The Owners' Manual | Issue 14 | Fall/Winter 2018

BL COMPANIES’ EXAMPLES & ENGAGEMENT OF PUBLIC OUTREACH

Farmington Center Study

The Farmington Center Study project re-imagined a key parcel and its surrounding village district by creating a thoughtful Master Plan and Design Guidelines that incorporated community input from the beginning. Our design team worked with Town Staff to develop a Public Outreach and Engagement plan that included multiple community site walks of the village, participatory community gatherings, and a highly successful visual survey analysis. The community site walks were open to the public and encouraged participants to join Town Staff and the Design Team (BL) to tour the existing village center and review the existing village character, challenges and opportunities. These site walks were held before the Design Team developed the eventual Master Plan for the area ensuring that public comments collected during these engaging site walks were captured in the final vision. In addition to the site walks, the process included regular community gatherings throughout the project that provided updates on concept development that

reviewed collected public input and how it would be applied, and was also an opportunity for some great story telling and imagination. As you might imagine, whenyougather enoughcommunitymemberswhoare very passionate about their town and neighborhoods some “design and planning magic” may occur. Our team had countless conversations and interviews with the local community that guided much of the concept design development and helped solidify a vision for the community they had helped to create. One of our regular community gatherings included a creative visual preference survey which challenged participants to identify architectural stylings fromother Connecticut and New England locations that could be used as precedent imagery for the Farmington Center Study. Hundreds of images were utilized and voted on by the community to develop a consensus on some architectural elements that would eventually help shape the design guidelines that were created as part of this study. The survey proved to be an effective method to narrow and focus the preferred vision for the community.