Belleville in the year 2035 - Visioning Roundtable
The Belleville Economic Development and Tourism committee is inviting everyone to the Belleville 2035 Visioning Roundtable. At this event, you will be able to talk, argue, dream, and laugh about the future of Belleville. If you can't make the visioning roundtable, or even if you can, you are also invited to complete Belleville's vision survey. Please take the survey here.
The vision roundtable is scheduled for September 11th, 2025 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm at the Belleville High School Library. Refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP here by September 5th.
The web-based Vision Survey hosted by UW Madison Extension includes a set of 5 questions about what you want the Belleville community to look like, feel like, and be like in 2035. We estimate 10-15 minutes to answer these 5 questions. Following those vision questions are 9 optional questions about what you believe currently makes the Belleville community special. If you choose to answer, we estimate another 10 minutes for these 9 questions.
Successful private, for-profit developers must be good at communicating their development vision and selling their development proposals to potential reviewers, funders, and tenants by using verbal descriptions and design renderings. That is how and why they can get permits approved, attract investors, and lease space even before they break ground. The community of Belleville needs to use similar tools to attain similar results, which is why it is important to craft Belleville’s Vision Narrative. The narrative will also serve as a foundation for Belleville’s Comprehensive Plan update, potential edits to Belleville 2035: Future Ready Strategic Plan, as well as an important component of future grant applications.
About Informed Development
Informed Development is development resulting from action that is intentional, knowledge-based, strategic, and coordinated. The purpose or goal is for the community of Belleville to become more capable of Informed Development and on-demand action that results in a feasible, sustainable, desirable, and profitable future and to respond to ongoing changes with nimbleness. The focus is on better information and knowledge to guide the community’s collective development decisions and actions, and to provide better context for individual entrepreneurs and developers decisions and actions.
The Informed Development Process: Finding the Sweet Spot
Informed Development is a community-based and community-driven development process structured around three key drivers for success: assets/capital, shared vision, market opportunity.
Communities can and should leverage their development advantage from three key drivers – assets/capital, shared vision, and market opportunity – at the same time. Development can be inspired by any of the three, but that inspiration is best further enlightened by the other two before investment. A thorough understanding of assets/capital can help focus and clarify vision which can then be checked against market potential. An overlap of all three increases investment quality, investor confidence, and ultimately investment quantity.