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Modeled on the national Mayors’ Institute on City Design, the New Jersey Institute provides a multi-day retreat for six mayors and a resource team of design and planning professionals. The mayors present planning and design issues that each community is facing, and then participate in a wide-ranging discussion. While addressing the specific concerns raised by the mayors, the resource team members also describe in broader terms how they have approached similar problems. Using examples from other communities, the mayors and resource team members learn from each other. The Mayors’ Institute offers public officials the rare opportunity to discuss a planning issue facing their community with a group of peers and some of the most respected designers and planners in the country.

These institutes focus particular attention on the relationship between community planning and public health, and how better design and development can create healthy, livable communities. Experts in public health participate in the Institute discussions, providing presentations and analyses of how alternative development patterns impact the health of communities. In 2004, the N.J. Mayors’ Institute was held at Princeton University on June 23-25. This Institute focused particular attention on how better design can promote both smart growth and healthy communities. For those municipalities with downtowns, the Institute emphasized the opportunities for redevelopment as well as a more active lifestyle.

Case Studies

The six case studies presented by the mayors were organized into the following categories, which are described in greater detail further in this report:

making connections;
creating mixed-use centers;
linking community design and rehabilitation/infill

The most basic lesson for the mayors is to think beyond the confines of their problem, beyond the boundaries of the individual development sites or problem areas to the larger neighborhood or community planning framework. This emphasis on making connections – physical and programmatic – to the larger context is also a fundamental precept of healthy community design.