NORTH AVONDALE COMMUNITY PLAN

CUDA Studio provided urban design services to the City of Cincinnati for one of its most complex neighborhoods: North Avondale. CUDA Studio navigated a collection of community desires, challenging sites, and neighborhood politics to create a roadmap for public and private investment.

North Avondale is an historic neighborhood of about 3400 people. While the neighborhood has some beautiful historic blocks, well-appointed parks, and enviable institutions such as Xavier University and multiple elementary schools, it is challenged by areas of disinvestment, nearby crime, and a heavily traveled main street.

Many in the community voiced a desire to resurrect a neighborhood business district at a heavily traveled intersection. Some felt struggling legacy businesses should be prioritized. Others felt that high-end housing is needed – in contrast to recently developed housing for low-income families nearby. CUDA Studio negotiated these desires with market expectations to create a long-term urban design vision for the neighborhood.

The urban design vision is to reinvent the entry into the neighborhood, slowing traffic, and creating a new neighborhood businesses district where local businesses can thrive. The market for new businesses is unproven, so CUDA Studio devised a phasing strategy that would establish a commercial beachhead by reinvigorating existing businesses and grow from there leveraging newly-developed on-site housing as a built-in customer base.

CUDA Studio’s vision also includes an intentional, custom “streetshaping” (not just streetscaping) initiative. This streetshaping will help unify North Avondale with its southern neighbor with beauty and theme, slow traffic, increase comfort and safety, and highlight key neighborhood features along the avenue – all while fitting within the existing ROW and avoiding an array of overhead utility lines.

CUDA Studio was part of a multi-disciplinary team – which included Urban Fast Forward real estate and retail experts, Human Nature landscape architects, and Illumine Transportation planners – which complimented the City of Cincinnati’s own planning staff.