Project Awards

The City of Lakeland Comprehensive Plan: Our Community 2030 unites the city’s and the community’s vision to guide new development and foster redevelopment of a historic and rapidly growing city. The plan reflects wide-ranging and diverse input from all parts of the community. It brings forward policies refocused on neighborhoods and preserving the seven historic districts while supporting multimodal development along transit-oriented corridors and a vibrant downtown. The plan is leaner by hundreds of pages than its predecessor while being written and structured to be used and understood by citizens, the business community, elected officials, and planning practitioners.

Tallahassee’s first green roof facility provides an innovative example for sustainability in green infrastructure and accommodating persons with disabilities. The restroom design is both forward thinking and responsive to the community’s input.  Features of this new 1,200-square-foot restroom facility include a 400-square-foot irrigated green roof, two family-style restrooms with adult and child changing tables, a 500-gallon cistern to harvest rainwater, and a water fountain with a bottle filling station. The cistern system will harvest, treat, and reuse rainwater at the facility to irrigate the green roof system for sustainability purposes. This is a model for how infrastructure projects can be made sustainable even at a micro scale.   

The FLiP Jr program is the product of robust collaborations among community organizations, professional planners, USF student planners, and non-profits. Focused on underserved communities in Hillsborough County, the program exposed young children to planning through interactive activities revolving around multimodal transportation and safety, land-use, and civic engagement themes. The students were able to create their own “pop-up cities” and work on a beautification project. They became advocates for their communities. FLiP Jr is a model that will stimulate increased diversity in the planning profession and demonstrates why meaningful public engagement is imperative and possible for communities with the greatest needs.

MHCP COLAB created four pedestrian priority zones around local schools in one of Miami's most vulnerable communities, Little Havana, to make it safer for children to walk to school. Using Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) crash data, field observations, and extensive community input, the project team demonstrated to key decision makers that Little Havana had the highest number of pedestrian crashes in Miami-Dade County. The new policy requires crosswalks, designated greenways, 25 mph speed limits on local streets, leading pedestrian intervals, and midblock crossings. A public relations and media campaign drove community awareness and State funding for priority one projects which are now being designed.

The PROSMP created a compelling and comprehensive vision for a countywide system of neighborhood, community, and regional parks, connected by trails and sidewalks. The plan was innovative in considering what types of parks and recreation facilities are most appropriate in individual communities based on public input and applying of placemaking principles to create context sensitive park designs. This focus on the public realm has the potential to address numerous critical community health issues.  To address the need for a more equitable distribution of facilities and programs, an emphasis was placed on increasing the supply of parks and recreation facilities and developing community partnerships to help active those parks. Comprehensive in its scope, the plan considers funding sources as well as programs for implementation and capital improvements for future parks and recreation facilities. 

Hillsborough County’s Context-Based Classification Plan and Complete Streets Guide form the foundation for a complete streets ecosystem, working together to ensure that streets are designed in furtherance of the community’s vision. Streets are context classified according to future land use, building a bridge between transportation and land use in both form and function. Within each context, the Complete Streets Guide describes typologies that further define streets based upon the users that would be expected from the planned adjacent land uses. Street elements are then prioritized within each typology, thus customizing a street design to the communities they serve.

The LaVilla Neighborhood Development Strategy is based on the dynamic combination of the neighborhood’s position within Downtown Jacksonville and the unique land holdings of the city and Jacksonville Transit Authority. These two factors, paired with the neighborhood’s rich history and the opportunity for transit-oriented development, point to the neighborhood’s future position as a place for reinvestment and reurbanization. The plan and its continued implementation involves substantial and diverse participation and input from the public and local business community. Today, the plan’s approval serves as a jumping off point for additional community input, redevelopment projects, community partnerships and public realm improvements to help the community implement their vision.

Nassau County is defining the future of the SR200/A1A Corridor, its principal east-west roadway. The vision for the SR200/A1A Corridor charts a course toward a livable, sustainable, and economically vital future. Overcoming the challenges of COVID through virtual meetings, online surveys, and socially distanced outdoor events, the SR 200 Corridor Master Plan emerged from a three-year outreach period that involved more than 400 residents, property owners, businesspersons, and county officials. The Plan uses transect-based land use categories to incentivize growth within mixed-use centers with an emphasis on civic/park space and walkable design.

The Providence Plan Refresh is an innovative grassroots initiative stemming from a partnership between the Providence Neighborhood Association (PNA), the City of Tallahassee, and the FSU Barnebey Planning and Development Lab. The team worked collaboratively to implement and refresh an almost 20-year-old stagnated plan. The team created two deliverables: “The Completion Matrix”, a living document that serves to keep track of previous tasks and their status, and an “Implementation Strategy Guide”, a step-by-step framework with actionable digestible steps that PNA leadership can follow to improve and complete the tasks outlined in the plan for the betterment of the neighborhood.

Students from the University of Florida's graduate planning studio course for Fall 2021 partnered with local leaders from the Duval Heights Neighborhood to develop recommendations for planning best practices for East Gainesville. "Connectedness: Suggestions for Planning Best Practices in East Gainesville" attempts to address longstanding disparities experienced by the communities of East Gainesville and to find a means of fostering a more equitable relationship between the community and local institutions. This report provides an analysis of previous planning efforts, a comprehensive set of recommendations, and an organizational framework for future planning and policy efforts concerning the communities of East Gainesville.