What Is The Bottom-Up Planning Mindset?

(Bottom-Up Planning Mindset Series- Part 1 of 4)

Happy Sunday! Our first topic will be on the Bottom-Up Planning Mindset. We will be going over why we chose this as our first topic and why the bottom-up planning mindset is important. 

To get started, we chose the Bottom-Up Planning Mindset as our first topic because it is important for us to tackle our sustainability and urban planning problems with the right perspective. We want this topic to set the foundation for the rest of our series. 

The same term is also used in other industries, such as the corporate management space. The term bottom-up planning is used to describe a process for corporation goal setting and strategy formation. Our use of the term is similar to that, but using it in a sustainable and urban planning context. The bottom-up planning mindset requires one to look at the needs of the people at the bottom of the pyramid or those who are most severely impacted by a project. An urban or sustainability project then sets out to ensure those needs at the bottom are met as much as possible. 

For example, if you want to build a factory, how do you make sure the smoke doesn’t impact the people’s health around it? Historically, a lot of undesirable industries are built around poor communities, disproportionately affecting the health of the lower economic or racial classes. As we all know today, that is not proper planning. Nor does the out of sight, out of mind method work in reality. The pollutants always find their way to other nearby communities and oftentimes spread to contaminate large swaths of land. 

The ideal answer to this is to ensure the smoke that comes out of the factory (if any at all) is not harmful to begin with. If the emission is not harmful to the communities nearby, it will also not impact the communities further away and everyone wins. 

Of course, this is not always possible. But to minimize impacts for the most vulnerable population will ensure that the project is not putting an unproportionate burden on any single population or severely impacting a group’s livelihood. Plus, if your project has severe and unavoidable impacts to human health, that just might be a signal that you should start looking at other alternatives to the solution that you have decided on.   

All in all, the bottom-up planning mindset is important because it helps us come up with better projects as planners and community members. Next time we are out there doing our thing to make the world a better place, we should keep this one question in mind: would this project positively affect everyone it touches? 

This concludes our first post on Bottom-Up Planning Mindset. Our next blog and podcast will be released next Sunday, July 14. Don’t forget to follow us on facebook, instagram, linkedin, and twitter to stay on top of our releases and tell your friends about us so we can all discuss these social issues together.

Yours Truly,

Project Planning Green