Community Participation

Did you enjoy playing with blocks as a child?
Do you have ideas you can't quite express in words?
Ever imagine building your own town?

Then this hands-on community participation exercise is just for you. As part of Teska's approach to engage the community through active participation and interaction, we created the "Build-the-Vision" mapping exercise to provide community members with the opportunity to build their vision of a place in a visual, three-dimensional form.

Using a base map and building blocks representing various land uses and building types, community members can move the blocks around the map to translate their place-making ideas from their minds to paper. They are encouraged to share their ideas and discuss the optimal configuration of the blocks to effectively portray their vision for their town, district, neighborhood, or place that they are designing. Community members also introduce their own creativity to the exercise by creating new building blocks to fit their personal ideas and cutting out strips of paper to form roads and bike paths.

In the end, the results are a series of three-dimensional maps created by the community that present us with design ideas, which we can utilize as a basis to formulate design and development concepts. These design and development concepts may consider other factors such as market feasibility, topography, and smaller details like landscaping, architecture, signage, and streetscape elements.

The next time you play with blocks may be with Teska!