Blueprints for Successful Communities:
Coastal Downtowns - Darien and St. Marys

In January 2025, the Georgia Conservancy’s Sustainable Growth program began work with a graduate studio from Georgia Tech’s College of Design to consider future design and development scenarios for the downtown areas of two coastal Georgia communities - Darien and St. Marys.

Through our Blueprints for Successful Communities, a 30-year-old sustainable community design initiative, the Georgia Conservancy uses a community and sustainability-based approach to guiding community development and redevelopment. The effort’s history is strongly rooted in transparent and thorough stakeholder engagement. The Blueprints process is one of the most highly respected planning processes in the state because of its inclusiveness, transparency, and technical quality. All of this has been possible because of the support from Georgia Conservancy donors - thank you! We hope you will consider continued support of these innovative sustainable growth efforts!

In 2024, the Georgia Conservancy was awarded a grant through the LS3P Foundation to help support design thinkers in advancing strategies and technologies that promote transformative change. With a focus on the Southeast, LS3P chose to award Georgia Conservancy because of our mission to support communities throughout the state and, in particular, our recent efforts to bolster community resilience in places along our coast. 

Thanks to LS3P’s grant and the support of Georgia Conservancy donors, the Georgia Conservancy has embarked on the next chapter of a longstanding relationship with Georgia Tech’s Urban Design program by assisting a Spring 2025 urban design studio working in Darien (McIntosh County) and St. Marys (Camden County). Darien and St. Marys share many environmental, social, and economic characteristics, but are differentiated by unique infrastructural and environmental constraints. Leveraging momentum and opportunities in both places, the studio teams will work to find ways to transcend physical barriers that divide and stifle community development. In Darien, the studio will focus on bridging physical infrastructure that splits the downtown core and diminishes the city’s historic urban form, based on the Oglethorpe plan similar to Savannah. Its goal in St. Marys will be to plan for the future of downtown St. Marys in a way that negotiates development opportunities and enhanced placemaking with a major natural infrastructure project that will help mitigate flooding and provide community greenspace. 

Coastal cities are at an increased risk of environmental and disaster hazards, and the urban design work will seek to integrate ways to strengthen resilience in both historic towns. This central theme was developed in advance of the studio through an independent study project by a Georgia Tech urban design graduate student in Fall 2024. This project reviewed, compiled, and sought ways to apply water management strategies from across the world to St. Marys. These lessons will be carried forward and integrated into the design proposals this spring. 

The culmination of this effort will be design proposals for two of Georgia’s most historic coastal towns, allowing design teams to investigate and fine-tune strategies that will apply in similar contexts but against different historical, economic, and environmental influences.    

To learn more about our Darien & St. Marys Blueprints studios, please reach out to Luben Raytchev at lraytchev@gaconservancy.org or Michaela Master at mmaster@gaconservancy.org.