Group Project Urban Design Workshop — The 15-Minute City: Visions for Buckeye/Woodhill on Cleveland's East Side

The 15-Minute City: Visions for Buckeye/Woodhill on Cleveland's East Side

Workshop Overview

The workshop in Fall 2023 explored on-the-ground conditions and future possibilities for a critical neighborhood in east Cleveland: Buckeye/Woodhill. Like many Cleveland neighborhoods on the east and southeast side, Buckeye/Woodhill was once a neighborhood comprised primarily of eastern Europeans who came to the US at the turn of the 19th century to work in this industrializing center on the shores of Lake Erie. Much later, suburban development, white flight, manufacturing loss, and other urban dynamics affected the community and led to a shift in demographics over the decades. Today, Buckeye-Woodhill remains a proud neighborhood of individuals, families, businesses, and services while also continuing to weather the ill effects of racialized planning, urban renewal, and environmental injustice.

Addressing these issues, and issues similar to these throughout Cleveland's south and southeast neighborhoods has been a priority of the Mayoral administration of Justin Bibb, who was elected in November 2021. More specifically, the Bibb administration and City Planning departments have become interested in pursuing the idea of the "15-minute City", a planning trend that has garnered recent national and international attention as a way of connecting people to services without the need for an automobile. Cleveland's goal is to:

"Advance the mayor's vision for a 15-minute city where people's basic needs can be met within a short walk, bike ride, or transit trip. The overarching goal of this work is to make Cleveland a more attractive, desirable, and safer city in which to live, work, and play. The 15-minute city framework encourages private investment along historic commercial corridors with high-frequency transit service, increases transportation choice and freedom, and promotes healthy living and sustainability — all of which improve quality of life for residents. The 15-minute city framework encompasses many of the social and economic goals of the Bibb Administration, including addressing traffic safety through Vision Zero, decarbonizing our city and responding to climate change through proximity and transportation choice, improving air quality and public health, creating conditions for more affordable and diverse housing options, legalizing many of the existing homes in our neighborhoods through a form-based code pilot program, and supporting a small business ecosystem that affords entrepreneurship opportunities for Clevelanders, among others."

- Office of Mayor Justin Bibb, July 2023

The work during the semester entailed assessing a portion of the Buckeye-Woodhill neighborhood for the purposes of testing the 15-minute city concept and its application to a specific place and a specific set of existing urban conditions. The goal was to understand current neighborhood dynamics, social structures, physical conditions, and new zoning regulations while envisioning urban design scenarios (infill development, rehab, streetscapes, public spaces, and others) for how the area may evolve over time into a 15-minute city model.

Workshop Partners

The client for this work was the City of Cleveland Planning Commission, specifically the Office of Strategic Planning Initiatives, which is undertaking a rigorous planning effort to understand and apply the 15-minute city principles in neighborhoods that are looking to catalyze public and private investment. Additionally, we partnered with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), a non-profit entity focused on planning and revitalization work in Cleveland.

Given Cornell's planning and urban design work over the past 5 years, the City and WRLC asked us to prepare analyses, concepts, narratives, and visualizations to imagine the Buckeye/Woodhill neighborhood as part of the 15-minute framework. The goal of the workshop was to produce meaningful, substantive work that was serious and feasible, aspirational and innovative, building excitement about the possibilities and promoting an ongoing conversation about the trajectory of Buckeye/Woodhill's built and natural environments.

Selecting the Neighborhood

The genesis of selecting this geography came out of the city's initial analyses of current neighborhood services and proximities across the city to identify where services and people are already connected. This study exists in the form of an ArcGIS "StoryMap," which can be found here and serves as the foundational backdrop for our workshop.

One key finding of the study is that Buckeye/Woodhill — though accessible via transit through a recently renovated RTA (Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority) commuter station — lacks services, housing, and businesses that cater to the community, has extensive vacant land, and is characterized by fragmented connections that inhibit pedestrian and cyclist movements. Key improvements to its circulation patterns, catalyzing infill development based on new zoning standards, offering improved greenspaces, and promoting local business opportunities may begin to move Buckeye/Woodhill towards the 15-minute framework. 

During the semester, workshop phases to address the issues in Buckeye/Woodhill included the following. Results from the 15-week semester can be found below.

Critiquing the 15-minute city. What is unique or different that sets it apart from past planning ideas of walkable communities? Does it exacerbate or resolve existing neighborhood inequities? Does it lead to gentrification or other negative outcomes, or are there precedent strategies in place to prevent this?

Form-Based Code. What is "form-based" code, and how is it applied in Cleveland? What makes form-based code different than standard zoning (what is fixed and what is flexible)? How would form-based code play out in a neighborhood such as Buckeye/Woodhill? 

Higher-Density Development. What is meant by "high-density," and what kinds of development contribute to this idea? What are the dynamics and conflicts behind building out
neighborhoods and cities with higher density? 

Affordable Housing Development. Cleveland has shown an extensive need for affordable and "missing middle" housing. What development dynamics, economic factors, and public sector processes get in the way of creating more affordable housing in Cleveland? What specific projects are being done in Cleveland despite these barriers? 

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). Mixed-use development around transit can contribute to an active neighborhood; what is being done in Cleveland around TOD, and what are the opportunities around the Buckeye/Woodhill RTA station?

Ground-Truthing. How do research and analysis align (or not) with on-the-ground conditions? What are some things in a neighborhood that can't be mapped from afar but can be documented through experience?