Creative Campus Planning, Columbus, OH

The northeast side of downtown Columbus is home to a concentration of major cultural and higher educational institutions, including Columbus State Community College, Columbus College of Art and Design, and The Columbus Museum of Art, as well as large employers such as State Auto Insurance. Each institution has its own master plan and initiatives underway within the area, but they have never coordinated on a large scale. Believing a stronger district will help all the entities be more successful, several institutions initiated a collaborative planning effort to try to make this area into a neighborhood, which they branded “the Creative Campus.” Planning NEXT designed and facilitated a process that brought together the area’s stakeholders to develop a vision and action agenda.

Developing an Action Agenda

The process centered around a charrette where representatives from the all the organizations within the Creative Campus along with representatives from the City of Columbus, the Columbus Downtown Development Commission, the Central Ohio Transportation Authority, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and local developers, came together to discuss the area’s potential. A 14-item Action Agenda was created centered around topics such as collaboration, infrastructure, safety and improving community character.

Forging partnerships

Columbus State is one of the essential institutional anchors for Central Ohio. At the same time, the College has recognized that critical to its long-term success is working collaboratively with the City and other institutional partners. Planning NEXT has helped forge key strategic partnerships between the College and other entities. The Creative Campus one-year work program has included a number of concrete projects that Planning NEXT has helped facilitate, including:

  • Long-term parking strategy
  • Market analysis of residential, retail and office
  • Land assessment focused on land use, utilization, and ownership
  • Opportunity recommendations
  • Investment Plan

Through this work, the partner institutions have proactively engaged developers and generated significant interest from the development community.

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Tags

Project Type: Campus Planning
Community Type: institutional campuses
Client: Columbus State Community College
Services: visioning, land use planning, area planning, capital planning