Integrated Revitalization Guide

The I.R. Guide has entered an exciting new phase!  Originally created as a design tool for integrated revitalization programs and integrated restoration projects, the I.R. Guide is about to become even more valuable.

We are assembling a coalition of local, state, federal, and international agencies, non-profits, and colleges to help us turn the I.R. Guide into the world's first performance specification tool for integrated renewal of properties, neighborhoods, communities, and regions. [Email info@revitalization.org if your professional association, foundation, government agency, NGO, university, etc. would like to contribute expertise and/or funding to this vitally important project, or if your community/region would like to be a test site for this leading-edge new tool.  Most collaboration will be done electronically.]  See the I.R. Tools program for more details.

With this new tool, your community or region can write RFPs and RFQs specifying redevelopment and restoration projects that contribute as much as possible to all of your revitalization agendas: Economic growth, entrepreneurship, environmental health, social health, cultural heritage, quality of life, etc. 

Of course, you will still be able to use the I.R. Guide for its original purpose: To design end the inefficient, project-by-project approach to restoration & redevelopment projects, and progress to an integrated revitalization program that...

• ...funds the renewal of all your vital built, natural, & socioeconomic assets;

• ...renews them in the most effective and efficient sequence, and

• ...involves all necessary stakeholders.

But, with the new specification-writing version, you'll be able to support that integrated revitalization program by writing RFPs and RFQs that attract the sorts of developers and A/E firms that are capable of helping you advance that program with integrated restoration/redevelopment projects.  Whether the project is a brownfield, a waterfront, a neighborhood, an infrastructure system, an historic property, an ecosystem, a watershed, an agricultural area, a fishery, or whatever...the future Integrated Revitalization Specification Guide will help ensure that each project advances every relevant goal of your program.  No more "stovepiped" projects operating in isolation of your natural, built, and socioeconomic environments.

The Integrated Revitalization Guide (I.R. Guide) is offered as a free service to communities and regions worldwide. The I.R. Guide is a performance specification tool that helps you recruit developers and A/E firms who are capable of designing and delivering integrated restoration/redevelopment projects that support your integrated revitalization program.  The I.R. Guide can also be used to create an integrated revitalization program, if you don't already have one.   

Most communities and regions redevelop themselves via a stop-and-start series of isolated projects that wastes many potential efficiencies and synergies. Even when an overall plan or program exists to address larger issues--such as watershed, transportation, farmlands, etc.--few communities know how to integrate those goals into their RFP/RFQs.  Without use of the I.R. Guide, the firms responding to your Request for Proposals/Qualifications will find it difficult to effectively support your community's overall economic, environmental, and quality-of-life goals in their project proposals.

Another result is that you don't get the maximum "revitalization bang" from your "restoration buck".  This lack of integration also results in endless project delays, as one special interest group after another learns of the project late in the cycle and voices their objections.  What's more, this haphazard approach can lead to outright project failure, when it's discovered--too late--that one project should have preceded another.

The I.R. Guide helps you design an efficient, ongoing revitalization program that funds, plans, and implements your renewal projects in the most effective order, capturing the momentum from each project to build credibility for your community or region's rebirth.  You can use it to generate funding and political support for your projects.  It can be used to create an effective communications and marketing campaign to communicate your renaissance to the world, thus attracting more private investment.

The I.R. Guide can be used by communities or regions, and can also be used by communities as the first step to creating a regional initiative.  Getting multiple jurisdictions to work together toward the creation of a regional plan is sometimes difficult.  However, it's relatively easy to expand the scope of a successful, well-designed community revitalization program, since other communities will want to benefit from it, once they observe its results.

The I.R. Guide comprises two sections (described in more detail below):

• Asset Integration Checklist

• Stakeholder Integration Checklist

Note: As a non-profit organization, Revitalization Institute does not do consulting work, such as for business, NGO, or government institutions needing help with their internal strategy or business development nor do we offer technical consulting on redevelopment/restoration projects.  If your organization needs help applying integrated revitalization tools or approaches to your company's business plan, your agency's mission, or to projects, please contact one of the for-profit firm's in our Affiliate Network.

