Lakeland Green                        

"We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us"                              - Winston Churchill

The Lakeland Green Plan

Lakeland Green is a major new opportunity for the community of Lakeland to express and realize its vision in the midst of rapid change.  The land resource is bounded by the Lakeland Dam on the south, scenic Seed Tick Road on the east, pastoral Old Brownsville Road on the north, and partially by Oliver Creek on the west.

Encompassing over 1200 acres of publicly and privately owned land, Lakeland Green displays much of the indigenous character and natural amenities of the historical landscape. Lakeland has a special opportunity to create a signature project that embraces the city's potential and is reflective of its future.

The Lakeland Green plan includes a municipal town center, a historic farmers’ and artisans’ market place, and multiple residential hamlets with lakes, forests and open space meadows. A regional commercial center is strategically located and attached to the transportation “backbone” of Lakeland. Educational and religious institutions are integral features of this sustainable community.

The municipal center is laid out in a crescent shape overlooking the Harvester lake. It will possibly feature a town hall, library, justice center, and arboretum. The civic buildings are placed on high points of the site. This reinforces their importance and captures views over the heart of the city landscape. The balance of the 165-acre site is dedicated to parks, forest and open space for both active and passive recreational uses.

Roads are designed as context sensitive features. Intent on preserving rural, country routes, they serve as a complement to and context for the newer and more modern traffic intensive thoroughfares.

A synergistic regional commercial town center is located on the intersection of two of Lakeland’s major arteries. At the scale of a small village, the commercial center features a mainstreet with mixed-use, retail, live-work units, and parking. It is only five minutes walk from the activities of the municipal center.

Each of the neighborhood hamlets provide residential, work, play, and worship places and are designed in close proximity to nature and to each other. They are woven together by narrow streets at a walkable scale. Beyond these more densely designed neighborhoods are larger, more generous lots with detached residential linked by trails and greenways. The site periphery is then preserved by large open spaces and enhanced by even larger estate residential properties. Small, intimate residential enclaves articulate some of the most rural, forested preserves. This allows much of the site’s natural amenity to be untouched.
 

The Charrette Process  

The Lakeland Green plan was designed through a charrette process. A charrette is a community design workshop where citizens, designers, and others collaborate to form a vision for development. Historically, the word "charrette"  was derived from the French word for "little cart".  Design students would jump on the "charrette" to finish their presentation immediately before it was due. However, with the advent  of the New Urbanist Movement, the word "charrette" has come to encompass an entire weeklong process during which a multitude of designers, architects, engineers, and the public gather to create a consensual development plan for the future.