Los Angeles Vision Zero: Dignity-Infused Community Engagement
Melody Wu | October 2023
All-inclusive, holistic, and equitable, this engagement strategy invites members from Los Angeles’ most vulnerable communities into the planning process.
What is Dignity-Infused Community Engagement?
A dignity-infused planning process invites community members into the process from the beginning, weaving both their perspectives and technical planning practices into a project. Beyond being innovative and advancing the profession, the work seeks to restore and atone for historic, systemic, and institutional injustices. This approach shifts the traditional transportation planning process into one that integrates the voices and experiences of community residents into every stage of a project life cycle.
The Collaborative Partnership
We partnered with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) on a first-of-its-kind Vision Zero Dignity-Infused Community Engagement (DICE) project. Together, we took on the challenge of navigating visual communications through the lens of equitable engagement. With a focused and collaborative process, the project’s visual communications work created an identity, elevated participation, and instilled a sense of urgency around the need for safety improvements.
Color finds its way to most project visuals, but it is important to be strategic when making design decisions. Fonts, maps, infographics, and images all work as a cohesive system—every touch point of the visual DNA. Below are some examples of how we carried and evolved the Vision Zero Dignity-Infused Community Engagement branding throughout our work:
The Results
Our visual communications work brought impactful results to the engagement activities beyond the effort of informing residents and encouraging participation. While civic change can feel inaccessible to many, these visual and tangible representations helped to build awareness and extended our LADOT Vision Zero project team’s work with communities that care deeply about traffic safety.
