Project Description
WELLBEING AS A PLANNING PRINCIPLE
The field of planning affects the wellbeing of people and communities in ways that are often underappreciated. Even with the best intentions, our construction and management of the built environment can lead to collateral harm. By prioritizing equitable access to wellbeing as a measure of progress, however, planners can shape their projects and policy recommendations to undo past harms and reconnect communities that have historically been impaired by our built environment.
Pattern for Progress (PFP), Full Frame Initiative (FFI), and MASS Design invite you to a unique regional conversation exploring how planners and their colleagues can center wellbeing in their work. FFI defines wellbeing as “the set of needs and experiences universally required in combination and balance to weather challenges and have health and hope.” The focus on wellbeing as a goal leads to increased resilience, economic prosperity, and social cohesion, as well as more effective governance and more impactful investment of public resources.
Many planners and community groups have adopted wellbeing as a core planning principle that drives their work and their decisions. How can wellbeing be measured and planned? Where have these principles been successfully applied throughout the country? How can the impacts of these efforts be expanded? How can we channel these values into mainstream planning practice and make wellbeing a more explicit purpose of planning as a field?
9-9:30 a.m. Coffee at the Fringe Cities Exhibit
ABOUT THE FRINGE CITIES EXHIBIT
“Fringe Cities” refer to smaller US cities that have been uniquely affected by mid-century urban renewal and development since. Fringe City Futures presents MASS’ work and research in Poughkeepsie, NY, in the context of a national landscape of Fringe Cities and their abundant futures. As we enter a new era of federal infrastructure spending, climate instability, and economic inequality, new challenges and new opportunities arise. At MASS’ Hudson Valley Design Lab, the design process seeks to address these challenges by creating a platform for community-based recovery, resilience, and resistance that is unique to Fringe Cities.
9:30-11 a.m. Wellbeing as a Planning Principle
Planning professionals, city managers, town supervisors, land use board members, and planning-adjacent colleagues are all invited to learn:
- How to consider wellbeing in planning and infrastructure projects, based on concrete examples from across the country;
- How to assess wellbeing tradeoffs in decision-making throughout design, review, implementation, and maintenance phases of a project;
- How FFI’s Wellbeing Insights, Assets, and Tradeoffs Tool is being rolled out nationwide, and how its core concepts might apply to planning projects in the Mid-Hudson region.
11-12:30 p.m. Moving the Dial & Working Lunch
Planning professionals are invited to stay for an in-depth conversation exploring how we can bring wellbeing to the forefront of planning conversations as a norm. Participants in this smaller group will discuss:
- Systemic barriers to wellbeing that are unique to the field of planning, and what leads to exceptions to these barriers;
- How practitioners in the field are overcoming challenges when bringing wellbeing to the forefront of their work;
- Existing assets that support wellbeing as a mainstream planning principle, and immediate steps we can take to move the dial in the field of planning.
About our facilitators and their organizations
Limited number of seats available.
Registration is required.
Thank you to our hosts:
Special thanks to the Gordon & Llura Gund Foundation
