The Belknap Neighborhood Area Specific Plan, completed in September of 2009 and adopted by the the City of Grand Rapids in February of 2010, is the closest that we’ve come in our partnership in urban planning with Nederveld, Inc to Policy Planning.
Our task was to bring together a fractured neighborhood, frustrated by a year of abortive planning exercises, around a consensus plan. With Belknap being one of the Grand Rapids’ oldest and most mature neighborhoods, our work focused much less on design and/or re-design and much more on land use and the forms that those uses might take. The final document includes formal definitions of appropriate forms for various parts of the study area and ultimately reads much more like a document of zoning intent than a definition of a physical plan.
The document is certainly our most aspirational and political to date.
