Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island- This must-see New York icon is accessible via a full tour all the way up to the crown. Also check out the Ellis Island Immigration Museum which features an interactive children’s learning center and immigration exhibits. Liberty Island and Ellis Island have been closed due to damage from Hurricane Sandy. Liberty Island will reopen on July 4, 2013 while the reopening date for Ellis Island has not been announced.
Metropolitan Museum of Art- A New York City landmark, this museum houses a wide variety of art ranging from historic arms and armor to one of the best collections of Medieval art in the world. The Met offers special family programming, family audio tours, and family guides and Maps to enhance your visit. Do set aside plenty of time for viewing this vast collection.
Collaborative Stakeholder Engagement Approaches
Education and awareness-raising play an important role in modifying a community’s behavior towards connected places. Although changes might be beneficial to one section of the community, other sections might feel marginalized. Conflicts between stakeholder groups may arise. In Jayanagar, a suburb in Bangalore, India, for example, bicycle paths and footpaths were built and promoted through soft policy measures. After one week of operation, these pathways were converted to on-street parking facilities for vehicles (Francis, 2012), and bicycle riders took to the roads as usual with the mixed traffic. This outcome could be a result of the incomplete consensus achieved before the bike lanes were designed. Stakeholders did not have an opportunity to be heard. People and stakeholders must be involved at every stage of planning, from policy formulation to implementation.
Using several case studies, the advantages and drawbacks of various approaches using collaborative stakeholder dialogue (CSD) that have been adopted in different parts of the world are elaborated below.
New York Map Photo Gallery
The Deliberative Approach at the City Scale
The Network City metropolitan planning strategy to enable more sustainable travel in Perth, conceived in 2003, included extensive community consultation (Curtis, 2008, p. 105). The 25-year framework began with a one-day dialogue with the community, from whom working groups were created to produce the strategy over a one-year process of collaboration (Curtis, 2008). The Network City framework relied on integrating land use and transport planning to create multiple centers linked by public transport across the
A challenge for the Network City plan was the high target for infill development and the capability of local governments to enforce such targets and concepts. The strategy used, Dialogue with the City, a deliberative democracy tool, had two objectives: first, make the community aware of the impending challenges; and, second, invite community views and suggestions for the future. Community surveys (mailed to 8,000 residents), a range of media advertisements, papers, and digital publications were used to achieve the first objective of raising community awareness. This generated an informed dialogue, a key aspect of deliberations. These deliberations continued for around eight months, with a good representation of participants from the local communities, professions, and government. Small-group dialogue with representation of diverse participants was used to encourage free discussion, increase access to information, and move towards consensus (Curtis, 2008, p. 105).
There were a few limitations in the process. Measurement of the participant demographic profile could have ensured a more equitable participation and diversity of views. The comprehensiveness of the information disseminated prior to the dialogue was another issue (Hartz-Karp, 2005). However, the process did lead to a positive outcome. One important compromise between the community stakeholders and the development industry was the need to limit urban sprawl. The community stakeholders modified their position of an urban growth boundary to managing growth through sustainability criteria. This was a first step towards achieving a connected city. A lesson learned was that the success of collaboration in city-scale projects is not necessarily to reach consensus, but to unveil all of the issues and different points of views relating to those issues (Legacy et al., 2012, p. 15).
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