Our studio group developed a master plan for the country-suburban region along highway 536 in Kenton County, given that funding was secured for a multiple lane expansion. The master plan funnels development into tiered focus areas, preserving sensitive areas while connecting new developments through proposed residential guidelines and an integrated park system. The plan calls for the backbone of this park system to be highway 536, which we conceived of as a heritage parkway. The heritage parkway would showcase certain character vistas that are unique to the current route, while also allowing

pedestrian access to the park and neighborhood systems via the bike path network.

Members of Kenton County’s planning department guided our process, including both interviews with pertinent stakeholders and creatively expressing personal perceptions of the county corridor region. We also presented our project to multiple public and professional bodies for feedback throughout the process.

These graphics are part of the Cuyahoga County Complete Streets Guidelines published December 1st, 2014. They convey possible configurations for multimodal streets at two different scales; large and medium commercial streets. These graphics were drafted and rendered in Google Sketchup 2014.

These graphics showcase the College Hill neighborhood business district. This graphic analysis helped our studio group understand the character of the business district. From this analysis we addressed how to emphasize the middle section of the district as a walkable-transit hub.

EXISTING CONDITIONS

PROPOSED IMPROVEMENTS

These improvements were part of my studio group’s plan to revitalize College Hill’s central business district as a walkable-transit hub. The district corridor is long, north-south, with the livelier portions towards the northern and the southern ends; there are many vacancies in the middle. We wanted to emphasize the unique neighborhood-oriented opportunities the middle area has by making the corridor nicer to walk along, bike along, and make transit a more obvious part of the district’s character. We achieved the extra streetscape room required for these improvements by removing two parking lanes that were ill-used and confusingly marked.

PROPOSED IMPROVEMENTS

These studio graphics were creative exercises to develop our hand, perspective and design skills.

melkomg@mail.uc.edu