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Places29
Albemarle Northern Neighborhoods Framework Plan

Albemarle County, Virginia

The Places29 project was a major planning effort to comprehensively address transportation and land use issues in northern Charlottesville and northern Albemarle County, Virginia. The County’s Northern Development Areas have a total size of 9,000 acres and include extensive, poorly interconnected shopping centers and strip commercial frontage along an eleven mile stretch of US 29, large tracts of suburban residential development, and sizable sections of vacant land. A particular emphasis of the planning effort was developing a land use pattern and multi-modal circulation network that are consistent with the County’s Neighborhood Model. The Neighborhood Model requires that future growth be focused in residential and employment neighborhoods that are organized around a range of walkable, mixed use centers, and creates multi-modal streets that balance access and mobility for pedestrians, bicycles, and vehicular traffic.

The project resulted in a Framework Master Plan that provided flexibility in coordinating the Plan with future, detailed planning efforts to be conducted for sub-areas, as well as with a broad range of development proposals expected over the next 20 years. A concurrent transportation study (with Community Design + Architecture as subconsultant) was fully integrated into the development of the Master Plan to prioritize and direct future transportation improvements for highway US 29 North and throughout the project area.

Community Design + Architecture led a team of consultants in economics, civil engineering, architecture, and photo simulation and was responsible for the project’s land use and urban design work as well as overall project coordination. The project included a major public outreach component, where public and stakeholder participation occurred primarily through a charrette process, but also included open houses and workshops with facilitated small group sessions, stakeholder focus groups, and one-on-one stakeholder meetings, as well as working sessions with agency staff, Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors. The Board of Supervisors adopted the Final Framework Master Plan in 2010.