August 21, 2007 -- “We can’t wait for September 17.”

So said Susan Henderson of the PlaceMakers consulting team, having just completed a preview visit to Taos on August 18. Five team members were in town to listen to citizens and to offer an orientation for what comes next. The advance group met with neighborhood groups, elected officials, developers and town staffers to hear hopes and concerns. The whole team, including specialists in design, economics, and transportation, will be back on September 17 for a five-day process called a charrette, a special type of intensive workshop that makes it easy for citizens to interact with designers and other professionals.

The charrette packs into five intensive days what would otherwise take months to create. The results, and what Taos has engaged the team to produce, are: (1) a new Land Use Master Plan (LUMP), a map indicating where and how the town plans to grow over time; and (2) a new Land Use Development Code (LUDC), which provides a regulatory framework for growth in keeping with the Plan.

The Town of Taos hired PlaceMakers because the firm specializes in the kind of holistic planning that supports citizens’ vision for future growth and development. During the charrette, PlaceMakers consultants will work with citizens and town leaders to address issues that have to do with, among other categories, Historic District neighborhoods; the preservation of open space; roads; the integration of appropriate residential, office, and retail space within comfortable walking distance of one another; and a broad diversity of housing. Then, in recognition that all such categories are linked, the PlaceMakers team will produce their contracted deliverables, the LUMP and the LUDC.

The goals for the initiative are specific and realistic. Its foundation will be the town’s existing, and extensive, efforts to articulate a collective vision for the future. And, rather than generating a new code from scratch and emerging with something unproven in real-world application, the LUDC will instead be a locally-driven customization of a nationally-recognized model template called the SmartCode.

The SmartCode allocates development intensity based on the idea that there’s a place for everything but that everything has to be in the right place if citizens are to realize a future in harmony with what they value most in their community. The Vision 2020 Plan and other surveys of citizen hopes have set down the values and the guidelines. PlaceMakers, in collaboration with the citizens of Taos, will provide the tools for realizing those goals – the new master plan map and a customized version of the SmartCode.

So what can citizens expect during the charrette? First of all, early on, PlaceMakers team leaders will repeat back to citizens what they’ve been learning about Taos from research and interviews with citizens. And they’ll ask if they’re getting the message straight: What’s missing from their overview? What needs to be taken off the table? What needs to be corrected immediately?

Then the team will set to work sketching responses to what they understand as Taos’s holistic planning goals. They’ll test those early ideas in a mid-charrette “pin-up” critique and then refine or rework ideas based on what they hear during the pin-up. Some charrette sessions are focused on particular concerns, such as those of developers and public works staffers. But since everything in the charrette is open to the public, team members can be sure they’ll be corrected quickly if they get too far off track. Even better, since the active participation of citizens is immediately rewarded with results that reflect all the input, the process builds trust and momentum for good ideas. By the end of the charrette, there’s already a powerful support group for the plans that finally emerge.

The charrette begins September 17. Make plans now to participate.