MIG Receives Two Texas APA Awards
The APA Texas Planning Awards recognize individuals, organizations and communities for outstanding contributions to planning in Texas.
Amarillo: Planning Positive Change in a Conservative Community
The Amarillo City Plan: Vision 2045 received a 2024 Texas APA Comprehensive Planning Award. It’s an innovation in comprehensive planning for more conservative communities—advancing meaningful planning work while acknowledging Amarillo's hesitancy towards land use regulation. It recasts planning as a roadmap for positive change and actively addresses concerns about the plan's potential impact on property owner rights. It will foster equitable growth, elevate quality of life and guide investments in Amarillo during the next two decades.
City Plan replaces a traditional future land use map with a Complete Neighborhoods Scenario, which depicts the community’s vision through Place Types that go beyond land use by providing additional guidance for development characteristics that contribute to better-quality districts and neighborhoods. While Place Types are a more progressive approach, they are also well-suited for a new plan in a community that values flexibility, options and an incentivized approach. Three Neighborhood Patterns – New, Existing Newer, and Older – guide how Amarillo can change from current to future conditions and address conditions in aging neighborhoods for the first time.
The Plan is based on one of Amarillo’s largest public engagement efforts, with more than 4,000 residents directly contributing to its development. To ensure inclusive participation, the Community Connectors program divided Amarillo into 67 neighborhoods, each with a volunteer Connector who served as a link with residents. Lunch-and-Learn events equipped Connectors with information about City Plan, allowing them to disseminate it and gather feedback from their areas. And the City invited key land developers to a series of personalized breakfast meetings. Developers appreciated the open and responsive approach and agreed on an annual review process.
You can read more about the Plan at https://www.amarillo.gov/our-city/cityplan
Medical District Based on Communty: Holistic, Green and Healthy
The Southwestern Medical District will be the new model for what a medical district can be: a holistic, green campus that unites the community and promotes health, healing and safety. Its Urban Streetscape and Park Project Received a 2024 Planning Achievement Gold Award for Public Outreach.
MIG San Antonio partnered with the Texas Trees Foundation to transform the Harry Hines corridor in SWMD into a vibrant, connected and safe multi-modal linear parkway with an 8-acre park. The community engagement process prioritized outreach to the communities most impacted by planning processes, especially those that have been historically left out of civic conversations.
The wide variety of outreach and engagement methods ensured that people could participate in the way most comfortable for them: Interviews, an interactive online survey, focus groups, pop-up outreach events, walking tours, door-to-door canvassing, and community open houses. All the engagement activities were conducted in English and Spanish and over 3,400 community members participated throughout the process.
You can read more about the project at https://texastrees.org/swmdtransformation/