Links to additional projects

Project descriptions

North First Street, San Jose, California

Everything about the North First Street corridor in San Jose, California says “arrive by car” in spite of light rail tracks going down the middle. Non-profit organization Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network hired Urban Advantage to produce photo-simulations for their web site depicting Smart Growth throughout Silicon Valley including infill development along North First Street. Later the City of San Jose Planning Department produced a walkable urban plan for the corridor. Urban Advantage was asked by the City and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency to conceptually depict the plan. The resulting vision, published on the front page of the San Jose Mercury, accompanied an article about North First Street evolving as a second downtown for San Jose. Bay Area environmentalists endorsed the vision. Six months later the San Jose Mercury featured both the original and new photo-simulation on the editorial page asking the question, “What’s controversial about this vision?” Three days later the council approved the urban plan.

Upper Rock, Rockville, MD

The Upper Rock development in Rockville, Maryland is the kind of cutting edge development requiring special effort to win over skeptics. Urban Advantage was hired by developer JBG Companies to take the urban design concepts from Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company and photo-realistically illustrate the conceptual build-out of a "entrepreneurial village." To be built on the parking lot of a conventional office park, the plan envisions a new neighborhood of live-work lofts to house the “creative class," with photo-voltaic cells on awnings, wind turbines on soundwalls, a rooftop community garden, living "green roofs” on buildings, and light-rail transit. Urban Advantage produced photo-realistic aerial and ground level views. When the developer informed us that the project was approved by the city council, we skeptically asked, “how many of these cutting-edge features were approved?” He replied, “everything as illustrated.” The Urban Advantage images were widely used in developer presentations and websites as well as newspaper and magazine articles.

Columbia Pike, Arlington, VA

In March 2002 the Columbia Pike Revitalization Plan was adopted but not much might have happened along the 3.5 mile auto-oriented corridor without the subsequent adoption by Arlington County of form-based codes—physical standards for the corridor in the form of urban form regulations. The form-based codes would require building fronts to face streets, be accessible from sidewalks, have minimum and maximum window coverage, etc. In September 2002 Urban Advantage was hired by Dover, Kohl & Partners to produce photo-realistic computer simulations during a community design charrette showing the public what Columbia Pike might look like if regulated by those standards. The final images, when shown at the charrette’s conclusion to 270 citizens, won enthusiastic applause and were published in the Washington Post. Although many form-based codes had been applied to greenfield sites, this was one of the first large-scale applications for the revitalization of an existing urban corridor. Urban Advantage’s images strengthened public interest and conviction in the codes.

Downtown, Walnut Creek, CA

Pedestrian-unfriendly Mount Diablo Boulevard cut a wide swath through the heart of downtown Walnut Creek separating the historic city center from the recently remodeled street-oriented Broadway Plaza shopping center. Sidewalk-oriented development on the Boulevard seemed like the logical solution to stitch the downtown together, but concerns on the City Council about the visual impacts and height of such buildings led the City of Walnut Creek to hire Urban Advantage. Following building envelope standards produced by Sasaki and Associates, we produced photo-simulations of conceptual development at three locations on the Boulevard. After viewing the images the council felt comfortable in approving the standards and soon approved the first development project, Broadway Pointe. While the architectural details of what was built differ from our conceptualization, they are the same in terms of massing and urban function. According to Walnut Creek planner Victoria Walker, “The images and subsequent Broadway Pointe were a powerful catalyst for the knitting together of the downtown and initiating the succeeding mixed-use development boom.”

Kendall, Florida

It was a daring step to take an auto-oriented edge city containing a very successful shopping mall and propose transforming it into one of the largest transit-oriented development projects in the southeastern United States. Urban Advantage images played a key role during a joint Dover, Kohl and Partners/ Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company design charrette in the unincorporated suburban area of Kendall, Florida near Miami. The photo-simulations showed wide sun-baked streets with perspiring pedestrians transformed into dense urban avenues shaded with trees and arcades. Not only were before-and-after changes depicted, but also alternative “after” scenarios and phasing of change from “before” to final “after.” Urban Advantage’s transformation images helped make those changes palpably real to elected officials. The charrette in June 1998 led the Miami Dade Board of County Commissioners to unanimously approve the Master Plan in 1998 and a form-based code in December 1999. New Urban News said the plan proposed “so many radical changes that it seemed a fantasy.” As a measure of success, current projects under construction or in the permit process will provide more than 3000 residential units, 350,000 square feet of commercial space, and 110,000 square feet of offices.

