The year: 12,000 B.C.
The place: what we know today as Des Moines, Iowa.
Vastly unlike its modern iteration, the ground of this time is blanketed by the Wisconsin Glacier, a large glacial mass that scrapes and flattens the landscape of the upper Midwest like an enormous bulldozer.…
I don’t think I’m alone in my experience of needing to adapt in innumerable ways in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to rethink how we engage with many seemingly mundane parts of our lives – grocery shopping, what to eat for dinner and even how we get to and from work.…
The infrastructure of our towns and cities – buildings, homes, roadways, buildings, land use –make up what we know as the built environment. These human-made environments are where we often live and work, and they strongly influence how we behave and feel, and can even impact our physical and mental well-being.…
My passion for historic preservation began when I was young. An admiration for the beauty of old buildings and the extensive details of these structures ultimately led me to pursue a career as an urban planner.…
In October 2018, RDG Planning and Design hosted its 8thannual Design Residency, a 3-day charette style learning event which gathers the nation’s top graduate students from many fields to address complex community problems.…
At RDG, we are more than just designers and we strive every day to provide opportunities for staff to adopt a series of lifestyles that allow them to achieve balance to their home, work and public lives. Lifestyles that maintain their value as good designers, commitment to sustainable decisions, living a healthy lifestyle, continuous learning, embracing new technology, and all the while having some fun! We…
GIS, also known as Geographic Information Systems, is a software platform bringing understanding to our projects. This platform provides a variety of tools to perform data manipulation. For us at RDG, GIS is a foundational tool utilized in all of our community and regional planning work.…
More colleges and universities are discovering the benefits of planning and implementing campus landscapes that are more than function and aesthetics but are transforming the campus into a “living laboratory.” These integrated learning environments are fostering strategic use of the exterior environment, connecting students to real-world applications, establishing new multipurpose spaces, and will continue to evolve as education demands change.…
Long and linear, greenway trails often follow the path of natural features in existing landscapes, such as streams or rivers and are sometimes developed along unused railway corridors.…
Our 2015 Design Residency topic focused on “Urban Alchemy.” We wanted to identify how cities can combine existing and proposed urban elements and spin them into social, economic, and environmental gold. We engaged ten of the top collegiate students from across the Midwest in our design residency process, and challenged them to address a loosely-bounded district in downtown Des Moines near the riverfront that included 24-acres of proposed “re-invigoration” projects.…
