Logan City Hall was buzzing last Thursday — not with politics, but with possibility. Nearly 100 residents packed the council chambers, markers in hand, ready to sketch their dreams for the city’s future on oversized maps.
The visioning workshop, directed by both employees of the city and urban planning and geospatial design firm, Houseal Lavigne, was aimed at creating a starting draft of the city’s general plan for 2045. The design firm’s lead, Cody Ferguson, instructed the crowd.
“This is the part when we all get to scribble up maps and draw out what we want the city of Logan to be like in our ideal, you know, our vision for the city,” Ferguson said. “What we want it to be like for the next 10 to 20 years.”
The map’s key guided participants to draw where they’d like to see future elements of the city — like residential neighborhoods, commercial zones, industrial areas, transportation routes, community facilities, green spaces, and parks.
Why was the event important? According to Ferguson, it’s because it tells Logan’s story.
“Not just to us ourselves in the room," he said, "but to people that may move here, who may want to invest here, to the City Council, to the planning commission when they're looking to make decisions. It gives direction. It tells the story of the city and where the city has decided it wants to go, not the city government, not the staff, but where the people actually want to go.”
At the end of the workshop, each group was given time to share their vision. Here are a few:
"Hi, group four, representing group four, and we would like our city to be a city of connection, gathering, sustainability, and safety. The way that we're envisioning this is through putting in a lot more bike lanes on a lot of the places where people will actually bike, and then doing things like, on the main road, like Main Street, having places where bikes can actually cross safely and not get hit. We want more life within walking distance."
"Our vision was to protect the downtown neighborhoods, preserve the green space, and consider one-way streets, maybe renovate and not tear down what we have. We have Logan. We love where we live. We want to keep it great."
"We're group seven. We're thinking about apartments next to smaller groceries and markets like the Island Market. We mark that as, like, a specific kind of model, what that can look like. When we are offering and crafting those spaces, they need to be accessible to people. So the fact that mixed-use space right now is only available, in terms of funding, by getting commercial loans is a problem because of the terms of those loans. Everyday people cannot afford those spaces."
"Lucky number 13 here. First and foremost, throughout all of our conversations, was that Logan should be walkable and affordable, right? Logan must be a place that anyone can afford to make their home. That means thinking about more transit options, thinking about bus lanes, thinking about bus service that fits the industrial needs."
"We kept a very high-range view. The big thing that we want to talk about was trail connectivity around the entire city — using the canals, using the shoreline — but also connecting it to Logan River and coming back north to Second North, the commercial nodes in residential areas, mixed-use development, walkable communities, returning stores into the communities where they were before."
