Planning to Preserve Community Character in Oak Park, Illinois

Abstract

This chapter describes my own personal experiences working on a project funded by the Village of Oak Park, Illinois. The project itself was a year-long collaboration between the Village of Oak Park, Illinois and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in which a fairly sizable group of faculty, graduate students, village staff, citizen activists and volunteers came together to develop neighborhood character plans for two commercial business districts in the village. One of the unique contributions I made to this project was to explore how computer-mediated visualization and communication tools could be used to complement and facilitate conventional community organizing and traditional participatory planning.