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Every few years, a familiar story surfaces in cities everywhere: a “new vision” for an area with “so much potential” *cue eye roll*. Fast forward a bit (but not much), suddenly there are glossy, but familiar, renderings that are promising transformation, renewal, a new breath of life: new apartments, cafés, bike lanes jump off the page. But typically, these stories begin at the moment of transformation, skipping over everything and everyone that came before.
This is the “blank slate” myth at play: devaluing and/or negating existing people, structures, and history to justify the glorification of the new.
Every place, regardless of what it looks like, who calls that place home, the “potential” it has, already holds a legacy worth building from.
Grassroots planning is far from a new approach; it’s a return to the oldest one: communities shaping themselves. It prioritizes co-creation over complete control, listening over imposition. Grassroots planning is the hyper-local approach to community development and decision-making that prioritizes input from residents.
In practice, it looks like residents forming a community land trust to protect affordable housing. Or a neighborhood-led design process that centers the community, not an external vision. Or the adaptive reuse of a vacant building into a community center instead of another demolition. These efforts share a common truth: planning is most powerful when it’s done with people, not to them.
As a private sector urban planner, I imagine grassroots planning is not supposed to start with me and my team. By the time I start a project, it’s time to hit the ground running. While consultants are bound by what is in the contract’s scope and budget, there’s still an opportunity to enable grassroots planning. The first step of grassroots planning isn’t a feasibility study…
Have conversations! Document neighborhood stories, photographs, and histories that ground the work in context.
Map what’s working. Identify local businesses, organizations, and social networks that already support residents.
Redefine value. Measure success not just by return on investment, but by belonging, stability, and joy.
Co-create. Replace top-down engagement with partnership and shared ownership of the process.
The invitation is simple: we should build forward, together.
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