Miscelleaneous items in the queue...

Things I've come across recently:

1.  Vancouver Public Engagement plan and process.

-- Engaged City Task Force
-- Final Report

2.  A report in the UK, Planning Out Poverty, which calls for linking planning responsibilities into community development corporations as a revitalization initiative.  (That hasn't worked so well in the US, but that's another story.)  From the webpage:

TCPA has been working with the Webb Memorial Trust throughout 2013 on a case study based research project to explore the overarching question 'how can we re-focus planning to be more effective in dealing with social exclusion?' The project is not a study into poverty in general, but about how we challenge social exclusion through planning in different urban contexts...

The report suggests that we need a profound reconsideration of the social purposes of planning and calls for the reinvention of 'social town planning'. It offers 12 policy recommendations to national and local government as well as to the private sector and the wider planning community which reflect the project's ambition to embed the importance of social issues within planning practice. 

It's likely worth a read.

3.  Peabody Trust in London is a public housing organization that includes "social infrastructure" within their projects.

4.  San Diego opened a new central library last September.  It does include non-library space--they didn't have enough money to build the library as planned--but it is a two-story high school paid for the San Diego School District.

-- "New San Diego Library To Open Debt Free," Library Journal
-- "PEOPLE PACKING INTO NEW DOWNTOWN LIBRARY," San Diego Union-Tribune
-- Central Library stories, San Diego Daily Transcript