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Vision / Reality: Strategies for Community Change

Various contributors, including Calthorpe Associates

Vision / Reality: Strategies for Community Change introduces the concept of the Community Partnership Strategy (CPS), a product of consolidated planning.  CPS allows communities to coordinate programs and carry out the complex, sensitive, and lengthy process of community-based planning of the basis of a unified vision.  Such a vision can lay the foundation for the development of communities that are cohesive, attractive, safe and economically health.  At the core of this process is empowerment – bringing the diverse elements of the community together and forging a shared vision of the future and an action plan to achieve that vision.  

The fundamental planning principles described in this book, each elemental to the planning process, are: 

  • “Bottom-up” planning
  • A consolidated approach
  • Empowerment through skill and job creation
  • Decentralization of decision-making

This publication offers useful ideas for initiating a process of defining a community vision through comprehensive planning and translating that vision into action for diverse neighborhoods and communities.  The ideas presented are solidly grounded in the experience of communities throughout the United States where the residents, community leaders, the business community, and others have joined forces in a strategic planning process.  

 “We in the federal government must recognize that real community development can occur only through a bottom-up approach that comprehensively links the engine of economic growth to the physical and human needs of each unique community.”
-Andrew M. Cuomo
Assistant Secretary, Office of Community and Public Development