Front N Center Charrette Process

This past Wednesday, July 9th, a group of sixteen volunteers worked to vision what could replace the buildings on the former Front N Center lots. Last year, the public was notified about the demolition of these long vacant buildings downtown due to long-term owner neglect. We wrote about our response here.

Strong Towns Blono came together and decided that the parking lots that would replace these historic buildings were not the highest and best use for the lots. Instead, the Urban Centers Revitalization Committee pursued a relatively little-known process called a design charrette to collaboratively envision the future of these important spaces.

A charrette is a collaborative process in which stakeholders, community members, designers, engineers, and urban planner collectively brainstorm design. Therefore, the outcomes of a charrette are immensely better than from the traditional real estate development process. The goals of this specific charrette on the lots of Front N Center and near vicinity is to propose a plausible and desirable alternative to current proposals (parking lot).

The Visioning Meeting

On July 1st, our group held a Visioning Meeting with members of the charrette team and visited the sites in question. We then brainstormed an outline of a Strong Towns-inspired vision of what we wanted to see.

Our vision included: majority local ownership/owner-occupied, small parcels, mixed uses, many entrances along the street, greenspace, productive from a tax-rolls perspective, and an allowance for small bets like food trucks and missing middle housing.

The Design Meeting

We divided our charrette team into three groups: low intensity, medium intensity, and high intensity proposals for the lots in order to give varied options of what the future holds for these lots. Several urban planners were in attendance, as well as engineers and city staffers.

The charrette had three short feedback loops designed to improve the overall site plans: peer review where participant “homework” is synthesized into one group plan, professional review by engineers, urban planners, and economic development specialists on the feasibility of certain ideas, and final review where each group critiqued each other’s work.

The final charrette proposals will be compiled into a packet by the Urban Centers Revitalization Committee within the next few months.