Placemaking Community: Villa Rica Alley Activation

Design ideas and solutions for the Carroll County community

Placemaking describes a spectrum of interventions aimed at enhancing public spaces across four main criteria: access & linkages, uses & activities, comfort & image, and sociability. Our public spaces perform the vital role of serving our civic and communal functions, and there is little doubt that a well-maintained, successful public realm carries with it social and economic benefits for the whole.

In 2022, the Georgia Conservancy began working on a Placemaking and Alley Activation Plan with the City of Villa Rica through the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Community Development Assistance Program (ARC-CDAP). Villa Rica is a growing city of 18,000 in Carroll County and just 30 miles west of Atlanta. The city previously completed a Liveable Centers Initiative (LCI) that delivered a high-level vision for the downtown district that served as the lodestar for the placemaking plan, which was geared towards providing Villa Rica with smaller-scale, implementable design ideas that it could start working on immediately.

The project grappled with five distinct sites across downtown Villa Rica that included alleys, streets, and a park. The Georgia Conservancy created conceptual designs, costing estimates and implementation steps, and a list of funding sources so that the city would be ideally positioned to drill down on a specific design in the near future. Drawing on our experience with the Georgia Economic Placemaking Collaborative (GEPC) and knowledge of placemaking examples throughout Georgia, the plan also featured in-depth case studies from other local communities that revealed deeper insights on the effective implementation of placemaking projects.

The effort culminated in a final progress report before Villa Rica’s City Council and delivery of the final plan document, which will serve as a blueprint for placemaking implementation down the line.

PROJECT PARTNERS

Questions? Reach out to Georgia Conservancy Design Lead Luben Raytchev at lraytchev@gaconservancy.org