Blue Ridge Blueprints
WNCA joins with the Asheville Design Center to offer Blue Ridge Blueprints for communities
Blue Ridge Blueprints is a community-driven program that helps communities plan for and design their future while preserving local character and protecting natural resources. The program offers communities an interdisciplinary team of volunteer professionals that includes architects, landscape architects, planners, urban designers and developers. The Alliance provides meeting facilitation services and overall project management and leads the community through a visioning and goal-setting process, while the Asheville Design Center provides design and planning expertise to give shape and definition to that vision.
Our Blueprint program fills a local and regional leadership vacuum on land use planning, because many local governments in the region do not engage in effective land use planning due to either a lack of resources or a philosophical approach that favors individual property rights. This leaves communities vulnerable to growth and development that is detrimental and that they cannot manage. And if these communities want to plan for their future, they usually cannot afford professional planning and design services.
The Alliance and ADC have worked with Buncombe County’s Big Ivy community and Asheville’s Burton Street neighborhood, and the Riceville community outside of Asheville.
To read more about the Blueprints program, download this (.pdf) document.