SCAG Investing In Citizens' Visioning Process With Goal Of Accommodating Regional Growth

John Fregonese

John, you're working with SCAG on what is clearly one of the largest growth visioning efforts in the United States. Explain how you approach a growth visioning process for a six county area and a population the size of most states. Is it possible to envision such a large metropolis?

Regional thinking is not new in the United States. Certainly the Plan of Chicago from 1909 was a real approach to the metropolis. That was created in Chicago and has certainly become the dominant form of human settlement in the twentieth century. We've gotten to this point where we have these large metropolitan areas, we know they function as a unit-labor, transportation, air quality, water, and so forth-and they are basically a single organic construction. You can see from the air what they look like, and yet we have not, in the United States especially, approached looking at solutions that way.

The advent of geographic information systems (GIS), the availability of rich data sets, has allowed us to tackle this, because the computer allows you to understand and model a large region which we weren't able to do a decade ago. Technology has freed us from the details allowing us to think about the region, model it, and look at different solutions. It's one of those cases where, because it's a complex region, the computer allows us to do things that we couldn't otherwise do. We can conceptualize ideas and play them out in scenarios and see what to do-we have built a virtual reality of the Southern California area and can model different scenarios in detail, run it through the transportation model, and see what the impact is on air quality, for example. By looking at a lot of different choices, we can start to understand the consequences of our planning decisions.

Elaborate for our readers how one designs a growth visioning process for 17 million people living across six spacious counties. Also, how will the process roll-out over two years?

First, we set up our measurement tools. We have three basic models: an economic forecasting model, a land use model, and a transportation model. We've set those up and are integrating them. That's the benchmark where we test ideas and we see how well these ideas work.

Next, we try to figure out what it is people want. There are a number of things you can do with a large population. Certainly, it's no mystery to businesses how to address large populations-go to the media. We use some of the same tools-we use polling and broad-scale outreach to find out what people are thinking. We released a poll on February 13 that looks at what people consider the basic problems and what solutions they think might work. Then, we are going to be asking people to build their view of how the future ought to work. In a traditional planning process, we would develop a Master Plan that would address all of the problems we identify in the data gathering stage. Because we are using scenario planning, we're going to go through this process where people can come up with their own ideas of what would work. We'll try those out and we'll see how well the ideas work. From that large trial and error process, we'll find a good solution.

Our method of doing that is going to be workshops held around the region with thousands of people invited to attend and work on large scale maps of the region. They will be provided with a set of tools that represents the actual forecast of expected growth. People will have to figure out, working with eight-to-ten other citizens how they would like to approach each problem. We're going to be able to integrate that together into a number of discrete scenarios, analyze them objectively and let people know what the results are and see what they think of them.

Mark Pisano is quoted as saying, "Local governments, by their nature, give priorities to local interests and concerns. There is no cohesive regional framework in which to view problems, yet most of the forces that shape the region and affect the quality of life are those that reach across political boundaries: air quality, open space, transportation, housing, and jobs. Without a regional solution, the only logical strategy is to act parochially and that's exactly what our local governments tend to do." Assuming Mark's insights are accurate, is it fair to ask what regional entity might implement whatever visions come out of this process you are helping to manage?

We're probably going to look to implement this through existing regional entities: SCAG, MTA, the sub-regions and so forth. You can liken it to the way Europe started getting together in the common market back in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. It's now the European Union, but back then, they were getting together on a few key issues where cooperation clearly was in their mutual self-interest-and, the EU still is a fairly weak organization. Regional governments and regional entities will remain fairly weak for the foreseeable future. People in America don't like the idea of a new form of government. But, there is a common vision and a common approach that has widespread acceptance in terms of what the problems are and how to deal with them. Getting to consensus on that is a big step towards regional cooperation. Right now, one of the problems in Southern California is that the problems already are well known. However, the solutions are not well known. What is the solution? What's the best way to grow? What's the best way to accommodate the expected population increase? What is the optimal transportation solution? Those questions have not been explored in a form that allows people to come to a common understanding of the best solution for them.

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