Round One Public Workshops

Bay Area citizens joined the project in the Fall of 2001 when more than 1,000 residents participated in Saturday workshops held in each of the nine counties. These "planners for a day" held lively discussions and negotiations about the pace, character and shape of development in their communities. Using large maps of their counties, they identified promising locations for various types of new development. Their suggestions were then fed into a special computer program that illustrated the impacts of decisions on the county's housing supply, open space, transit accessibility and other measures of livability, and allowed participants to adjust their maps accordingly.

Each workshop produced up to a dozen schemes for accommodating future growth in a smarter way, with a cumulative total of 100 countywide scenarios for the Bay Area. The project team spent weeks combing through the proposals, searching for common threads and ultimately distilling them into three thematic smart growth alternatives for the region. The team then invited planning officials and business, environmental and social equity leaders from throughout the region's nine counties to a Distillation Meeting to review the draft alternatives. Based on this free-flowing discussion, the team made revisions to the draft alternatives to reflect local ideas and concerns. These revised alternatives became the three regionwide smart growth alternatives featured during the Round Two workshops.

Handouts and materials from the Round One Workshops are available on our Workshop Materials page. Publications used at the workshops are available on our Publications page, and our Technical Appendices contains data from the workshops.