Background

The Brice-Tussing area of Columbus was once a vibrant and viable retail district on the far east side of the city.  Over the years, retail activity shifted even further east and suddenly the area found itself out of favor with retailers of all sizes.  The preponderance of big box retail made the decline even more noticeable when preferences began to shift.

The Task

Tired of watching the Brice-Tussing area languish, the City engaged an enterprising team of consultants to study the area and identify opportunities for redevelopment.  During the study process, the team met with a variety of stakeholders including several local area commissions, residents, commercial realtors, local business leaders and potential investors.  Data was poured over and parcels were scrutinized for highest and best use as well as optimal land use and zoning.

Info

The plan is currently in the final stages of development.  In the interim, here is a page dedicated to the project and maintained by the City of Columbus.  Here you can read a midterm draft of the plan as well as view several display boards that were generated for the various open houses.

One of the ways the project team has kept in touch with the community is through the West Franklinton MindMixer page at www.westfranklinton.com.  The beauty of this website is two-way communication: the project team can start a general conversation and the members of the West Franklinton community can fill in the details.  The site launched on January 2, 2014 with six core topic areas requiring community input:

1. Community Identity + Image
2. Driving, Walking + Biking
3. Housing + Neighborhood
4. Retail
5. Parking Strategies
6. Parks + Open Space

Collectively, these core topics generated 177 individual ideas with 193 comments over a period of two months.  We were thrilled with the feedback and the active participation of community members, and we are currently working on incorporating this wealth of local knowledge and energy into recommendations and strategies that will be presented at the second public meeting on April 30th, 2014 at Gladden Community House from 5 – 7pm.

There’s obviously a lot to read through in these discussions, but there are many tricks to getting a quick idea of the general concerns and even mood of a discussion.  Among them is a simple and easy visualizing technique that was all the rage in planning circles circa 2011: the word cloud.  A word cloud is merely a visualization of text data, where words from a given source are sized according to their use.  That is to say, the more a word appears in a given text, the larger it will appear in a world cloud.

Word clouds are by no means a substitute for carefully reading through text or other analysis exercises, but they can reveal some pretty interesting patterns and are a handy visualization regardless.  We decided it would be fun to throw the discussions from the original six MindMixer topic areas into wordle to see what these community discussions look like.  We’ll probably continue to play with these visualizations over the next few weeks (I would particularly like to edit out the words “West” and “Franklinton” to see what else will stand out), but the results are below.  What do you think?

Community Identity + Image

Idea Titles Text

Discussion Text

Driving, Biking, Walking

Discussion Text

Idea Titles

Housing + Neighborhood

Idea Titles

Discussion Text

Retail

Idea Titles

Discussion Text

Parking Strategies

Idea Titles

Discussion Text

Parks + Open Space

Idea Titles

Discussion Text