The city of Akron selected urban planning firm Sasaki to develop a master plan for its redevelopment of the Innerbelt.
The goal of the plan will be to better connect the east and west sides of Akron, while correcting historic mistakes which displaced thousands of Black residents for the highway.
"It created a really wide stretch of freeway and over-wide stretch of freeway that never fulfilled its goal of transporting 100,000 cars a day," Director of Planning Kyle Julian said. "But it attempted to do so at the cost of people's homes, at the cost of businesses, at the cost of neighborhoods, and particularly where Black people lived and worked."
The urban planning team does not yet have a plan for what the features the redesigned Innerbelt will include, aside from reducing the size of the roadway, Julian said.
But the master plan will focus on meeting numerous community needs, Director of Economic Development Suzie Graham Moore said.
"It is ... thinking differently about land use, sustainability, wealth creation and value creation and how economic development can give back to communities that have been left out of the equation for such a long period of time," she said.
And they will be relying on a diverse team of collaborators to ensure the redevelopment project doesn't repeat history, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Esther Thomas said.
"There's, you know, Kyle Julian, Suzie Graham Moore and myself, we were leaders," Thomas said. "But when we envisioned who has input, who is helping to shape the future, this is the city team, members of the city team that are doing that."
Sasaki will work with the city, project partners and residents to generate ideas before developing the final master plan, Urban Planner and Associate Principal Siqi Zhu said.
"We have a top of the funnel, a large amount of ideas," he said. "Our job essentially is to work with the community to articulate those larger set of options into a narrower and more specific set of future actions."
The team wants to learn, collaborate with and listen to residents and partners throughout the process through additional public engagement opportunities, Zhu said.
Though details on future engagement sessions aren't yet finalized, Zhu said information will be posted on the Akron Innerbelt website as it becomes available.
