Develop vision and strategy with stakeholders

Step 5 of 12 Strategy Development

← Build and jointly assess scenarios

SUMP overview

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The assessed scenarios from Step 4 point to a direction, but a direction is not yet a plan the area will stand behind. Step 5 turns the evidence and the preferred scenario into two things the community can own: a shared vision of the neighbourhood people want, and a small set of concrete objectives that say what the plan will actually change, for whom, and by when. The work here is as much about legitimacy as about content. A vision shaped with residents and the cross-boundary coalition is one they will defend when delivery gets hard. One drafted for them rarely survives the first difficult trade-off.

Why a shared vision is harder in the outskirts

In a compact city, the people a vision needs to involve are mostly within reach. They share streets, civic spaces and a single municipality that can convene them. The periphery offers none of that for free. Residents are dispersed across a wider area, more reliant on the car for the trips that structure their day, and often split between several municipalities with no common forum. The local civic infrastructure a planner would normally lean on, the associations, squares and meeting places, is thinner on the ground. Reaching people therefore takes more deliberate effort, and the engagement has to travel to them rather than wait for them to arrive at a town hall.

This is also why the cross-boundary coalition from Step 1 matters again here. The vision cannot be owned by one authority alone. It has to be backed by every body that holds a lever, because in the outskirts no single one of them can deliver a 15-minute neighbourhood on its own.

What worked in the living labs

The DREAMS living labs offer two contrasting ways to build that ownership, and both moved engagement out of the meeting room.

Living lab Vienna, Liesing

The Raum_Wagen flexible activity hub turned an underused space into a place residents helped programme. Over the summer of 2025 it ran open-air film, theatre and workshops, and invited residents and local initiatives to shape its use through the imgrätzl.at neighbourhood platform, which reaches many of the self-employed and women-led micro-businesses already active in the area. A light bike-sharing station sat alongside it. The hub was itself the engagement: a visible, low-threshold place where the conversation about the neighbourhood's future happened in the neighbourhood itself.

By holding that conversation in a space people already used, Vienna reached residents who would never have attended a formal consultation, and gave local actors a reason to keep showing up. Deliverable 5.1 records the set-up, the partners and the low-threshold workshops and networking meetings behind it.

Living lab Utrecht, Overvecht

The Overvecht lab worked on shared e-bikes for a post-war estate with many low-income residents who had no affordable access to one. Rather than treat engagement as consultation, the team built the question of who owns and runs the service into the design, testing different business and governance models and a social business model that gave local actors a genuine stake. The municipality, the university, the operator and the national cyclists' union each held a defined role.

Utrecht's lesson is that a stake outlasts a survey. When residents and local organisations help run the thing rather than only comment on it, the objectives the plan sets are far more likely to hold. The common thread across both labs is that engagement which hands people a role, a space, a service they help shape, or a business they partly own, builds an ownership that one-off consultation cannot.

Let the objectives follow the evidence

A vision can inspire, but objectives are what the rest of the plan is judged against, so they have to be grounded in what residents actually need rather than in a generic standard. The diagnosis from Step 3 already pointed the way. Residents do not value reaching one of each amenity. They value real choice, two or three groceries within reach rather than one, and the survey work behind that finding (Deliverable 4.2) showed those needs cut across age and income in ways a single neighbourhood average hides.

The honest objective that follows is not minimal access but genuine, multi-modal choice, framed around the groups the diagnosis found least well served. A good objective for an outskirt names whose proximity it improves and by how much. Raising everyday grocery access for older residents in a named, underserved pocket is a sharper commitment than lifting an area-wide score, and far easier to track and to defend.

Bring the conversation to where people already are

In a dispersed periphery, attendance at a central meeting is a poor measure of engagement. Meet residents in the places and on the platforms they already use, and give the most affected groups, who are usually the least likely to attend, a deliberate route in. A vision shaped this way carries the weight to survive the trade-offs that come later.

Building your own vision and objectives

Translate the scenario the coalition preferred in Step 4 into one or two plain vision statements, the kind a resident would recognise as describing their own street. Turn each into a handful of objectives specific enough to track, each tied to a priority group and to a gap from your baseline, and resist the long wish-list that commits to nothing. Then take both back to residents and to the cross-boundary coalition for a genuine reaction rather than a rubber stamp, and record what changed as a result. The objectives you carry out of this step become the targets and indicators you formalise next.

Go deeper

For practical methods on who to involve and how, the CH4LLENGE participation kit offers a manual and factsheet on engaging citizens and stakeholders across the SUMP cycle, including how to match engagement methods to local conditions. To compare notes with other practitioners working on proximity in lower-density areas, the 15-minute cities community hosts an active discussion, with a recurring thread on whether 15-minute principles hold in low-density contexts.

Sources and further information: EU SUMP Guidelines, Second Edition (Rupprecht Consult, 2019), Step 5 "Develop vision and strategy with stakeholders"; DREAMS Deliverable 5.1 (set-up of the living labs, including the Vienna and Utrecht engagement methods); resident needs and persona data from DREAMS Deliverable 4.2.

← Build and jointly assess scenarios

SUMP overview

Set targets and indicators →