City officials want to know what residents love and hate about Aurora. They want to get a clear picture of the city’s current image and an even clearer plan for how to transform Aurora from second-fiddle suburb to truly competitive urban hotspot.

Through November, city planners and a consultation firm hired from Chicago are beating the streets, trying to catalog the best and worst perceptions of the city of 350,000 so that they can establish a future development and goals road map called “Aurora Places,” which will help to inform the course of the city’s development for the next decade or two.

“It’s very important that folks be a part of thinking about what the city should be in the future and how we’re going to get there,” said Robert Watkins, Aurora Places project manager. “This is not a one-time process, but it is something that we will start and monitor and measure the progress of over time. We won’t be successful if people aren’t behind this or a part of it.”

Aurora Places is essentially a beefed-up process for updating the city’s guiding principles and priorities for development. Watkins said that the amount of outreach and the unusual initiative of labeling the campaign is because Aurora is at a pivotal point in history and Aurora Places is being devised to be the basis for a transformative future.

“This is a plan that may have a longer future than some of the past plans,” Watkins said. “It’s a very intensive effort.”

The first phase of the project involves gathering feedback from residents, businesses and other stakeholders. The city has an online survey for residents and another one for business owners and an interactive mapping tool on a website launched specifically for plan — auroraplacesplan.com.

“We have attended a number of community events where we have gathered input via postcards. We are distributing Do-It-Yourself Workshop kits to community members who want to host their own workshop with friends, a church group, a book club or similar,” said Aurora spokeswoman Julie Patterson. “We are actively scheduling and conducting staff-led workshops in the community to city employees, boards and commissions and external groups. We are conducting one-on-one interviews with key stakeholder leaders in the community, and we will be scheduling some focus groups in the coming weeks.”

That major metropolis trajectory is already in motion: The opening of the RTD light-rail, the growing Anschutz Medical Campus, the Gaylord Rockies resort hotel near Denver International Airport and a slew of redevelopment projects will ultimately contribute to the changing landscape of Aurora.

“It’s important for Aurora is to think about the kind of places it has and the kind of places it needs,” Watkins said. “We’re a city of 350,000 people — which makes us bigger than St. Louis or Pittsburgh or a lot of other traditional cities of that size — but we don’t have a traditional downtown or central business district like Denver has or any of the other cities.

“We have to think about how we’re going to maintain or improve the great places that we already have while thinking about creating destinations here in Aurora — places that will attract people, attract jobs, young professionals and all kinds of other people who want to live and work and seek entertainment in Aurora,” he said.

The feedback gathering phase should be completed by Nov. 30 so planners can begin to piece together the larger themes and methods of development that will characterize Aurora Places before it’s ready to go to City Council for adoption sometime next year.There have been hundreds of responses online so far.

Michael Del Giudice is the chief planning officer and director of the University of Colorado Denver’s Office of Institutional Planning. He is also a member of the city’s stakeholder steering committee, which meets monthly to discuss at-large priorities that will improve the quality of life in Aurora.

“The university, hospitals and Fitzsimons Innovation District will together serve as an major anchor in North Western Aurora,” Del Giudice said. “The historic pedestrian-scaled neighborhoods of the area are unique in Aurora, and will become neighborhoods of choice over the next 20 years if the city successfully implements comprehensive transit, manages congestion, increases new and existing businesses of all scales, and realizes the focus on place-making identified in the Aurora Places study.”

The approximately 20-member steering committee includes community leaders, people from Aurora Public Schools and the Cherry Creek School District, the Aurora Chamber of Commerce, county officials, the Aurora Economic Development Council, neighborhood representatives and so on.

According to Del Giudice, early emerging concerns for the development of the city include continued improvements in K-12 education; refocusing the city’s car-centric public realm to streets that balance pedestrian, bike, transit and auto circulation; and building new and improving existing partnerships between business, government, nonprofit organizations, institutions, and associations to address critical issues, such as health care access, safety, affordable housing, job creation and more.

“It’s pretty simple,” Watkins said. “We’re not asking complicated questions, just what’s important to you. What are the issues in relation to development or the future of this city that are important to you? What’s good about Aurora? As we develop strategies to move forward one of the things that we want to be careful not to do is to remove or destroy or inhibit the good things.

“We want to make sure that it’s not just a staff plan or a council plan. We’re doing a lot of work in these early phases to listen to people to see what they think is important and make this a community-guided plan.”

If you go:

Neighbor to Neighbor Roundtable, Aurora Places

5:30-7:30 p.m. Oct. 18

Aurora Central Library Community Room, 14949 E. Alameda Parkway

Registration is required; call 303-739-7280

Or request a Do-It-Yourself Workshop kits by emailing auroraplaces@auroragov.org or call 303-739-7194