Urban Planning and Design

Community Partners Created the “Rebuilding Community” Toolkit for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The National Trust sought proven strategies to help address the growing problem of demolition and abandonment of historic buildings. Community Partners Consultants created Rebuilding Community: Best Practices Toolkit for Historic Preservation and Redevelopment to highlight successful examples of historic preservation for housing and community revitalization. The toolkit offers examples as diverse as state financing incentives for rehabilitating historic buildings for housing in Vermont to an artist overlay district for the former mill town in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts to a catalogue of historic homeownership opportunities in Hartford, Connecticut. Each example summarizes project impacts, factors for success, and offers tips for others. The Toolkit is being translated into Spanish to reach a wider audience. The publication is downloadable from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

• The City of Worcester and its arts and culture community were looking for ways to coordinate efforts and focus activities for culture, entertainment, and artist live/work space. The designation of the new Arts District along Main Street in Worcester led to Community Partners’ completion of the Worcester Arts District Master Plan for the Worcester Arts District Task Force, ARTSWorcester, and the City of Worcester. Working with a diverse set of stakeholders, Community Partners fashioned a plan that combined urban design and economic development strategies to enhance the city as a regional destination for art and culture while improving quality of life for residents. The Master Plan was quoted as being “visionary while maintaining a firm grounding in economic realities” in the Worcester press.
  
  
• Concerned citizens in Concord, New Hampshire sought to use the proposed widening to Interstate 93 to address a number of concerns including reconnecting the Merrimack River to the downtown, preserving open space and managing growth, and enhancing the capital city as “New Hampshire’s Downtown.” Through extensive community input, a vision of “Concord: A City of Villages,” was created for The Initiative for a 20/20 Vision for Concord. Susan Silberberg led this effort while planning manager at another firm. This vision and growth management plan made transportation, urban design and economic development recommendations to protect and enhance Concord's open spaces and high quality of life. The Vision Plan won a Congress for New Urbanism 2002 Charter Award.
  
  
• The City of Boston sought public access solutions for Long Island in Boston Harbor. Seeking to balance the desire to allow limited public access to this island rich in historic resources with the day-to-day operations of a City homeless shelter, the Mayor’s office commissioned a study to investigate possibilities for public use. Community Partners helped develop the Long Island Limited Public Access Master Plan. Potential public activities, a physical plan for public access, and complex logistical and security issues are identified and addressed.
  
  
• The National Endowment for the Arts recognized that mayors play a pivotal role in city building. By coordinating the Northeast Mayors Institute on City Design, in conjunction with the NEA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mayors were educated about their role in city design and development and addressed specific design challenges in their communities.
  
  

Rebuilding Community Toolkit

Long Island Lighthouse

Designing the City offers tangible advice and strategies for revitalizing communities

The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities sought to improve the quality of design in the Commonwealth. As the first Director of Design and Development, Adele Fleet Bacow created new programs as diverse as bridge design, highway landscape design, public finance, the state’s Main Street Program, rural communities, artists housing, and cultural facility development in partnership with other state agencies and cities and towns across the state. The lessons learned in these programs and strategies to work effectively with public officials are highlighted in her book Designing the City: A Guide for Advocates and Public Officials. The effectiveness of this work, funded in part by several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, was recognized with a Presidential Design Achievement Award.

Download excerpts from Designing the City:
Contents (PDF, 424 KB)
Preface (PDF, 516 KB)
Chapter 1 (PDF, 2.6 MB

Designing the City is copyrighted by Adele Fleet Bacow and Island Press, and was reprinted by permission for this web site.
If you are interested in ordering the book, please visit www.islandpress.org or call 1-800-828-1302.

• As a former mill town typical of many communities in New England, downtown Athol suffered from vacant storefronts and commercial disinvestment. Community Partners completed an analysis of the downtown commercial district for the Athol Downtown Partnership, completing surveys of customer satisfaction, recommendations for retail improvement, and technical assistance on storefront display design. Subsequent hands-on workshops with storeowners put these recommendations into action.
  
  
• The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority recognized the potential of the Commonwealth’s bridges as an avenue for public art. This creative initiative involved planning and community involvement for the “Gateway of Color” Bridge Design Project in conjunction with public works artist Stan Edmister. The project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, resulted in new color schemes for repainting bridges and viaducts along the Turnpike, an educational component for schoolchildren with the Massachusetts Pre-Engineering Program, and production of a video documenting the innovative results.
  
  
• By creating the Governor’s Design Awards Program, design excellence by a variety of players in the public and private sectors in Massachusetts was highlighted. While Director of the Design and Development Program for the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, Adele Fleet Bacow implemented this program in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Boston Society of Architects. The Governor’s Design Awards Program included extensive citizen involvement, public education, and recognition.
  
  
• Adele Fleet Bacow’s work at the state arts council created a unique partnership in bridge design between the Massachusetts Department of Public Works and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. This partnership resulted in innovations in bridge design, a major conference and workshops, revision of the state’s guidelines for bridge design, and publication of Bridge Design: Aesthetics and Developing Technologies.
  
  
• The town of Røros, Norway is a 350-year old copper-mining town and UNESCO World Heritage Site of 5000 residents faced with managing the impacts of over one million visitors each year. Susan Silberberg led teams with planning, architecture and landscape architecture expertise to the town for intensive six-week design and technical assistance workshops. This work resulted in a framework strategy for tourism management and traffic calming entitled “Stop the Car and Experience Røros.”

Designing the City by Adele Fleet Bacow

"Gateway of Color"

Governor's Design Awards Program