Bedford West Commercial Design Guidelines

Project Description
Terrain Group was contracted by Annapolis Group to develop Commercial Design Guidelines that would assist in the development of the Bedford West Area. These commercial design guidelines will help to establish the overall quality of commercial development, promote the compatibility of commercial development with surrounding land uses, and enhance pedestrian safety and walkability. To ensure that the guidelines developed would achieve the intended design results, Terrain Group developed a series of Conceptual Plans that showed a variety of ways in which development could evolve by using the Guidelines. In developing these Conceptual Plans Terrain also employed their extensive knowledge of Commercial Site design to ensure that the Design Guidelines provided the client with a functional and practical design solutions.

Services Provided
The guidelines were developed by Terrain using their knowledge of both commercial site design and regulatory planning processes. A commercial site needs to be considered within the overall pattern of development. Typical tools for making the transition between commercial development and other less intensive land uses include back-to-back building orientation, large distances between uses, and heavily landscaped buffer areas, often with fences and walls. However, some of the unintended results of this include excessive land consumption and lack of pedestrian and vehicular connections. Accordingly, the design guidelines developed by Terrain Group encourage commercial development that provides convenient pedestrian and vehicular access and connections to adjacent uses. In addition, the use of alternative transitions is emphasized, including architectural transitions, such as reducing the scale of commercial building mass next to residential uses, at least some front to front building orientations, and development of less intense land uses between commercial and single-family residential areas, such as lower intensity office, civic/open space or multi-family land uses. Landscaped buffers, walls and fences are used only when these other alternative transitions are not effective, not possible, or not desirable given the prevailing development patterns in a specific area. These guidelines are intended to encourage an orderly and logical pattern of commercial development that is easily recognized and enhances the human scale of the development.