dutchess turnpike planning report
December 2023
planning report
planning report
LINK TO FULL REPORT
Throughout the course of my one-semester planning seminar, my team and I researched and compiled a 128-page planning report. This report encompassed both an extensive existing conditions study and a comprehensive series of planning recommendations for the Dutchess Turnpike.
The Dutchess Turnpike is an approximately 2.25 mile stretch of the Route 44 highway corridor that runs through the Town of Poughkeepsie. For the purposes of our study, we defined our study area as the 2.25 miles of corridor in addition to a 0.5 mile radius of its surrounding neighborhoods on both sides. We were tasked to conduct a study of the Dutchess Turnpike because recent changes in the study area, including the demolition of a Kmart sited on a large, abandoned suburban mall and the creation of the walkable mixed-use development of Eastdale Village, have posed serious opportunities for reconsidering the uses of the area. Current use of the Dutchess Turnpike relies heavily on private automobile ownership. The space’s existing land-uses can be traced to the suburbanization patterns following postwar urban renewal and IBM’s mid-twentieth century establishment in the Town of Poughkeepsie. The existing land-uses and automobile-centered transportation infrastructure, however, are ill-suited for the present demographic that resides and works within the study area. Our research on the existing land-use and zoning, demographics, transportation, and environmental conditions demonstrated over and over again how the area is inaccessible, unsustainable, and overall poorly designed for contemporary use.
My roles within this team project included researching and writing about the history, contemporary demographics, and existing cultural landscape of the study area. My second role was to identify, through site visits and GIS mapping, catalyst sites that could be re-imagined to increase the liveability of the area. My third role was to design graphic visualizations of our team’s research and recommendations.
I designed the layout of our entire report on Adobe Indesign and used a combination of ArcGIS Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop and Google Earth to produce a variety of visual representations (excerpts shown on the pages that follow) for our planning report.