Neighborhood Planning

The public engagement guide outlines a framework for how the City conducts engagement efforts throughout the next phases of the comprehensive planning process and establishes guidelines for improving the approach to engagement more broadly. The guide was developed through a collaboration of residents, community organizations, and City Planning. It is designed to help increase engagement with the planning process.

In collaboration with public agencies and community planning partners, City Planning has developed the Neighborhood Plan Guide to establish a framework for how to create high-quality and consistent neighborhood plans. This guide creates a standard for the development of neighborhood plans that can be adopted by the Planning Commission. The City of Pittsburgh will initiate these planning processes in most instances and will use this document to guide its work. Registered Community Organizations can also initiate the neighborhood planning process and work with public agencies to follow these standards and adopt a plan.

This series of informational sessions coordinated by the Department of City Planning is structure to build knowledge and insight for the neighborhood planning process. Each session focuses on a different topic area and will often be conducted in the neighborhood where a planning process is set to begin.

The registered community organization program establishes a set of standards for community-based organizations. If the organization meets these standards, it can initiate a process where it follows the standards in this guide to create a neighborhood plan that may be adopted by the Planning Commission.