Placer High School Students redesign Auburn while playing the Imagine Auburn Boardgame

High School Workshop Review - Press Release

The Imagine Auburn team held a student workshop at Placer High School Thursday, March 30th in the newly built Career Center in the Library Commons. The high schoolers helped beta test the board game created for Imagine Auburn’s Create - Workshop 2. Members of Placer High School’s Key Club and Environmental Club brought a vital perspective to envisioning a positive future for Auburn. High schoolers are often called the future of a place and an open campus has allowed the students to get to know the project area intimately.

The students were excited to learn their opinion mattered and stepped up to try out urban planning and think through how to develop Auburn into a more walkable community. With plenty of smiles and full bellies, the students created city designs and contributed criticism towards improving the board game. Their commentary will be used to better prepare the team’s materials for the next workshop on Tuesday, April 11th at the Auburn Library Community Room, when the general public is invited to play the board game.

Imagine Auburn is encouraging the local community to attend Create - Workshop 2 to help shape Auburn’s FBC and enjoy the company of others over food and refreshment. The team asks for all interested participants to RSVP, as there will be limited seats for the main activity, a board game. All generations are welcome to attend.

Upcoming Events

Create - Workshop 2

Tuesday, April 11th from 3:30 pm to 6:00 pm, Auburn Public Library Community Room

Have you ever wanted to design a city? How about reshaping Auburn itself? Play Imagine Auburn’s City board game. The final game boards will help the design team with concepts to merge into a commercial core vision plan.

Envision - Workshop 3

Tuesday, April 25th from 5:00 pm to 7:30 pm, location to be determined

Can you find your ideas in the vision plan? Come see the pieces together and envision implementation.

Community members can register for the workshops or join the project’s email list through the project’s website, www.auburnfbc.com.

Imagine Auburn is the public outreach component for the Form-Based Code project sponsored by the City of Auburn.

Imagine Auburn Workshop Series Open to All Community Members

The Imagine Auburn team invites the Auburn community to participate in our upcoming Workshop Series. This sequence of gatherings will focus on exploring, creating and envisioning a new future for Auburn’s Commercial Core. These workshops build directly upon community feedback from the survey and interviews conducted this winter and are the peak of outreach for Auburn’s new form-based code (FBC). The community’s vision will provide a clear view of the desired intentions for the future building environment in the FBC area and allow the team to begin the final coding process.

Participants will have the opportunity to play a vital role in the overall design decision-making and dialog on various topics, all aimed to produce local solutions to challenges and opportunities unique to Auburn. The team hopes to have a variety of community members participate, to supply a vision that represents all generations and walks of life within the region. Food and beverage will be available for all participants. The team encourages participants to partake in all three workshops, as each one builds on the other, to provide the best feedback and results for the project.

Explore - Workshop 1

Tuesday, March 28th from 3:30pm to 6:00pm at Old Town Pizza in the Gold Country Fairgrounds

How well do you know Auburn? Put your experience to the test exploring the dynamics that shape our city. Activities dive deeper into the top topics from Imagine Auburn’s survey results. This is a way to see how your perspective relates to that of others and start defining opportunities and solutions for Imagine Auburn to work on. Pizza will be served and a happy hour will follow for open dialog with the design team.

Create - Workshop 2

Tuesday, April 11th from 3:30pm to 6:00pm, location to be determined

Have you ever wanted to design a city? How about reshaping Auburn itself? Come play Imagine Auburn’s city board game. The final game boards will help the design team by providing them with concepts to merge into a commercial core vision plan.

Envision - Workshop 3

Tuesday, April 25th from 5:00pm to 7:30pm, location to be determined

Can you find your ideas in the vision plan? Come see the pieces together and envision implementation.

Community members can register for the workshops or join the project’s email list through the project’s website, www.auburnfbc.com.

A student-based workshop will also be held with Placer High School’s Key Club and Environmental Club near the end of March. The team is eager to hear the opinions of the community’s youngest members.

Imagine Auburn is the public outreach component for the Form Based Code project sponsored by the City of Auburn.

Auburn city contractor moving toward community visioning workshops

Traci Newell, Auburn Journal

Read the original here.

Feb 07, 2023 9:00 AM

The Auburn City Council was updated on its form-based code project at its Jan. 23 meeting, learning how the city’s contractor will enter the next phase of the plan. Auburn hired Genevieve Marsh Design, a team of Auburn-based professionals, to lead the city through a visioning of the city’s commercial core, which will result in an update to the zoning ordinances. “It’s all about stewarding a community vision and translating that into a form-based code,” Genevieve Marsh said at the meeting. “We cultivate the beloved character of Auburn and the future changes of the commercial core and simplify the development process.” A form-based code is a land development regulation that fosters predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the organizing principle for the code. A form-based code is a regulation, not a mere guideline, adopted into city, town or county law. A form-based code offers an alternative to conventional zoning regulation. Jonathan Wright, community and economic development director, brought the update before the council to acquaint the council’s newest member and interim city manager to the status of the project. Marsh shared her group is at the end of the documentation process and is about to move toward the visioning process, which will involve community outreach through a number of workshop events. “This starts with identifying the existing character and built environment of Auburn,” Marsh said. “We have a lot of character and variety and we’ve been hard at work capturing that.” Marsh said the documentation phase is “very robust,” as her team works to identify districts and neighborhoods in the commercial core and went through a block-by-block survey and analysis. Marsh said her team came across two challenges to parcel improvements across the area, pointing out parcels on slopes and the age of many structures in the commercial core. Through her team’s data collection, Marsh shared, “We did a huge amount of data capture to figure out how different buildings are configured in these different areas, what is their relationship they have with each other and what is the public space.” Marsh said the team is on track to deliver its recommendations to the city on time in September. Council members said they were looking forward to discovering the results of their research. They also wanted to make sure the community was properly contacted for the Chartette (or workshop) events scheduled in March. Marsh said the events were open to the public, but she said she is working on invitations to stakeholders as well. For more information on the form-based project, visit auburnfbc.com.