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Lowell Downtown Evolution Plan

Lowell, MA, USA

Featured in Planning magazine; Featured as a “best practice” in New Urbanism and Beyond textbook (edited by Tigran Haas)

Client

The Lowell Plan, Inc.

Collaborators

AECOM Transportation Planning, Rock Maple Studio

Timeline

2010

Category

Downtowns

Budget

N/A

Scale

250 acres

Status

Partially Implemented

Reference

Adam Baacke, Former Planning Director,
UMass Lowell,
adam.baacke@mass.gov

“Jeff Speck’s Downtown Evolution Plan got community leaders and stakeholders to see potential opportunities that otherwise might have been missed. It also helped motivate the City to restore two-way traffic throughout the downtown, and to reconstruct Lowell High School on-site instead of moving it to a greenfield. Both of these issues have been central to sustaining downtown vitality despite pandemic impacts.”

— Adam Baacke, former Assistant City Manager and Planning Director

Jeff Speck led a team to create a comprehensive plan for the continued redevelopment of downtown Lowell. To complete the work, he moved his family to the city for a monthlong “slow charrette,” in which he led dozens of meetings and public sessions while receiving constant feedback from his client, the non-profit Lowell Plan.


The plan addressed all aspects of the physical form and programming of the downtown, including a full redesign of the street system, converting most one-way streets back to two-way, implementing “road diets” on oversized thoroughfares, and introducing a comprehensive bike system where none existed. It also included an “urban triage” study to determine where future investments are likely to have the most positive impact on the city’s livability and future success, and then proposed a series of short-term, mid-term, and long-term interventions for public and private investment downtown.


In the years since the plan’s completion, many of its recommendations have been implemented, including the controversial reversion of the downtown street network from one-way to two-way traffic—now a widely heralded decision. Speck’s plan was featured in Planning magazine and as a best practice in the international design textbook New Urbanism and Beyond, edited by Tigran Haas.

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