The Block Vision Project

Overview

The Block Vision Project helps neighbors imagine a better use for a specific corner, strip-mall site, parking lot, or dead block. LVBT facilitates the session, brings design support, and helps publish a rendering and neighborhood-authored brief.

The work starts from nominations by people who know the place. The published vision belongs to the neighbors; LVBT’s role is to make the idea legible and usable.

Motivation

Most “what could be” content is created from outside a neighborhood. It may be polished, but it often reads like someone else’s plan and triggers defensive politics before the real conversation starts.

Residents become authors when they name the site, describe the problem, and help shape the vision. The result becomes their document rather than an outsider rendering.

Approach

LVBT will open nominations, choose sites based on local stakes and willing neighbor leads, and hold facilitated sessions in places residents already use, such as libraries, schools, churches, or community rooms.

Design or landscape partners can translate the room’s ideas into a credible visual. LVBT then helps publish the rendering and written brief, and routes the result to the relevant council member, planning body, or code-reform campaign.

Activities

Each session will publish a neighborhood-authored brief with the site, the problem residents named, the design idea, and the public body or decision it connects to. The rendering will make the idea visible enough for neighbors, reporters, and elected officials to discuss.

In year one, LVBT will complete two sessions and carry at least one neighborhood vision into a public comment, planning process, or code-reform campaign. The finished briefs will also become examples LVBT can reuse when explaining zoning and land-use reform.