expand the role of citizen-designers in planning’s engagement processes. Partnering with a community development center in West Humboldt Park, Chicago, we conducted a series of online design charrettes and developed an urban design proposal with staff and residents in the summer of 2021. I use learnings from this virtual co-design process to discuss ways site design can allow community participants to feel heard and represented in planning spaces in their community, revealing how the equity of our spaces relates to the size and diversity of the group designing them. I postulate how participation processes themselves can be designed to facilitate and increase the redistribution of citizen power, comparing this participatory process with others from the field of planning. I find justice-oriented planning practices must incorporate democratic design, equity, transparency and replicability in order to improve neighborhood-level planning in Chicago.