South Weymouth NAS Smart Growth Visioning Project

Lennar Partners, Inc, as a subconsultant to Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris (SMWM)

As a subconsultant to SMWM, DC&E helped define, evaluate and implement a smart growth and sustainable development plan at the 1,400-acre decommissioned South Weymouth Naval Air Station in southeast Massachusetts. DC&E was responsible for defining specific smart growth goals and objectives for the project, creating detailed evaluation criteria and serving as a liaison between the developer and the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who saw the project as an opportunity to create a national smart growth model. As part of the process, the EPA and DC&E analyzed the performance of numerous alternative site plans created by the design team using their GIS analysis tool, the Smart Growth Index. This model analyzed the performance of each reuse plan in terms of environmental outcomes, land use mix, travel behavior, and housing and employment characteristics. The resulting framework can be used to evaluate site plans from any project against goals for smart growth and sustainable development.