Community Visioning for Place Making: A Guide to Visual Preference Surveys for Successful Urban Evolution

Community Visioning for Place Making is a groundbreaking guide to engaging with communities in order to design better public spaces. It provides a toolkit to encourage and assist organizations, municipalities, and neighborhoods in organizing visually based community participation workshops, used to evaluate their existing community and translate images into plans that embody their ideal characteristics of places and spaces. The book is based on results generated from hundreds of public participation visioning sessions in a broad range of cities and regions, portraying images of what people liked and disliked. These community visioning sessions have been instrumental in generating policies, physical plans, recommendations, and codes for adoption and implementation in a range of urban, suburban, and rural spaces, and the book serves as a bottom-up tool for designers and public officials to make decisions that make their communities more appealing. The book will appeal to community and neighborhood organizations, professional planners, social and psychological professionals, policy analysts, architects, urban designers, engineers, and municipal officials seeking an alternative vision for their future.

Anton C. Nelessen Tony is the inventor of the Community Visioning Process using the Visual Preference Survey and Vision Translation workshops. He has applied it in nearly 400 communities across the country and world. He is a trained architect and urban designer, professor, author, film and multi-media producer, painter, sculptor, and visioning facilitator. He has led an award-winning urban planning firm since 1989. He has been Undergraduate Program Director for Planning, Public Policy and Public Health at Rutgers University. Currently, he is Professor of Urban Planning, Design and Visioning at Rutgers. He and his wife live in downtown Princeton, New Jersey.