Project designed by Anish Kumar while employed at Hillier >
As head of Hillier’s Planning and Urban Design practice, Anish Kumar was selected by the Capital City Redevelopment Corporation (CCRC) to develop urban design criteria for improving Route 29 adjacent to downtown Trenton. The criteria were developed in collaboration with the City of Trenton, the Regional Planning Partnership, and the New Jersey State Department of Transportation.
Route 29 separates Trenton’s downtown from the waterfront and in most areas directly abuts the Delaware River’s edge. Generalized land uses of the waterfront area include state office buildings, surface parking lots, and 41 acres of Route 29 and its accompanying infrastructure.
Anish’s study included preliminary reclamation calculations, best practices research, and comparable project studies and concluded with the following five Transparency Upgrade Urban Design Principles:
- Reclaim waterfront land for public open space.
- Link city sidewalk network to river with pedestrian-oriented development parcels fronting on Route 29.
- Provide strong visual connection between downtown and the river.
- Create imageable gateway to Trenton.
- Form waterfront “connectivity” and roadway “transparency”.
Anish’s study suggests that a newly upgraded Route 29 would occupy approximately 12 acres of at-grade waterfront roadway leaving a remaining 29 acres for open spaces. This significant open space reclamation provides continuous waterfront access and an extension of the downtown grid with civic gateways at key intersections. Existing landscaped buffers, interchanges, overpasses, highway dividers, and large signs prevent any visual or psychological links to the waterfront. Previous waterfront access alternatives only provided constrained, limited, and mode-separated connections across Route 29.
Through the planning process, Anish achieved a consensus in calling for a comprehensive “transparency” upgrade to reclaim the waterfront for public open space. By combining circulation modes onto the street level, key intersections form high-intensity parcels with opportunity for landmark buildings and open spaces.