Blueprint Denver

Land Use and Transportation Plan

In 1998, the Denver Comprehensive Plan was updated to chart a new course for the city. Fregonese Associates was selected to lead a consultant team which undertook the implementation of the comprehensive plan by developing a holistic and integrated land use and transportation system. The plan that was adopted in February of 2002 is known as Blueprint Denver.

Understanding the dynamics of redevelopment is an essential underpinning of this project. For an older central city, almost all the land that is developed has been developed once before. For Blueprint Denver, FA developed the most sophisticated models available to track redevelopment potential, and show the influence of public policy in shaping it.

Informed by extensive involvement from leading governmental, neighborhood and business leaders as well as broad citizen involvement, alternative scenarios for the future of Denver were designed and evaluated to reveal the most successful ideas for shaping Denver’s future. The ideas with the most support and the most compelling evaluation results were combined, then refined, to become the land use vision for Denver’s future.

Transportation was also an integral part of this project. One of the most common transportation planning practices is to define streets as freeways, arterials, and collectors. However, streets are much more—they form the largest areas of public open space—often acting as a playground, garden, business district, pedestrian path, or plaza. Blueprint Denver defines streets not only by their traffic handling capacity, but by their land use role.

To ensure implementation of Blueprint Denver, FA developed a new set of development codes which the city adopted.