Why should your community or region use the Integrated Revitalization Guide?  Three reasons:

1. Vision & strategy: The I.R. Guide helps you perceive, design, and fund the renewal of all 12 sectors of restorable assets, so that the renewal of each asset to contribute to the renewal of other assets.  The I.R. Guide helps you avoid the usual haphazard, wasteful, project-by-project approach to renewal by creating a scalable, "brandable" ongoing revitalization initiative with an ideal scope. This conveys to the outside world that your area is on the rise, thus attracting investment.

2. Collaboration: The I.R. Guide helps you create a shared vision of renewal that aids in overcoming parochial attitudes and conflicting interests, forming the multi-stakeholder, multi-jurisdictional backing that's essential for sustained revitalization.  The I.R. Guide helps special interest groups (watershed, infrastructure, agricultural, etc.) become relevant to to each other, by showing how each is essential to the goals they all desire: Higher quality of life, more jobs, better jobs, and a cleaner, more beautiful environment.

3. Faster, better, cheaper: Integration enables you fund and restore your built and natural assets in an optimized, properly-sequenced manner that creates synergies, increases project quality, and ensures that smaller projects don't "fall through the cracks". It speeds your revitalization by capturing the momentum from each project, and by reducing the project delays that arise from not addressing a community's various concerns (historic, ecological, etc.) up front.  It increases the efficiency of your investments by accomplishing multiple agendas simultaneously, and reduces those investments by helping you discover non-obvious sources of funding, partnering, tax credits, etc.

When to use the Integrated Revitalization Guide.  You can use it at any point: To start a dialogue, to create a shared vision, to create a strategy, to create a plan, to evaluate a plan, or to improve an ongoing revitalization program.  The I.R. Guide is a process to create a unique solution for your area; it's not a plan or strategy in itself.

What can the Integrated Revitalization Guide help you accomplish?  Both of the checklists that comprise the I.R. Guide can be used in multiple ways, by different groups. You can run through the checklists to design a revitalization program, and identify technical issues.  Then, run through them again to identify potential partners, political backers, and funding agencies for each element of that program.  Run through them again to identify likely business opportunities for local entrepreneurs and investors.    Run through them again to find ways for local schools to use your program as a living laboratory of restoration/revitalization learning and research, thus helping to build local expertise, volunteer opportunities, and careers.

Need help?  If you would like assistance in using the Integrated Revitalization Guide to design or specify integrated restoration/ redevelopment projects--or integrated revitalization programs--we offer Workshops.   They are affordably-priced, and these workshops come to your location, so you can involve all stakeholders.

How does the Integrated Revitalization Guide work?  The I.R. Guide helps you integrate restoration projects and revitalization programs along two axes: Assets and Stakeholders.  It thus comprises two sections:

1. Asset Integration Checklist.  This section helps you properly inventory your restorable assets, and helps your develop an efficient process for addressing their renewal.  The Asset Integration Checklist identifies 3 key factors for each of the 12 sectors of natural, built, and socioeconomic restorable assets. Using these 36 key factors to audit each of your restoration projects produces effective integration of all twelve (applicable) sectors. Thus the renewal of all restorable built and natural assets will be funded and executed in a phased approach that produces the maximum efficiencies and synergies, and a minimum of conflicts. This tool is valuable at all scales, from the restoration of individual structures to the revitalization of large regions with a huge inventory of restorable assets and many jurisdictions.   

   • For instance, let's say you wish to assemble an integrated revitalization initiative for a region that encompasses hundreds of communities, several states/provinces, and maybe even more than one nation.  You need to make sure that all restorable assets are funded and restored in the right order.  Using the 24 key factors as a checklist will reveal how each asset and community relates to each restorative agenda.  This helps you determine the order in which the assets and communities should addressed, which to combine to achieve efficiencies and synergies, etc.  What's more, if many of the communities use the same system (this I.R Guide) to organize their own revitalization programs, it becomes far easier to integrate multiple local programs into a regional initiative. 

2. Stakeholder Integration Checklist: The Stakeholder Integration Checklist helps you redesign your government environment to attract more restorative investment and to be more conducive to restorative projects.  One of the most important factors in this transition is integrating of all 4 stakeholder/landowner groups (business/finance, government, academic, and NGOs/citizens) into the process.  With effective integration of the four stakeholder groups, a revitalization program should achieve maximum financial and political support, should address all relevant socioeconomic issues, should contribute the maximum of new knowledge, and should be less vulnerable to being held hostage to any particular group (such as changing political regimes/agendas).

