Oxnard – The Charrette Process
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CNU-California Annual By-Design Charrette
The CNU-CA hosts an annual By-Design charrette program that provide educational and membership outreach opportunities statewide. The charrette is designed to advise a city that requests our assistance in visualizing the opportunities that CNU’s principles and processes provide a sponsor city. Our board’s selection of the annual charrette project is based upon the request’s relevance to CNU initiatives, expertise, and potential to have a significant and positive impact. Oxnard’s Downtown Vision Plan fits the following Congress for the New Urbanism national initiatives:
- Highways to Boulevards (https://www.cnu.org/ourprojects/highways-boulevards)
- Lean Urbanism (https://www.cnu.org/our-projects/lean-urbanism)
- Missing Middle Housing (https://www.cnu.org/ourprojects/missing-middle-housing)
We organize our public engagement charrette’s to deliver cutting-edge professional, high-level analysis and recommendations are based on best Congress for the New Urbanism practices.
Initiating a Downtown Oxnard Charrette
In December 2015, the City of Oxnard City Manager, Greg Nyhoff, and Oxnard Community Planning Group chairman Roy Prince and local CNU member Dao Doan requested our chapter’s By-Design Charrette to provide a Vision Plan for Downtown. With funds available to begin transforming Oxnard Boulevard from a State Highway to a true Boulevard through Downtown, as well as the city’s redevelopment obligations to sell catalytic sites this year, Oxnard requested CNU-California lead an expedited yet fully engaged public process to develop an updated Vision Plan.
The process is purposely organized as an intense consecutive-day public process to provide large open discussions, small-group focused discussions, and individual interviews, fit the city’s needs perfectly. Our charrette was planned and executed on the last week of January 2016, ending on February 2nd, 2016 with a final presentation at City Council.
Our team was tasked with the following deliverables:
A comprehensive 20-year Vision Plan for Downtown Oxnard.
- Highways-to-Boulevards retrofit of Oxnard Boulevard with a ‘Complete Streets’ approach to
connectivity and place-making. - Implementation Strategies with catalytic potential.
- Defining the Downtown Study Area by identifying, mapping, and envisioning improvements within these boundaries.
- Public dialogue and education events for all citizens on CNU principles and case studies.
The charrette gathered 20 CNU professionals from across California with experts in architecture, design, engineering, parking management, traffic, landscape architecture, development, and economics lending their experience to shape a plan that was vetted in three feedback loops with
local citizens. We meet with local experts, architects, land owners, consultants, city staff, and local business owners to discuss issues, memories and expectations.
