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P'' METROPOLITAN LIVABLE COMMUNITIES DESIGN COURSE TIP ' 2.22.97 Draft • Course Description The Metropolitan Livable Communities Design Course is an intensive, six-week immersion for city staff and officials in the planning, implementation, and policy issues presented by particular challenges facing four to six first-ring municipalities. The course is an outgrowth of the Design Center for American Urban Landscape's.multi-year examination of issues facing first-ring communities. Fundea by a series of grants from the McKnight Foundation, the Design Center's work has sought to identify challenges of common concern to the first ring and to develop strategies that draw first-ring communities together in addressing those challenges. Each of the participating cities will bring to the course an issue of current concern. These "focus issues" will be the subject of the courses, during which the Design Center and interdisciplinary resource teams will work with each community to assess the design, finance, policy, and other implementation implications of that community's focus issue. The Course is rooted in the desire to assist communities in developing practical strategies for tackling their particular focus issue. In the process, however, it also seeks to accomplish four related goals: 1. To enable a city to examine its focus issue from a variety of perspectives, utilizing a team of experts working in a neutral and educational setting. 2. To enlist a cross-section of community representatives in a community team — citizens, elected official, city staff— that will not only actively participate in the Course, but will carry ideas and strategies back to their community; 3. To involve participants in an exchange of expertise, insight, and strategies with the • other municipal participants; and 4. To develop approaches that can be implemented in other communities. Course Structure The course will run for six weeks, from mid-April to late-May. At the heart of the course are the focus issues, one from each community. Each focus issue will emphasize a different type of planning/policy issue common to first-ring communities. Together, the complement of issues will constitute a wide range of issues confronting communities on a daily basis. After a city has proposed its focus issue and before the start of the Course, the Design Center will meet with the community team to define the facets of the issue the community wishes to address and the outcomes the community would like to see achieved. The Design Center will subsequently prepare a "Briefing Book" that will include both a summary of these discussions and a collection of supporting materials. This book will serve as the course workbook, to which materials can be added as the course proceeds: background summaries, related reading material, lists of resource people, interim working drawings, policy memoranda, and the like. •