Randall Arendt (the Natural Lands Trust) facilitated a “Reinventing the Commercial Corridor” workshop to highlight practical ways of reclaiming existing commercial highway strip centers. The workshop brought together 35 partners and featured both a general educational presentation and a participatory, hands-on exercise. Arendt’s presentation focused on highlighting progressive approaches that emphasize various redevelopment design strategies to create mixed-use centers from existing highway strips.

The design exercise following the presentation allowed partners to begin to experiment with implementing the new approaches to consider how to retrofit an existing section of degraded commercial highway strip.

The workshop sought to help communities envision how to implement smarter, more sustainable development patterns and introduce ideas for improving economic viability and attractiveness of communities and transportation corridors in the South Mountain landscape.

Click here to download the Reinventing the Commercial Corridor informational brochure.

The Reinventing the Commercial Corridor workshop was sponsored by the following organizations: PA DCNR, PA DCED, Adams County Office of Planning & Development, C.S. Davidson, Inc., Shippensburg University, Natural Lands Trust, Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Franklin County Planning Commission, Cumberland County Planning

Go Local for Health

The South Mountain Partnership sees many of its priorities and interests – open space, outdoor recreation, thriving agriculture, and livable communities – intersecting in the concept of health and wellness. As such, the Partnership has endeavored to build non-traditional collaborations around this theme of health and wellness, and has hosted a series of regional wellness summits – Go Local for Health.

Why health? It has been traditionally considered a topic of conversation between a patient and a healthcare professional, and one to start only after symptoms appear. Yet our surroundings, the environments in which we live, and the decisions and choices we make in our daily lives have a huge impact on our individual and community health. In short, the issues that the Partnership prioritizes also help to inform individual and community health.

An initial Go Local for Health summit was held in 2012, and second followed in 2013.