U-M and MSU partner to improve Traverse City's downtown

ANN ARBOR, Mich. The University of Michigan and Michigan State University are teaming up with the Traverse City community to rebuild the connection between the city and its waterfront.

For years, Grandview Parkway has been a physical barrier between downtown Traverse City and Grand Traverse Bay, but the recent decommissioning and demolition of the Traverse City Light & Power Board's bayside power plant has created new opportunities for the waterfront area of the city's West Bay.

U-M's Center for Economic Diversification and the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment's Landscape Architecture program and MSU's Small Town/Community Design Initiative and Landscape Architecture program are bringing in students and faculty to help with the effort over the next year.

"Downtown Traverse City is a very dynamic, walkable space that has lots of active, independent businesses," said Larissa Larsen, a U-M natural resources assistant professor and urban ecology expert helping lead the project. She visited the city last week as part of the Michigan Road Scholars program and will lead a large group of graduate students conducting research on the area.

Several organizations and interest groups have formed to look at ways the area can best be transformed into a space that would serve recreational purposes and that could be used for events while providing an aesthetically pleasing open space serving a host of people and needs.

Warren Rauhe, an MSU landscape architecture associate professor and director of MSU's Small Town Design Initiative and Community Design Initiative, said that MSU's undergraduate landscape architecture program and U-M's graduate landscape architecture programs are the only two such programs accredited in the state.

"It's just a tremendous opportunity for the two schools and the two sets of faculty and students to look at this together," Rauhe said. "What we do in a nutshell is translate the thoughts and ideas members of the community express verbally into graphic images of what the waterfront could look like in the future."

The Small Town Design Initiative is a go-to resource for Michigan's small communities for physical environmental design assistance in community development and land use. For Traverse City, the MSU team will produce a series of seven to eight master plan ideas for the waterfront with before and after images of what the waterfront could look like in the future.

The U-M Center for Economic Diversification, directed by Lawrence Molnar, has long and extensive experience working with organizations throughout the state on economic and community development programs. The center works with community members through interviews and focus groups to gather information, ideas and other data that can be used to help the Graduate Student Project Design Team.

The teams will put together an Urban Character Study that will inform a second deliverable: Design Guidelines and Standards for Reconnecting Traverse City to its Bay. The result will be a manual of design guidelines and standards to bridge the gap between downtown and the bay that will provide valuable tools and techniques that can be used to develop and design the city in a culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable manner into the future.

One project goal is to include members of the public and many organizations in the process to get as many good ideas as possible. Other partners involved with the project include the Traverse City Downtown Development Authority, the Traverse City Convention & Visitors Bureau, the City Planning Department, the U-M Office of Government Relations and the Great Lakes Water Studies Institute at Northwestern Michigan College.

The project will also examine:

Related links:
U-M Center for Economic Diversification
MSU's Small Town Design Initiative
U-M's Master of Landscape Architecture program