Honolulu, Hawaii

“They paved over paradise and put up a parking lot,” warned songwriter Joni Mitchell. Even everyone’s favorite paradise, Hawaii, is not immune to the depredations of sprawl. Parking lots and big-box stores were making inroads into Honolulu, undermining the idyllic allure. The City of Honolulu and the Citizen Planner Institute recognized that safeguarding the welfare of pedestrians was key to the vitality of the tourist environments as well as local neighborhoods. Urban Advantage was hired to produce a series of six images at various locations in the Honolulu metropolitan area demonstrating the benefits of pedestrian-sensitive urban design. Among other things the images illustrated: conversion of a warehouse/industrial area to mixed-use with high density residential and a vibrant public park; remaking a strip mall parking aisle into a main street; revitalizing a failing downtown main street environment; and offering development alternatives for a vacant lot—typical back-of-lot big box store vs sidewalk-oriented development. The vision portrayed played a key role in getting a new Wal-Mart oriented to the sidewalk with plentiful ground-floor retail windows. Several years later the images are still generating discussion, showing up in planners’ and citizens’ presentations and appearing in magazine articles.

Fannie Mae Foundation

The images Urban Advantage produce show not only possibilities for new development but also possibilities for revitalizing what already exists. Urban Advantage was hired by the Fannie Mae Foundation to produce photo-simulations in four different cities to demonstrate the value of under-appreciated community assets: Memphis, Kansas City, Miami and Washington DC. For Memphis, six landscape transformations were embedded along with other graphic and text items in a community asset map demonstrating the locational benefits of assets in the Soulsville neighborhood within the larger metropolitan region. In Kansas City, five image sets addressed restoring residential architecture, sprucing up parks and reinvigorating a main street. In the Overtown area of Miami, four image sets demonstrated how attractive affordable housing and modest public investments can beautify and elevate streets. Finally, in Washington DC, eight images, following design ideas in an urban design plan by Sorg and Associates for the neighborhoods around Howard University, illustrate restoring some of the most beautiful historic areas in the city and reviving the latent urbanism surrounding the University. The Urban Advantage landscape transformations show that the agents of renewal can be cities, public agencies, and developers, but also businesses and home-owners investing in their own properties. One of the final images is featured on the home page of the Fannie Mae Foundation.

Twin Cities, Minnesota

Working for Calthorpe Associates, the lead consultant for Smart Growth Twin Cities (a regional planning project of the Metropolitan Council in Minnesota), Urban Advantage produced photo-simulations showing the possibilities for creating walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Smart Growth Twin Cities’ scope was regional encompassing six counties in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area where most new growth is presently auto-oriented and low-density. Traditional village, neighborhood, and townscape urban forms are being replaced by strips, pods, tracts, arterials, and power centers. Calthorpe Associates asked Urban Advantage to illustrate six (?) “opportunity sites” in the region illustrating conceptual development for those sites, but also making the principles of Smart Growth and traditional urbanism as palpably real and understandable as possible. Calthorpe Associates supplied Urban Advantage with existing conditions photographs. Urban Advantage then produced photo-simulations of change that built on top of those photographs. In PowerPoint viewers could thus see a slide containing the existing conditions photograph morph into the envisioned change. www.Calthorpe.com (Click on Photo Simulations)

San Leandro, CA

In the San Francisco Bay Area growing needs for affordable housing and public concern for development alternatives to land-hungry sprawl at the metropolitan fringes have fueled a growing interest in identifying urban infill opportunities. Urban design firm Community Design + Architecture, working with the City of San Leandro, chose Urban Advantage to illustrate how a typical auto-oriented arterial road in an older inner-ring suburb could transform itself into a mixed-use urban corridor. East 14th Street is one of the two major transit corridors going through the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area that is being targeted by AC Transit for major upgrades. The images explore possible bus rapid transit in the corridor as well as land use changes that would support such a transit upgrade. Three locations along the corridor were selected for images that explore different development densities and transit alternatives. The plan and images were successful in convincing the city to advance urban infill as part of its development strategy. The San Leandro City Council approved new design guidelines for the corridor in April, 2004. Several development proposals have subsequently moved forward.