Phase One: The State Street Redesign Plan

The focus for the first phase of the Madison 2200 project was on redesigning State Street, a mostly pedestrian thoroughfare located in the heart of downtown Madison. A well-known Madison landmark, State Street is a popular resident and tourist destination, with enough restaurants and retail stores to appeal to even the most eclectic senses. State Street was chosen as the target for the first phase of Madison 2200 because its popularity breeds opinions about how the street will grow and change in the future. The opinions that people express about State Street are laden with circumstances — teasing out and making sense of those complex relationships and then designing a new State Street to meet the needs and wants of the people who visited there was the participants’ main challenge.

During the summer of 2003, 11 project participants viewed State Street land-use information to help them make choices about what they thought State Street would either look like, or what they thought it should look like over the next few years. They used an interactive geographic information system to analyze and virtually make these land-use changes, weighing and evaluating the consequences of their decisions along the way.