Lane Community College Campus Long Range Planning

Creating a Great Campus, Place, Community

2009-2010 Process

The design workshops held at Lane Community College (LCC), on 19 and 24 October 2009, began the work of creating a vision for the long range planning process at LCC. During the workshops, faculty, staff, and students, along with neighbors and neighboring land owners, and local design professionals, came together at the site to identify the challenges and opportunities facing LCC and to begin to craft a vision, identify goals and define design principles to address key planning issues.

Through a series of exercises - analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; identification of campus rights and blights; and the collection of stakeholder participants’ needs and preferences focusing on the physical and human environment and future needs and possible uses of the Russell Creek Basin and LCC – and a series of collaborative workshops and discussions, the group developed a vision for long range planning for LCC, to create, as LCC President Mary Spilde intends, a “legacy for and to the greater community.”

Planning Vision: To create a campus that has appropriate infrastructure that fosters educational excellence through sustainable building and landscape practices organized around equitable accessibility contributing to a complete community.

For this planning vision, four design goals emerged to guide the alternative development process:

Goal 1: Appropriate Infrastructure. Layout a strategy that incorporates camouflaged support services into the campus core that are efficient and logical.

Goal 2: Sustainable Building and Landscape Practices. Produce a vision that maximizes environmental stewardship and green technologies through attractive, well designed, safe, convenient, and comfortable buildings and outdoor spaces.

Goal 3: Equitable Accessibility. Provide easily identifiable hierarchy of gateways, roadways and pathways that promote safe, convenient, and comfortable options.

Goal 4: Complete Community. Provides places to learn, live, shop, work and play that help create a well-balanced environment for all Lane County residents.

During the workshops participants were divided into 12 groups and created their own “ideal” design and site layout for the future of the basin. These twelve concept development schemes, based on the current and future themes gathered during the planning phase of the workshop, gave guidance to the design consultants, allowing them to produce design options. A stakeholder group then evaluated the three options using the design principles as standard criteria to determine the option that best meets the principles of the vision. Incorporating comments and discussion from an addition design review, the design team was able to refine and produce two more option, led to an additional option.

Furthermore, the group developed an area development plan map (ADP), which divides the site into six distinct regions: the Northside, the Front Yard, the Campus Core, the Southside, the Eastside, and the South-Eastside. In October 2010 the LCC Board of Education unanimously adopted the vision, goals and principles and the Area Development Plan.

Held from January-March 2011, another round of workshops created detailed ADPs that cover each of these areas. With the guidance of stakeholder participation the ADPs have seen several iterations. The current design option is shown as separate illustrative plans that incorporate all the known requirements at this time. This represents only one construction variation, a snapshot in time that meets the design vision. This approach, called capacity planning, develops the property to its capacity by showing notional buildings and circulation paths. It is up to LCC to decide need, density, occupancy and final shape of the buildings that could be carried out using this living document.

The final result provides a framework to accommodate the short-term growth in addition to leaving room to accommodate long-term growth. It provides for additional classroom, administrative, storage, housing, and flexible use buildings in addition to parking facilities.

As LCC’s needs grow and change, the necessity for a flexible plan that still allows the school to achieve its vision is required. In order to provide this flexibility, a form-based code is provided. The form-based code is comprised of a regulating plan and street standards.

Overall, the plan maintains LCC's design vision of a walkable, friendly campus environment that creates a living, learning, and working environment that generates an alternative revenue stream while supporting its educational mission and fulfilling its obligations to the community.