Community Engagement during Covid

Emily Torres-Cullinane and Carolina Prieto take us into the world of community engagement, one of the crucial tools of all urban planners. How could it be successfully accomplished in the era of Covid, when large group meetings were no longer allowed? How can a large group work online?

It’s hard to remember now, but one year ago, there was no consensus on what online tools were going to be the best. Zoom ended up winning that competition by being the most user-friendly with the lowest bar to entry. That was the tech challenge. The bigger challenge still loomed — how to make a real translation from in-person to connection to online connection. I think we’re still learning the rules of that road.

A thought that really resonates with me: Emily notes that we’re not the same people we were one year ago. Covid has changed us significantly. We won’t return to the way we did community engagement before. We’re going to take the tools we learned and developed in the online world and use them post-Covid. I am continually fascinated by the question of just how much we'll carry forward into the non-Covid world post-pandemic. I’m not altogether convinced that we won’t forget a lot of the most profound lessons we’ve learned from this experience.

Emily also introduces the concept of “civic infrastructure,” the human infrastructure in a community that allows them to problem-solve. The digital divide emerges in this conversation too, and Carolina talks of the digital access plan that MAPC is working on with Chelsea, Revere and Everett MA.

Finally, Emily and Carolina recently returned from SXSW to think about tech and planning, Topics such as AI and the ethics around it, and questions around the hybrid version of community meetings all emerge, in part because the entertainment world is thinking about how to connect in-person and virtual in the live music setting. What can planners steal from that space and apply to their world of community engagement?

The whole conversation illuminates just how much we’ve changed during this year.

Previous
Previous

Food Retail

Next
Next

Economic Recovery post-Covid