Develop a vision and objectives with stakeholders
Step 5 of 12 Strategy Development
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 run by Cerema hosts an active discussion, with a recurring thread on whether 15-minute principles hold in low-density contexts.