Cities across the country are crafting sustainability plans, but the City of Detroit took a unique approach to creating theirs by investing in a massive public engagement initiative to create the city’s first Sustainability Action Agenda.
These efforts helped the City’s Office of Sustainability create a thoughtful, holistic plan for Detroit’s future.
Residents left location-specific comments on a city map – highlighting what they wanted to see and calling out what they didn’t. Community members could support and respond to comments left by their neighbors. Technology ensured that underrepresented neighborhoods were represented in the engagement process – through polling at in-person meetings, opportunities to share comments via SMS text messaging, and opportunities to learn about the project and share feedback on a multilingual online platform.
Learn how the City of Detroit and consulting firm AECOM worked with coUrbanize to carry out multilingual outreach, to leverage technology to complement town halls and boots on the group work, and to use coUrbanize analytics to ensure responses were representative of key districts.
Community input was central to the creation of an agenda that would lead to a greener, more equitable Detroit. After more than a year of community engagement, the Detroit Sustainability Action Agenda was released in the summer of 2019. You can read the entire case study here.
No two cities are the same. To learn about how coUrbanize can help your municipality with a city-wide project like setting a sustainability agenda, request a demo here.
