Sustainable Design Planning Assistance Program - Newton Design Workshop

For over a year a sub-committee of the New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association’s Sustainable Design Committee worked to develop a Community Design Initiative. The objective of this initiative was to assemble an interdisciplinary panel of community planning and design experts who are particularly familiar with New Jersey ’s regulatory environment. The panel would provide design assistance to a municipality to help solve difficult land use, development and/or redevelopment issues relating to a specific project site within the community. The primary goal of this program was two fold:

1. To develop a model that offers a compelling explanation of how community visioning and form-based design can benefit New Jersey municipalities and how theses practices differ from conventional land-use regulations or master planning; and

2. To advance development projects in New Jersey that embody sustainability principles and practices, in both design and operation.

A request for proposals (RFP) to undertake a community design workshop was distributed to the 566 municipalities throughout New Jersey . To be eligible for participation the applicant municipality was required to have successfully completed a “visioning” exercise in their community and, through this process, selected a target site in need of effective design solutions Responses to the RFP were received at the end of May. Site visits and community interviews were conducted in mid-July and by late-August the Town of Newton was selected as the candidate community. The municipality’s project focused on the redevelopment of a highly visible “Moose Lodge” site, a combination of parcels encompassing 4 acres located at the easterly edge of Newtown’s compact, pedestrian-scale downtown. The challenge was to develop a “sustainable”, mixed-use redevelopment concept that would be linked to and compliment the downtown area without drawing resources and activity from the retail core. The design team’s goal was to develop creative design and planning alternatives the Town could use to redevelop an important site that has languished for over two years without a suitable direction and that would meet Newton ’s community development objectives and the site developer/owner’s financial expectations. The Workshop Findings Report describes the project setting, the obstacles the Town and the developer have wrestled with and the concepts proposed by the team to help the Newton successfully redevelop the Moose Lodge site. View Newton Planning Assistance Program Report.