Hi, Lisa, thank you for speaking with me today! Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
Hello! My name is Lisa Vlasak, and I am from Vienna, Austria. Last year, I started my own business, advising planners, planning organisations, and municipalities on how they can communicate with residents about current and future planning projects.
I have a background in urban planning myself with a special interest in in planning communication. Back in Vienna, I was working in a neighbourhood management office. These offices are set up in areas with a lot of planning activity or urban challenges to ensure that people have a place where they can get information about their city, their neighbourhood, and how to get involved in current planning processes.
What does your everyday work look like?
As a communication advisor for urban planners, I offer advice and workshops for planners who want to learn how to communicate better, and I also write. Whenever there is a project that needs to be very clearly communicated, I can do that for planning teams and city administrations. I also help with public awareness-raising around the topics sustainable urban planning, environmental protection and mobility.
What have you learned about planning communication?
During my time in Vienna, I realised that planners tend to communicate very technically. This has to do with the German language – English is a little bit easier, while German speakers tend to express themselves in a difficult, technical way. But still, there is a lot of jargon also in English when it comes to planning communication. And this is a topic that should be accessible to everyone.
But often, planners don’t have the time or the capacities to deal with communication. At the same time, like many other professionals, we tend to overestimate what people can understand. Based on a study in Germany, 74% of all information from authorities and companies is written at a language level that only 7% of people can understand. I realised that this is a huge problem, which is why I started to focus on how to communicate in an easy way and in an interesting way. Because planning is a very new topic to most of the people out there. To really involve them in a planning process, you need to also spark an interest.
What are the most common mistakes planners make when communicating, and how to avoid them?
To make planning more accessible, language is one important aspect. We have to keep information easy to understand and accessible. But we also need to think about how we reach out to people. There are so many kinds of people affected by planning, young people, old people, people with disabilities, with high or little education, with different first languages, … And they all have different interests and worries. The challenge is how to best reach all of them.
For example, if you have a street to redesign and want to replace parking lots by trees, some people will be very happy about this. Other people will care less about the environment and more about their parking lots. To engage both groups in the planning process, we need to invite a whole neighbourhood into the decision-making process. People have different views and fears and we need to take that into account when approaching them in a participatory process.
We also can’t use the same language and approach with everyone. For example, to involve young people – who use public space a lot, often more than adults – we need to use different arguments. This is about language, but also about content. How to use the right arguments to get different people on board?
And then, planners need to think about how people can find their information. Putting up posters in the neighbourhood or a Facebook page post might not be enough. Often, people don’t come to participation projects because they don’t know about it. So, we need to make sure that we use the right communication channels to reach people – through schools and parents, through social media, through personal information, through letters.
And lastly, when do we schedule events? A lot of them are held in the evenings, but that is not necessarily the best time for everyone. You might miss out entire target groups like young people and families, very old people. My recommendation is to really look at the target group and adapt to their needs and circumstances.
Let’s assume that we now reach the target group and schedule an event at a time that works for most of them. How can we then communicate with people to find out what they really want?
I think the most important realisation I have had is an unconventional one: You should appear accessible to others. Don’t dress up like a businessperson to seem professional. Because this makes residents feel underdressed and unprepared – which is their biggest fear for these events. So really, planners should go there in a casual way. Often, people prefer to speak to the intern who they might meet at the door and who often looks more casual, immediately creating more of a connection with people.
Secondly, my other important recommendation is to really listen. I have seen many times that people come to an event to share their ideas and ask questions, but they don’t really have the time and space to talk. Planners often want to convince the audience of their project and come prepared with perfect arguments, but they don’t listen. I find that most of the time, people don’t really have a problem with the plan – but they do have a problem with not being listened to and not being taken seriously. We can solve this by just taking a step back and imagining how to explain the project to our grandmother at the kitchen table.
And then, you need interesting and easy-to-understand information in posters and presentations. Keep it as simple as possible – your grandparents should understand and be able to read it with glasses, for example. Make it self-explanatory. And show the city at eye level, not in a model. I think the best visualisation is a rendering, or a simple sketch of a streetscape, a future vision of how a place is going to look.
Could you summarise your top tips for sparking interest in the population about urban planning projects?
So, I recently bought a pair of glasses. I don’t need them for my sight, but I put them on whenever I want to demonstrate to planners the importance of reading and writing a text from the perspective of a resident. These “resident glasses” help us to make information interesting by first changing my point of view. We step back from being a planner and instead become, for example, a 55-year-old resident with a dog, a car, some local friends. And then we can think about what this person’s life is like, what would be interesting for them, what motivates them, and what would convince them of a project.
Most of the time, planners write about the whole pictures. But sometimes, residents are just interested in small details like a new coffee shop, whether there will be a doctor in the area, whether this means cars, a niece place to meet, etc. You have to figure out what is important and interesting to people and then catch them with these topics. From my experience, we can then involve them much better than if we write about a project from a planner’s perspective.
Great! How can we follow your work?
I want to raise awareness about the topic of accessibility in planning projects, so I share my thoughts, recommendations, and experiences on LinkedIn and on my own website. I’m always happy to connect with like-minded people.
I really hope that one day, planning is really going to be a topic that everybody can participate in, no matter if they have experience in planning projects and no matter their level of education. Planning is something that affects everyone in the same way, but information doesn’t spread out to everyone in the same way. I hope that one day, everybody will be able to understand what’s going on in front of their house.
