Downtown Raleigh is already thriving and consistently garners national accolades for livability. The City has a strong history of planning and created a Downtown Experience Plan in 2015 to help ensure the area’s continued success, and to expand it to all Downtown neighborhoods.
The Downtown Plan sets a vision for both near term development and amenities, as well as a long-term aspiration for sustaining this success.
Over the course of a year, hundreds of people helped to create the plan by sharing their ideas through community meetings, brainstorming sessions, stakeholder debates, festival events and online dialogues. Engagement strategies ranged from large public meetings to small stakeholder roundtables, online surveys, project web page updates, MindMixer social media engagement, email notifications, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts. Brie Hensold served as the project manager for the plan while at Sasaki. The Downtown Experience Plan positions the city to capitalize on its projected growth and remain competitive through reinforcement of neighborhood character, catalytic development projects, mobility improvements and enhancements to the quality of the public realm and downtown park system. The plan’s projects, policies and programs seeks to create and maintain an inclusive, authentic downtown that is walkable, bikeable, and well-connected. They build on the best of Raleigh’s entrepreneurial spirit and sense of partnerships to make space for more creativity, design, and innovation in the coming years. With implementation as a priority, the ten-year plan establishes clear, achievable, and community-supported action items. Five catalytic projects were identified across downtown’s unique neighborhoods, including park renovations, new greenways, an urban innovation district and infill development sites. Implementation is underway on many identified projects, including a sensitive historic renovation of Moore Square park, designed by Gina Ford while a principal at Sasaki.
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