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The City
Case Study 2: City of Raleigh, NC,
Arena Small Area Plan
Figure 8.1
West Raleigh Location Map. The
east–west dimension of the master plan area is a
little over three miles, and the north–south distance
just over a mile on average.
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through this area between downtown Raleigh and the
Research Triangle. As a result, the infrastructure is
heavily dependent upon a few connecting highways to
serve both regional and local traffic. There is not a very
good network of local streets, and the planned exten-
sion of a north–south highway across the site linking
populous areas to the south with a shopping mall to the
north will increase regional traffic around and through
the site. Planned street improvements and extensions
along the southern boundary will help to relieve the
stress on that east–west corridor and create a new
southern edge for the study area.
The main objective of the Small Area Plan was to
provide a coherent framework for development that
achieved three things:
1. Resolved the dichotomies of large-scale and small-
scale uses;
2. Avoided the kind of uncoordinated piecemeal
development of the type that had taken place to
date; and
3. Established a balance between development and
environmental protection.
A parallel requirement was to prepare a set of urban
design guidelines that would orchestrate development
in the future mixed-use centers proposed in the plan,
and that would be extended to cover all such village
and neighborhood centers within the city of Raleigh.
KEY ISSUES AND GOALS
Within this overarching objective, we established four
main issues to be examined by the plan. These were:
1. Achieving a balance between development and
environmental protection;
2. Improving the transportation infrastructure
through the site and capitalizing on the proposed
new commuter rail service;
3. Creating new types of transit-oriented develop-
ment (TOD) around the rail stations that illus-
trated principles of good urban design and
development economics;
4. Resolving the difficult relationships of scale
between the major state and civic operations and
adjacent new and existing neighborhoods.