The City of Kalamazoo keeps gaining momentum - the city just held a 2-day workshop on April 11-12 to generate ideas and gather community feedback about revisioning the entire downtown. This event was just one part of a much larger undertaking to update the entire city masterplan, which is meant to guide development through 2025 and beyond. The draft masterplan should be ready for review in June sometime. The city preceded this large event with a series of smaller, neighborhood-oriented meetings that occurred throughout the winter. Input from more than 3,000 residents was gathered at these meetings.
I had the opportunity to participate in this 2-day charrette as a volunteer designer, along with 30-40 other volunteers in various design professions (architects, engineers, landscape architects, urban planners, city parks & development staff, etc.) It was a wonderful experience to listen to residents' ideas about how to catalyze positive growth in the city.
The process generated a lot of concepts and discussion about what downtown Kalamazoo should and could be. Our team’s particular focus was on ways to improve the Kalamazoo mall. There were 7 or 8 teams that all focused on different areas of downtown.
The next steps that the city will take include reviewing all of the community feedback gathered last night and at all of the previous neighborhood meetings. Their goal is to develop a full draft of a masterplan in the coming months, to be reviewed by the city commission beginning in June, before being approved for implementation.
There are some great people on staff at the city and at Downtown Kalamazoo Inc. who are dedicated to working on ways to implement the ideas that are being gathered. The city has been very successful in its effort to engage residents and invite them to participate in a variety of different media, including a very
comprehensive and understandable website outlining the process. The city has also done a good job conveying its commitment to actually act upon the strategic visions that are outlined.
Screenshots from the Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 website, explaining the process.
Gibbs Planning Group has been contracted by the city to conduct an economic feasibility study and market analysis in tandem with development of the master plan. This consulting firm is based out of Birmingham, Michigan, and is a nationally-recognized leader in the field of commercial real estate consulting and urban planning. Their
client list is quite long. In Michigan alone, it looks like they have done consulting work in 50+ communities, including Ann Arbor, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Canton, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Novi, Rochester Hills, Southfield, Warren....
I learned a lot of neat things about what is already in the planning stages for some of Kalamazoo’s public spaces. If you want to read more about the process, below are two articles from MLive, from each of the two days.
From last night, 4/12
Kalamazoo mayor wants big dreams to transform community spaces
and From Tuesday night, 4/11
Kalamazoo master plan carries optimistic expectations of community
Finally, below are a bunch of the photos that I took of the event that you can scroll through, just to get a sense of the creative juices that are flowing. A couple of the sketches are my own - I won't say which.
The Mayor, Bobby Hopewell, talks about planning and dreaming the future, Wednesday night, April 12.
