Instead of presenting finished plans, the city brought a giant white model to community meetings and let residents move the buildings themselves. For two years, a 16-foot model of Pittsburgh’s Hill District traveled between church basements, recreation centers and school gyms, and at every stop neighbors picked up small foam blocks and put them where they thought new homes, shops and parks belonged. The plan that came out of those evenings looks very different from the one most people expected.
Project Hill District plan · Location Pittsburgh, PA · Workshops 24
The Hill District is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, perched on high ground just east of downtown. It has a deep cultural history and a long memory of planning done to it rather than with it. Earlier redevelopment efforts in the mid-twentieth century cleared large areas and displaced thousands of residents, and that history shaped how people approached any new plan.
Starting with trust
The planning team, led by Common Ground Studio, a nonprofit design practice working under contract with the city, knew that a conventional process would struggle. A typical neighborhood plan involves a consultant drafting options, presenting them at a few public meetings, collecting comments and producing a final document. Residents often feel their input arrives too late to matter.
Tamara Price, who directed the project, proposed something different. Before drawing any plans at all, the team would build a large physical model of the neighborhood as it is today, then let residents change it. Every proposal in the final plan would have to trace back to something people had built with their own hands at a workshop.
The first meetings were tense. Some longtime residents were openly skeptical, and a few said so loudly. Price says the team listened more than it talked. “We didn’t defend anything,” she says. “We just put the model on the table and said, show us.”
Hands on
Neighbors placed new housing, parks and shops block by block. The model was built in white foam and basswood at a scale of roughly one inch to forty feet, large enough that individual houses were easy to recognize. Vacant lots were left as bare, flat spaces. Next to the model sat trays of loose pieces: small blocks for houses, taller ones for apartment buildings, green felt for parks, and colored tiles for shops and community spaces.
People understand a model in seconds. Drawings take a degree.
Tamara Price, Common Ground Studio
Each workshop followed the same basic format, refined over the first few sessions:
- A short welcome and a five-minute walk around the model, so everyone could find their own street.
- Small groups gathered at different sections of the model with a facilitator.
- Residents placed pieces wherever they wanted new homes, shops, parks or services.
- Facilitators photographed every arrangement from above and recorded the conversations.
- Groups presented their ideas to the full room, and others could respond.
- Before the next workshop, the team built the most popular ideas into the model.
That last step mattered most. When residents returned, they could see their own ideas from the previous session standing on the model. The plan grew visibly from meeting to meeting, and people started bringing friends and family to see what had changed.
What people built
Patterns emerged quickly. Residents consistently filled vacant lots with modest row houses and small apartment buildings, rather than large towers. They placed shops along the main avenue, often in the ground floors of new buildings, and almost always included a grocery store. They added small parks in odd corners and pushed for a larger park on a steep, wooded hillside that had been unused for decades.
Some ideas surprised the planners. Several groups placed community gardens on lots the city had considered for housing, and argued persuasively that both could share the same blocks. Teenagers at one workshop at a recreation center insisted on a covered outdoor basketball court near the library. Seniors pushed for more benches, shorter crossings and a bus shelter at nearly every stop.
The model also exposed disagreements that might have stayed hidden in written comments. At one workshop, two groups placed competing uses on the same lot, one a parking garage and the other a playground. The facilitators asked them to talk it through at the model. They eventually agreed on a smaller playground with street parking along one side, a compromise that made it into the final plan.
Between workshops, the team translated the foam arrangements into rough drawings and simple numbers: how many homes a block could hold, how many trees a park could fit, how far each new shop sat from the nearest bus stop. Those numbers went back on a board beside the model at the next session, so residents could see the practical effect of their choices without needing to read a technical report.
Reaching more people
Twenty-four workshops is a lot, and the team worked hard to make them accessible. Meetings were held at different times of day and on weekends. Childcare and dinner were provided at every session. A smaller portable version of the model visited senior centers, a barbershop and a school open house for residents who could not attend evening meetings.
The team also paid attention to who was not showing up. After noticing that renters were underrepresented at the early workshops, they partnered with tenant associations to host sessions in apartment building lobbies. Attendance from renters roughly doubled over the following months.
Price is careful not to overstate the reach of any process. “We never got everyone,” she says. “No plan ever does. But we got far more people than a slideshow in a city hall conference room would have, and we got them talking to each other.”
The result
The final plan adds 600 homes and a new park, and passed without opposition. The homes are spread across dozens of vacant lots rather than concentrated in one large development, and a share of them are set aside as affordable to households earning below the area median income. The new park covers the wooded hillside that residents had singled out from the very first workshop, with trails, overlooks and a small amphitheater.
The city council adopted the plan unanimously. Several council members noted that the public hearing, usually the most contentious step in any neighborhood plan, drew mostly supportive speakers, many of whom described the specific blocks they had worked on at the model.
Key takeaway: when residents can physically shape a plan, they understand it better, trust it more and are far more likely to support it when it reaches a vote.
Lessons for other cities
Building a large model is not cheap, and running two dozen workshops takes time and staff. But Price argues that the cost is small compared with the delays and lawsuits that often follow plans residents feel were imposed on them. Several other cities have already asked Common Ground Studio for advice.
Her advice is practical: build the model early, keep it simple, bring it to where people already gather, and always show people what changed because of them. The Hill District model now sits in a ground-floor storefront on the main avenue, where anyone can stop by and see the plan they helped build. Children still rearrange the blocks on Saturday mornings, and nobody has the heart to stop them.