Making the vision concrete: Implementation of downtown revitalization plans

Downtown redevelopment is often a critical part of local efforts to enhance quality of life and generate economic development. Such projects have been hit and miss and have sometimes faced strong public criticism and legal challenges. Planners have increasingly turned to visioning, a collaborative process focused on long-term goal setting, as a method for developing broad agreement on important community issues. However, there has been little research on the effectiveness of implementing goals created through visioning process. The planning literature has tended to stress the importance of the process rather than outcomes and work on implementation has focused almost exclusively on state and federal policy-making. The failure to carry out plans and to document implementation threatens the credibility of planning efforts.; This research introduces the Community Ownership model as a method of examining the relationship between planning process and plan implementation. The model contains four types of implementation processes based on the level of collaboration during the planning process and the distribution of responsibility for implementation. These types (the independent variable) influence whether implementation efforts are initiated and sustained over time (the dependent variable) with the social, economic, and policy context acting as a moderating variable. This study employs a quasi-experimental, multiple case study research design that uses archival, survey, and interview data. Case studies were drawn from California downtown revitalization plans developed between 1998 and 2003.; The findings supported the hypothesis that the type of implementation process had an impact on the sustainability of plan implementation. High levels of collaboration and dispersed responsibility for implementation tended to promote more effective and more democratic planning and implementation processes. In contrast, low levels of collaboration and concentrated responsibility for implementation discouraged stakeholder involvement and ultimately impeded implementation efforts. The results of this study suggest that planning officials considering downtown revitalization should select respected and committed leadership, develop a collaborative planning process, and make stakeholder involvement a permanent part of revitalization efforts.