Northeast Ohio’s biggest regional planning effort in a half-century has won the planning profession’s top award for a comprehensive plan.
Vibrant NEO 2040, the product of three years’ work by the nonprofit Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium, has been awarded the 2015 Daniel Burnham Award of the American Planning Association.
“It feels terrific,” Grace Gallucci, director of NOACA, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency and one of the plan’s lead organizers, said about the award.
“I think it helps to validate the work that NEOSCC did over the last three years . . . to say that it’s a good plan,” she said.
The award is named for Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, who planned Chicago’s world-famous lakefront and also devised influential plans for other American cities, including Cleveland’s 1903 Group Plan.
Gallucci said she hoped the award would add impetus to the implementation of the Vibrant NEO vision, which calls for focusing new development on existing communities, particularly the region’s aging urban cores.
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