Evaluating municipal visioning

Until about 15 years ago, the term ‘vision’ was used in planning almost exclusively to describe the innovative ideas that individuals such as L’Enfant, Howard, Wright and Le Corbusier proposed as idealised future city forms (Shipley, 2000). While that traditional idea of the visionary persists (Wells, 2002), over a decade ago the planning profession began to use the words vision and visioning in several new ways. For example, when individuals are described as ‘having vision’, it refers commonly to how leaders inspire others with their thoughts or viewpoints about desired futures. Planners also began to talk about ‘community visioning’, which purports to describe a new method of soliciting stakeholder input for the creation of collective plans (Shipley & Newkirk, 1999). There was virtually no mention of visioning in these contexts before 1990. However, by the middle of the decade articles concerning vision and visioning appeared often in planning journals worldwide. For instance, the April 1995 issue of the American Planning Association’s (APA’s) Planning had three items on visioning, while Britain’s Planning Week for the same date also included several articles related to visioning. Similarly, three of the eight feature articles in the September issue of Plan Canada involved vision. The growing acceptance of visioning in planning practice is illustrated well in the APA Annual Awards for planning. In 1989, one plan involving vision received honourable mention; however, since 1993 two or more vision-oriented plans have been recognised every year (Shipley & Newkirk, 1998; Enlow, 2003). Community visions have been described as pictures of the future and of a particular place (Regional Municipality of Waterloo, 1992). They are thought to be dynamic ways for people to express their goals, descriptions and images of their community far into the future (Klein et al., 1993). Visioning exercises have been used in hundreds of locales across Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia and Africa as part of the processes for developing official plans and plans related to more specific land uses and activities, such as parks and transportation (Newman, 1993; Neill, 1999; Weinberg, 1999). The effort to create a plan for the World Trade Center site after the September 11th terrorist attacks involved 257 workshops where about “19,000 ideas generated in sessions were logged into a