Masterplan Narrative

The downtown area as it stands today can be summed up by one word: void. The downtown area is composed of an estimated 5,000 people, but when I walked through the downtown area to document the area (a weekend afternoon), it seemed as if the city was absent of all inhabitants. The only life in the city was from the people at the busstops and the crackheads at the river, and to be frank, this is not the image the city wants to depict when advertising itself to developers and potential businesses it wants to attract. The city has some postives going for it, it is the capital of Ohio, so there is a strong prescence of government in the city as well as having a strong financial prescence, several banks and major corportations are located in downtown (Huntington, Nationwide, etc). A masterplan can take advantage of these positives, the city could invigorate itself economically with the addition of a controlled plan of residential development, focusing on density and amentities found in suburbia, look at plans of incorporating pedestrian friendly methods of design and scale. By creating a pedestrian friendly core, that would implement activities/needs from everyday living, this would ultimately invigorate the local economy as well as the daily lives of the inhabitants and recreate the vibrancy of the downtown area.

New Urbanism:
http://www.newurbanism.org/newurbanism.html