People changing streets the Innovating Streets way!

By Angela Bensemann, Halo Communications

I recently jumped at the opportunity to join the team tasked with introducing the first Innovating Streets project in Porirua City. I really had no idea what I was getting into – I hadn’t worked with any of the team members before and I didn’t know anything about the Innovating Streets programme. But I did know Porirua and I did want to get involved.

Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency’s Innovating Streets for People programme aims to make it faster and easier to transition our streets to safer and more livable spaces. A process called tactical urbanism is used by local councils to work with communities to transform their streets. The idea is to move streets away from being car centric to being more welcoming and safer for the whole community including those walking, biking, scooting, on mobility scooters, and pushing prams.

Fantame Street in eastern Porirua – the scene of the city’s first Innovating Streets project.

What does this different, faster, more community-led approach mean for communicating?

Heard of the saying, ‘building the plane while you’re flying it’? Well, it’s a bit like that.

Doing things faster is awesome but can be really tricky when you’re trying to do that within an existing organisation that, quite rightly so, has checks and balances, processes and approval loops to go through at every stage of a project.

Trying to keep communications apace with a fast-evolving project, within a fixed budget can be a challenge and inevitably (as in all things) there’s compromise.

Sometimes there just simply isn’t the time to get to do everything you want and still get things reviewed, altered, signed off, designed and distributed before you move onto the next thing.

Community engagement

The diamond in our crown for communicating and engaging with the wider community was our fabulous volunteer community co-design team.

These individuals put in many hours working on an outcome to reflect the needs of the community and really helped us to understand the issues in their community. They were our champions, helping to spread the word with letterbox drops, door knocking and social media conversations as well as encouraging others to get involved and give us feedback.

Providing translated material was one of our original goals to make material more accessible (not everyone is online you know) but, and it’s a big but, when you’re in a diverse community there are numerous different languages to consider, and translations take TIME (something we were fairly short on). We landed on three big ones, Māori, Samoan and Tokelauan and then waited… and waited for our translations.

Meanwhile, because we were ‘building a plane while flying it’ things evolved. This was a real challenge and while we did manage to have our foundation material translated, we had to abandon getting lots more material translated simply because of time and cost. Instead, we opted for a more illustrative approach trying to portray concepts in a way that everyone could understand – good practice anyway right!

Next time round we’d look to take physical translators along to key meetings and keep the focus on more visual (less wordy) comms and use our translation/design budget this way.

Other challenges included how to update a community quickly and efficiently. If we wanted to continue with our illustrative communications approach that meant having to design letterbox drops (which were an important channel for our community!). Design also takes time. We had to adapt and accept that sometimes a simple letter, that didn’t require design, was needed when we had less of a lead-in. This was a compromise (remember our less words more pictures mantra), but a good one considering time and budget constraints.

Feedback mechanisms

Trying to engage with as many people as possible prior to the trial features going in on the streets was challenging with limited interest from the local community in coming along and getting involved with the design process. However, once the trial features were on the ground people got really interested.

We wanted to provide numerous ways for people to have their say. We held a street party and manned a feedback table and people could use feedback postcards to provide their thoughts. After the party we ran an online survey, on-the-street surveys and made the postcards available at the local laundromat.

We also had a dedicated project email address where people could give us their thoughts and ask questions. Guided street ‘walk throughs’ were run by our engagement lead to reach those who wanted to ask questions as they walked through the street changes.

None of this was ground-breaking or new – it was good old-fashioned comms and engagement offering people plenty of different mediums to provide feedback through.

Listening to feedback

And then of course there were the Facebook comments. It is easy to get distracted by what’s being said on social media, but it is important to consider this within the wider context of the feedback and remember it’s not necessarily a representative view. We know that people don’t like change and social media provides an easy platform for venting.

It was pretty evident that some of our changes were less popular than others; note to self: removing car parks is always contentious. However, because it was an Innovating Streets project, this new street layout was a trial, so we were able to adapt the improvements and address concerns.

Our community co-design group helped keep things real and connected back into the community. Without this involvement I don’t think this project would have been able to achieve what it has done.

I loved being involved, it was awesome getting to know people from different parts of my city better, it was great seeing a project through from start to finish and really heartening seeing the way community feedback altered the final result.

I’m looking forward to seeing even more Innovating Streets for People projects rolling out throughout the country and am keen to see how they handle the comms and engagement challenges.