The I.R. Guide applies the Theory of Integrated Revitalization. which--if properly applied--can help you achieve a bigger "revitalization bang" for your "restoration buck". 

Click on this image to see the full graphic.

The Integrated Revitalization Guide can help you trigger truly sustainable economic growth. Used properly, the I.R. Guide will help your project, community, or region harness the powerful dynamics that are common to integrated restoration projects and integrated revitalization programs:

1. Benefit from increased project size & funding.  Effective integration makes every form of restorable asset (and each stakeholder group) relevant to the process of revitalization.  This increases the potential for political and financial backing for smaller projects, or projects that aren't as glamorous or well-understood.  Proper phasing allows these difficult-to-fund projects to be included in the plan at the appropriate time, rather than being shoved aside and ignored because they can't be included in the initial round of funding.

2. Benefit from increased project success.  The success of many revitalization programs often depends as much on the order in which projects are done and how projects are combined as it does on the projects themselves.  Common mistakes include:

   • Restoring a waterfront property before restoring the filthy river on which it sits, and then wondering why no one wants to live or play there;

   • Restoring the flora or fauna of an estuary before renovating the obsolete sewer system that killed it in the first place, and then wondering why your new seagrass beds or oyster reefs die;

   • Restoring the buildings of an historic neighborhood without renewing the infrastructure (potholed roads, obsolete telecom, unsafe water, etc.), or without involving the existing residents in the restoration of community spirit (to decrease crime, enhance parks, decrease litter, etc.), and then wondering why businesses and residents don't move in.

3. Benefit from effective use of integrating elements (such as water, transportation, and catastrophe) to act as regional integrators or as community catalysts.

   • Restoring public transportation (such as rail, light rail, trolleys, etc.) that was dismantled decades ago can help integrate a region's economic renewal;

   • Removing badly-placed infrastructure can enable the redevelopment of a neighborhood, such as removing highways that isolate citizens from their waterfront, or removing highways that were run through the middle of neighborhoods so as to restore their connectivity and sense of community.

4. Benefit from the Warsaw Effect: Developing a large, diverse, exportable pool of restorative talent from local restoration work, which can catalyze the growth of a significant new economic sector);

5. Benefit from the Silver Lining Effect: Almost every kind of disaster--natural (hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.), anthropogenic (damage from wars, resource extraction, dams, etc.), and socioeconomic (base closure, unplanned sprawl, industrial flight, etc.)--has the potential for positive change.  Examples include technological leapfrogging when outdated infrastructure is destroyed, redesign of communities that were never properly planned, redevelopment of closed military or industrial facilities, etc.

6. Benefit from Restoration Contagion: Effective integration can capture the momentum (financial, political, educational, etc.) of each restoration project, resulting in a self-sustaining revitalization process whereby the more revitalization you have, the more you get.  Money is naturally attracted to revitalization: Investors care less about what condition an asset or community is in than they do about the direction in which it is going.  For instance: A decrepit building in an area that is coming back to life is often a more attractive investment than a new building in a community that is on the decline. 

7. Benefit from the restorative power of integration: With effective integration, the same amount of money, spent on the same group of projects, can produce far more socioeconomic revitalization.

8. Benefit from the integrative power of restoration: Restorative development is uniquely non-partisan; almost everyone enjoys the process of bringing something back to life. Unlike long-term solutions--such as conservation and sustainable development--restorative projects tend to produce quick results and rapid profitability.  Thus, even those stakeholders who normally have no interest in "green" activities of any sort are attracted to restoring wetlands, reviving dead rivers, remediating contaminated lands, etc. This broad-based appeal can be--and often is--harnessed as an integrating force, bringing together jurisdictions or stakeholders who are normally at each others' throats to restore an asset for which they all share a passion and a common economic/quality of life interest (such as a river).

The Integrated Revitalization Guide is the copyrighted property of Revitalization Institute.

Again, the Integrated Revitalization Guide comprises two sections.  Both are evolutionary documents, in a constant state of development and enhancement.  The current version is still in "beta" status, and will be finalized during an upcoming meeting of Revitalization Institute's Technical Council.  Click on the links below to see the current version of section:

• Asset Integration Checklist

• Stakeholder Integration Checklist