Annually, I coordinate the Class Project topic for the urban planning course I teach at the University of Colorado-Denver with the folks at the Downtown Denver Partnership. Doing so results in a win-win-win situation: The students get a chance to do planning work for a real client, the Partnership gets a ton of good information at no cost to them, and I get a great new Downtown Denver-related topic to add to the Special Features section of DenverInfill.
This year, the idea was to evaluate the downtowns of 16 peer cities of Denver’s to gain an understanding of those downtowns, their built and natural environments, their urban planning issues and challenges, and how those cities’ experiences in their downtowns might be applicable and informative to the Partnership in their efforts to improve Downtown Denver. Now that the Fall semester is over and I’ve had a chance to take the students’ work and convert it into a web-friendly format, the new Downtown Denver Peer Cities Analysis special feature is ready to go. My thanks and congratulations to the students for a job well done, and to the Partnership (especially Jenna Berman, the Partnership’s Research Coordinator) for helping us out again this year.
