The hard work of defining long-term planning goals for Kona is done and embedded in the Kona Community Development Plan (Kona CDP) enacted into law in September of 2008. Now, Kona community leaders and residents will join with County of Hawai`i staff and consultants to apply key concepts in the award-winning CDP to the first major project to be designed under the Plan: The Honokohau Village.

The project, on a 40-acre site that includes the new West Hawai`i Civic Center, will be designed through a public “charrette” – a collaborative design workshop – held from October 21 through October 27 at the Sheraton Keauhou Bay Hotel. Go here to see the complete schedule.

During the seven days, the project team in collaboration with the community, will customize the Kona CDP’s Village Design Guidelines and create a master plan for Honokohau Village.

The Village will be designed as a Transit Oriented Development (TOD), a category of compact, mixed-use development encouraged under the new CDP. A TOD maximizes the advantages of mobility choices so that people representing a wide range of ages, abilities, and incomes can share the advantages of living, working, and playing in the same community.

“The Honokohau Village TOD,” says Mayor Billy Kenoi, “will include government offices, stores, homes, apartments, parks, schools, roads, sidewalks or pedestrian walkways, bike paths, bus routes, cultural sites, and open green spaces. And just as we reached out to the broader community to develop the Kona CDP, we want to encourage the same kind of involvement for this charrette. Everyone’s invited to participate.”

What’s a Charrette?

The term comes from the French and translates roughly to “little cart.” Its origins are traced to an art school tradition from 19th century Paris when a cart was sent around to students’ studios to collect work to be graded by their professors. Like most students, these artists worked until the last minute, then ran alongside the charrette making finishing touches as the cart rumbled towards judgment.

The idea has been refined by modern design teams to indicate design on a fast track, planned in the presence of clients – with the active participation of those likely to be affected by the plan. Charrettes thrive on collaboration.

By involving everyone who can enable or block decisions and by committing to produce actionable plans within a set timeframe, charrettes can save months – even years – of tedious back-and-forth negotiations and redesign. They also provide an experience that’s increasingly rare. People get to participate in something organized especially to listen to their ideas and to act on them immediately.

In well-organized charrettes, designers test ideas almost as fast as participants come up with them; so there’s something immediate and tangible to react to. These feedback loops of drawing, reacting, re-drawing, and reacting some more are keys to making charrettes work. Of course, all this hashing out of alternatives in public is not always the way political bodies and private sector developers like to work. But the biggest risk connected with a charrette is not too much debate; it’s too much success.

A charrette raises expectations. It builds enthusiasm. It draws clear lines of accountability. Because everyone knows who made and agreed upon the plan, everyone knows who’s responsible if it goes sour.

When a developer or a government body chooses a charrette process, it means investing resources to assemble and support a team of experts through four to ten days of near round-the-clock work sessions and community discussions. It’s a leap of faith – in the community, in the design team, in the process itself. But the potential rewards are great.

In the long run, a charrette is a money-saver. Time is money, after all, whether you’re talking about debt service on a developer’s investment or staff time for a government agency. Community buy-in that grows during a charrette accelerates a project’s path to approval and jump-starts the marketing. People don’t have to be sold after-the-fact on ideas they helped shape.

The biggest and most unexpected bonus comes from the creative energy a charrette generates. It attracts people and ideas that almost always make the project better. It’s self-correcting. Bad ideas are tossed more quickly; good ones bubble to the surface more readily. So by the time participants assemble for the final presentation it’s clear that the whole has become greater than the sum of its parts.

The pay-off is not only in terms of time and money saved but in the pleasure of partnering with an entire community on a project everyone can be proud of.

For more info: www.charretteinstitute.com