Here is a short tourism documentary on Northern Michigan from the late 1940s or early 50s. It's part of James A. Fitzpatrick's "TravelTalks" series and includes footage of Interlochen, Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, Traverse City and other places in the area.
It serves as a pretty interesting case study of what can change in transportation and the character of a region in 50 years.
Demonstrating the intense interest many area residents have in helping to design their community’s future, more than 600 people showed up last month for three more planning workshops produced by The Grand Vision project.
Last October, the federally funded, locally based project, which aims to produce a six-county guide to future land use by the fall of 2009, attracted a standing-room-only crowd to its first workshop. Participants in all four workshops now have their designs for the region’s future stowed in a computer that is now turning them—and others to come in future workshops—into a selection of vividly illustrated "possible growth scenarios" for the region’s next half-century or so.
Last week a total of about 500 people attended three Grand Vision scenario planning workshops in the Traverse City area. They looked at three small parts of our region: downtown Traverse City, Interlochen, and Acme. When it was all over, The Grand Vision consultant team had collected more than 60 maps from workshop participants, who were asked to offer ideas about the location and types of buildings they would like to see on specific property parcels on very detailed maps.
The Grand Vision project—the Grand Traverse region’s opportunity to produce a regional land use and transportation plan to accommodate the quarter of a million people who will be moving to this part of this state in the next 50 years—debuted last October in spectacular fashion.
More than 450 people showed up at the Park Place Hotel on Oct. 17 to sip coffee, munch on pizza, jaw with their neighbors from around the six-county region, and mark up maps with their first thoughts on how and where the region should grow and what to do to make sure people can get around the entire area both quickly and economically.
Three civic leaders from the Grand Traverse region have released a brief video that invites area residents to become "stakeholders" in The Grand Vision, the area’s citizen-based planning project that gets underway in mid-October.
The 12-minute video also presents clips from a recent presentation by the two principals leading the The Grand Vision project. In it, the two explain how the project works and repeatedly emphasize that it depends on strong citizen involvement to succeed.
Last week, when John Fregonese and Robert Grow came to town to meet and the community officials and civic leaders who hired them to conduct a regional transportation and land use study, they presented a slideshow about their work.
But those who know Fregonese Associates’ work say that, while the quick, explanatory slide show was nice, it’s miles away from the sophisticated, intensely localized and calibrated computer graphics that "stakeholders" will use in the upcoming Grand Traverse Area Transportation and Land Use Study—which has just been renamed Grand Visions.
