Lockport is a city dotted with contrasting sites: a quaint antiques shop and a boarded-up McDonald’s; a historic limestone church and rusty refinery tanks.
Today, this small Will County city along the Illinois and Michigan Canal is looking at its image–and deciding what will be the proper face for a community whose population is expected to double to 20,000 over the next decade.
For the past two years, city leaders have grappled with ways to manage growth and evaluate its comprehensive plan–forming committees, developing reports and inviting outsiders to study the city.
Thursday at Lockport High School’s East Campus, they tried something different: asking residents to vote with their eyes in an innovative Visual Preference Survey.
This is the first time an Illinois city has participated in this type of survey, which was developed by Anton C. Nelessen, a Rutgers University associate professor who is considered a pioneer in the field of “vision planning,” an advocate of neotraditional community planning, and a critic of suburban sprawl.
This style of planning allows residents, city officials and developers to create a common vision, or look, for a development or an entire community.
“We don’t consider ourselves planners or architects,” Nelessen said in a meeting in Lockport last week. “We are facilitators of what people think. This is what we call design by democracy.”
Lockport is a community of old homes and new developments, with a strip mall and a Main Street. The planned Interstate Highway 355 extension, with two exits on the city’s eastern border, will guarantee both growth and change for a city settled in the late 1830s.
Mayor Richard Dystrup said the survey will help residents voice their opinions on Lockport’s future.
“This project certainly offers a unique opportunity for all of the community to become involved and find the character and future of our growth in Lockport,” Dystrup said.
In the Visual Preference Survey, residents viewed 160 slides and ranked the images, of single- and multifamily residences, streets, commercial centers and parking spaces from Lockport and elsewhere.
As the slides, which were taken last week, were shown, residents marked a number from -10 to 10 on a sheet. They were asked if they liked it and by how much. Among the images were Lockport’s canal, prairie, cookie-cutter homes and overcrowded parking lots.
“We put values on that psychological or emotional response,” Nelessen said.
Using photographs allows residents to develop a consensus vision that might be difficult to ascertain in a verbal or written description, Nelessen said.
“A beautiful house on a beautiful lot means many different things to many different people depending on how old they are, where they come from, how much money they have, how many cars they own, etc., etc,” he said.
On Friday, the experts will single out the images that received the highest and lowest values, which will serve as markers for what people would like to see in Lockport. The findings will be presented in a meeting in City Council chambers at 8:30 a.m. Saturday.
Nelessen’s firm has conducted surveys in more than 200 cities nationwide over the past decade and found most residents are generally dissatisfied with suburban development. They prefer characteristics of small traditional communities, he said.
High marks are usually given to neighborhoods with community greens and shops within walking distance. Symbols of suburban sprawl, such as generic strip malls, usually receive low marks.
“It’s becoming very clear what is emerging is what I will call a new American vision, and it is very different and very wonderful and very unique,” Nelessen said.
The surveys have received high marks in other communities.
“It helped our community focus on what is important in the next 10 to 20 years–the master plan,” said Edward Slynn, community development director in Batavia, N.Y.
That community of 16,000 between Rochester and Buffalo has similarities to Lockport. It is near a canal, founded in the 1800s, and is dealing with redevelopment issues along the Main Street.
In Ft. Collins, Colo., city planners are using results from the survey to help redesign their comprehensive plan. And they are seeing developers incorporate some of the survey’s findings–narrow streets, grid layouts and pedestrian walkways were popular–into development proposals for the northern Colorado city of almost 100,000.
“This has been an opportunity to gain additional input from citizens in a unique fashion,” said Pete Wray , a city planner there.
To reach the maximum number of residents, Ft. Collins city officials videotaped the survey presentation and made copies available for checkout at the City Hall and local video stores.
The Lockport survey is part of the “Living With Growth” pilot project designed to add resident involvement to the planning process.
The project sponsors are the Canal Corridor Association and the Metropolitan Planning Council. Those organizations plan to use the Lockport experience as a model for other area communities facing similar growth.
“I hope they pay attention to the residents’ opinions,” said lifetime Lockport resident Marge Herron, who took part in the survey with her husband, Stewart. “This is a pleasant, small town. If it changes, we’re leaving,” she said.
