City Planning
South Park Corridor Redevelopment (2011)
In an Urban Design course at Clemson, my term project was to redesign the South Park Corridor. This is in Madison WI, not so far from Arboretum Cohousing. While this area has undergone quite a bit of study by the city for redevelopment already, I wanted to take a stab at this as it has lots of potential and I know a lot about this area.
The major changes I am recommending are: 1) business incubator at the current auto dealership right by Wingra Creek, 2) an artsy welcoming landmark at the south entry, 3) a roundabout at Wingra Creek and more boulevard to the south, 4) professional office like Strand Associates at the corner of Park and Wingra, and 5) mixed use where the abandoned printing shop is at Fish Hatchery and Park.
Site Planning course (2011)
This Town Center project used an abandoned textile mill site in Easley SC. This is a mixed use town center with a City Beautiful character somewhat reminiscent of downtown Madison WI. There are government offices, retail, residential, a school and a library/arts district. One addition I couldn't resist is a cohousing block building which is like some of the original cohousing in Denmark (yellow cross hatches).
The legend got hosed by the PDF generation, I will see if I can fix that at some point.
Created using ArcMap 10 and it's drawing tools, with roads and topo from official sources.
The project to create Residential Lots is on a rolling terrain that was interesting to work around. Most of the existing mature trees and of course the wetlands were preserved as open space. There is a circle theme used in many places, with the highlight being the series of oval pocket park neighborhoods which have bungalow housing (on the east side).
Location is a rural just to the east of Clemson SC.
Created using ArcMap 10. Lots were generated using the Arc feature creation tools. Aerial background is a Bing map layer.
Density Bonus impacts on wastewater infrastructure (2011)
Upstate Forever in Greenville SC is developing a program to trade a density bonus for LID measures in residential housing development. This is an EPA funded project to which is using market incentives to protect water quality in a fast growing mountainous region north of Greenville SC. As a graduate student volunteer/intern, I am doing research on the impact of using density bonuses on wastewater infrastructure. This resulted in a catalog of communities in the SC, NC, GA doing density bonuses, particularly those done for conservation.
For more information on Upstate Forever project see http://water.epa.gov/grants_funding/twg/upload/2009_01_20_watershed_initiative_2006_saluda_reedy.pdf
Arboretum Cohousing (2006-08)
http://arboretumcohousing.org
http://cohousing.org
I got involved with Arboretum Cohousing, as did my wife Susan, with an interest in both intentional community and sustainable
living. We have been interested in intensional community since spending some time at Jubilee Partners in the early 1980s and seeing Koinonia Partners in Georgia. We had looked at several cohousing communities around the US (like in Davis CA and Tucson AZ) and considered joining Village Cohousing (Madison WI) around 1999. When we joined Arbco in 2006, it had already had a core of people and had found a site, which happened to be about a mile from our home in Madison. This was all in a very collaborative and consensus decision making style, which was familiar to us from being Quakers and UUs. Everything was going along with Arbco just fine, we were in the design phase, when our leader come down with a serious illness. As I had been pretty involved with design, making a web site, PUD submission to the City and looking at cost models to price the units, I was asked to take over as the point person for the ownership group. Fortunately, I was able to negotiate a reduction of my day job at UW-Madison to 50%. So now I had a 50% and a new 100% job!
This was a fast education on how construction and residential development gets done. Fortunately, we had hired an experienced developer as a consultant, he steered us away from several bad scenarios, as well as being good as conflict resolution and budgets. Together with a lawyer, who was also an Arbco Owner, the 3 of us formed the Arbco Inc. management team. Management might be an oxymoron, as Arbco is run by a consensus decision making process, voting only when consensus can't be reached. We learned how to both honor the principal of consensus and to get'er done, as you must when "time is money". On time and on budget, that was no small feat, particularly into the teeth of an emerging recession and the bottom dropping out of the housing market.
The big deal with Arbco, though, was not so much the buildings, though the buildings are interesting, it was the formation of an intentional community. We liked to say we sold Arbco by potlucks. Every Saturday at noon for months, with a number of sales happening directly after! In reality what folks were buying into first was community and second whatever unit they ended up with.
While it took a couple of years, the experience of Arbco has lead me to shift gears in my life. I have laid down a good job in IT, and over 25 years of doing IT, to pursue what sustainability looks like in City Planning. Stay tuned, I have no doubt there will be some interesting new chapters to my tail coming up!
Greenbush Neighborhood Association (2007-08)
The Greenbush neighborhood is the one Arbe is in and I participated in several feedback sessions for Madison City Planning. One was to gauge the acceptability of Metro (bus) changes. These resulted in the big switch to multiple transfer points. The Metro planner was most interested in whether the bus travel times being proposed were acceptable (yes for me). The City also was updating it's city wide zoning/master plan and I gave feedback several times to prioritize what was important.
Dudgeon-Monroe Neighborhood Association Transportation Subcomittee (2001-04)
DMNA is one of the well established neighborhood associations in Madison. I was on the Transportation Subcommittee, mostly because of the new Southwest Bike Path. This rail-to-trail project was for biking commuters, which exactly me. The SW Bike Trail also intersected with the corner of our property. I participated in at least 6 meetings, plus numerous email exchanges with project lead. This ended up being both a heavily used biking commuter route and a linear park for the neighborhood. We watched a steady stream of dog owners go down to the trail to "walk" their dogs. Our cat would watch them from our front steps, daring them to come close so she could take a swipe. A second project was a proposed change by the City to the crazy Monroe/Regent intersection, with several plans being floated and the university in the process of renovating the nearby football stadium. The subcommittee was invited to review and offer comments, I also participated in an ad-hoc group that formed. The City decided to do nothing at that time, as none of the plans gained enough support.