Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Planning Manager Tim Kelly emails a weekly GR Forward update to the project Steering Committee. Here's this week's communication:

Happy Friday Everyone:

We are preparing for a busy and exciting week in Downtown Grand Rapids, which will include the International Downtown Association’s Midwest District Forum, West Michigan Design Week, and the Fifth Third Riverbank Run. As such, I will keep this week’s email brief.

Updates

As a reminder, our second Steering Committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, May 8 at 9:00a at Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. (29 Pearl Street NW, Suite 1). Among the items we will be discussing are project branding, outreach strategies, and the community-wide launch that will occur the first week of June. In addition to the Steering Committee meeting, our consultant team will also be finalizing their land use survey and continuing to conduct Downtown stakeholder interviews. Thanks again to all that offered to participate.

Resources

This week the American Planning Association held its 2014 National Conference in Atlanta. As usual, there is a wealth of information on best practices that emerged from the Conference. This article from the website Planetizen is a good summary of the most talked about items, and includes links to a number of resources toward the bottom of the page. I particularly enjoyed “The Next Century of Sustainable Communities Will be Organized Around Transportation”, which describes the role transit oriented development (TOD) will play in the future health of our communities. There is a lot of valuable insight contained in these articles, so I hope you have an opportunity to browse through them over the next couple of days.