Past Projects : 2001 – 2003

Metropolitan Design and Planning

  • Conference: Cooperating Across Boundaries
    This conference gathered elected and appointed city officials and staff, as well as other professionals from around the Twin Cities, to hear about and share recent work and experiences in building livable communities.
  • Green By Addition: Case Studies in Recycling the First Ring Suburbs
    This project was founded upon the premise that older suburbs can play a pivotal role in curbing urban sprawl and reclaiming natural resources in growing metropolitan regions.
  • NE Blaine Planning Study
    The Design Center worked with city of Blaine to identify strategies for meeting the Metropolitan Council's regional smart growth goals, and enhancing community and environment, within the interests of both citizens and developers.
  • Regional Design Strategy for Greater McGregor Area
    Design Center staff collaborated on a Center for Rural Design project, to create a regional design strategy for the future of the greater McGregor (MN) area.
  • Suburban Coalition: I-35W Corridor
    The North Metro I-35W Corridor Coalition coordinates land-use, transportation, and development plans to achieve common subregional goals for livable communities.

Urban Open Space

  • Taking Notice: Green Spaces in Urbanized Settings (2003): This project focused on the green spaces of urban and inner-suburban communities of the Twin Cities. Great parks, wildlife sightings, clean air, and swimmable lakes are so commonplace in the Twin Cites that people may take for granted these unique and rare urban assets. As the metropolitan areas ages and grows, the location, quality of design, and management of green spaces will determine whether these assets are sustained into the future.
  • Urban Park Restoration Planning: Bassett's Creek Valley Park
    With a multidisciplinary team, the Design Center developed plans to facilitate the restoration of one of the largest WPA park projects in the city of Minneapolis.

Transportation and Streets

  • Community Parkways Report
     When is a parkway truly a parkway, in form, and not just in name? What gives a street the characteristics of a parkway, even if it is called something else, such as a boulevard? To build a new parkway today, what would be the essential design elements needed to make it appear and function as a typical Twin Cities parkway?
  • Design and Development Principles for Suburban Arterials
    The livable Suburban Arterials research project explores how design of the road and site interact to create that inextricable tie between land use and transportation. It also seeks to offer an urban design framework and initial set of tools that enable land use and transportation planners to open a discussion about how to move forward in a collaborative planning effort.
  • Northwest Corridor: Redesigning Highway 81 and its Surroundings
    The Design Center worked with a variety of public and private partners to transform an aging county highway and the surrounding area into a corridor of connected and more livable communities.
  • Nicollet Avenue Urban Design and Transportation Plan
         The Design Center worked with four south Minneapolis neighborhoods south of Lake Street, providing technical assistance on urban design, transportation planning, and traffic engineering, culminating in a street design proposal that enhances community assets.
  • TEA-21 Reauthorization: Lessons from the Twin Cities Region
    To help create a bottom-up metropolitan agenda for federal transportation reauthorization in 2003, the McKnight Foundation funded the Design Center to conduct two regional roundtables.
  • Transportation and Regional Growth Study
    An urban design analysis of transit-supportive development and construction of a subarea transportation model that can capture data at a finer scale than that analyzed in typical transportation models.
  • Urban Transportation Corridors Study
    The Design Center is studying the challenges facing the development of and reinvestment in urban transportation corridors. Specifically, the research is focused on identifying urban design elements, challenges, opportunities, and principles of multi-jurisdictional transportation corridors in metropolitan regions.

Manual

  • Community Redesign Handbook
    The recently handbook features case studies that the Design Center has undertaken with Twin City communities, and describes both the process and results of these collaborations.

 





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