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

Katya Fels Smyth is the founder and CEO of The Full Frame Initiative and the founding co-author of the Wellbeing Blueprint. She is a former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and affiliate of MIT’s CoLab.

The Full Frame Initiative is a national social change organization partnering with government agencies, community leaders and other stakeholders to shift policy and narratives, moving the US towards a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing.

Elka Gotfryd is an urban planner and community development specialist with a keen ability to quickly and thoroughly get to the heart of any challenge, and to engage collaboratively in complex problem-solving. Elka joined Pattern for Progress as Executive Director of the Center for Housing Solutions and Community Initiatives in 2022.

Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress (Pattern) is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1965 by the region’s academic, business, nonprofit and government leaders to provide objective research and planning for the betterment of the Hudson Valley.

Chris Kroner Brown joined MASS with Justin Brown as co-founders of the Hudson Valley Design Lab in Poughkeepsie. Place-based and locally engaged, the design lab has become a thinktank for pioneering community design practice. As a committed architecture and urban design educator, Chris moved to the Hudson Valley to convert his teaching into practice as a revolutionary and immersive model of listening and engagement. He currently serves as a consultant to Poughkeepsie’s Planning Board.

MASS Design Group was founded on the understanding that architecture’s influence reaches beyond individual buildings. MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) believes that architecture has a critical role to play in supporting communities to confront history, shape new narratives, collectively heal and project new possibilities for the future.

Limited number of seats available. 

Registration is required. 

2023Wellbeing as a Planning Principle

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Thank you to our hosts:

Special thanks to the Gordon & Llura Gund Foundation