Transforming a downtown highway corridor to reconnect Hartford

This Planning and Urban Design project played a lead role on this major infrastructure project that will transform the city of Hartford, Connecticut. Working with the Connecticut Department of Transportation, the I-84 Hartford Project re-envisions “return on investment” through its focus on core transportation infrastructure along a central 2-mile stretch of elevated highway through the city, which had reached the end of its useful life and become a barrier to connecting vibrant communities with the city’s center. Composed of an interdisciplinary, and trans-professional team, the project team met regularly with local city, state, and community board representative to create “The I-84 Viaduct Study,” which offered a range of strategies for replacing the highway, and knitting the city’s center back into previously neglected communities and urban edge-conditions. This ongoing project provided transformational urban design, streetscape, and public space strategies which utilized urban design to reconnect the City with its neighborhoods; improve local streets, and create dynamic new public spaces for Hartford for years to come.

Awards

American Planning Association /
APA-Connecticut, Public Program Award

Congress for the New Urbanism /
CNU–New England, Urbanist Award

Hartford Preservation Alliance /
Neighborhood Revitalization Award

Remediating industrial brownfields for new life as a regional economic growth center

Planning to expand Amtrak and Regional rail service to a new transit center, the ‘Barnum Center Transit Oriented Development Plan’ guides public and private investment int the repositioning of what was once vacant industrial brownfield and its neighboring residential neighborhoods. With a large concentration of available public land, coupled with a station designed to accommodate express rail service, this redevelopment plan makes a promising and strategic center for economic development for the city of Bridgeport, its residents, and its economic watershed. Strategies in place with this plan will direct five million square feet for strategic development through guided reinvestment framework overlays over these lands now offered up for mixed use development and further investments in public infrastructure. With a focus on multi-modal street improvements to heighten neighborhoods immediate safety and mobility benefits, as well as temporary community based strategies for vacant sites to enhance market visibility, and improve blight conditions.

Awards

Congress for the New Urbanism /
New England Chapter, Urbanism Award

Congress for the New Urbanism /
Transit-Oriented Development Award

Urban planning guidelines for reinvestment in developing Allentown’s Urban Future

Utilizing a new state incentive program, the Neighborhood Improvement Zone (NIZ ) has since unlocked a historic wave of reinvestment in Allentown’s city center, as employers return to its historic urban core, attracted by improved street life, and cheaper rents. The scale and pace of the reinvestment, over $1 billion, creating or renovating over 1,500,000 square feet of new mixed use commercial, and residential real estate investment over a 5 year timescale. Creating a framework for investors, developers, and city agencies to guide redevelopment and pursue public investment, ensuring a future downtown which continues growing into a vibrant, walk-able urban center for the regions economic watershed.

Noted for its research into potential market opportunities nearly triple the central business district’s population, re-asserting its density as a truly self sufficient neighborhood, this plan also provided :

• Market reports outlining opportunities for 1,000 additional residential units

• Defined important neighborhood nodes for targeted multi-purpose redevelopment to create and sustain healthy neighborhood links with broader networks across the city and region

• Analysed massing strategies and guidelines organized by multiple scales and topological street categories to produce varied urban realms

• Identified short term and long term strategies which will strengthen historic downtown Allentown’s character by leverage existing built fabric and infrastructure with contextually co-dependent new low, mid, and high rise development opportunities.

• Prioritized funding and improvements for walk-able, transparent, and readily accessible public spaces.

Awards

• APA—National Planning Achievement Award for Urban Design

• APA–Pennsylvania Chapter, Planning Excellence Award
  Plan Other Than a Comprehensive Plan

• National Planning Achievement Award for Urban Design

From industrial zone to urban village: a plan for neighborhood transformation

The Brickbottom Brownfields Redevelopment Plan is as a strategic guide for the strategic redevelopment of over 150-acres of previously neglected industrial areas, which stands as the last neighborhood scale concentration of redevelopable land within reach of Boston’s historic urban core, offering a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a lively, urban neighborhood. Historically significant as protective tidal marshes, the area rapidly and haphazardly had been developed to support rail yards and heavy industry for a growing Boston. In recent decades, the area remained largely underutilized as light industrial. With plans for a new transit center on the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s Green Line light rail service, new direct transit links will connect this neighborhood with the heart of Boston.

Working closely with city leaders, longtime residents, and essential local business and property owners, this plan incorporates:

• A new and vibrant urban neighborhood with a walkable business district

• multifamily, and mixed income housing, as well as ample new access to new community parks

• Economic positioning identifying opportunities for future office, and MIT lab adjacent research spaces

• Greater access to adjacent neighborhoods,previously constrained by deep swaths of expose rail and elevated highway infrastructure

• 6,000,000 - 10,000,000 square feet of new mixed use, and income buildings created by practical, incremental steps allowing the neighborhood to grow at an inclusionary pace, and organically over time

Awards

• Congress for the New Urbanism
  CNU–New England, New England Urbanism Award