What We Do

The Planning & Design team helps our communities to envision, plan, and implement their portion of the Tennessee RiverLine. Our team is a group of landscape architects and designers with a passion for improving how people engage with the Tennessee River and its surrounding landscape.

We facilitate community engagement efforts, provide conceptual design and planning services, and collaborate on mission-driven research with academic and organizational partners.

Our purpose is to serve our community partners in their pursuit of enhancing their riverfront spaces. To achieve this, we use a design process that encourages community participation, is driven by data, and is continually informed by the Tennessee RiverLine’s guiding principles of public health, economic development, equity of access, and environmental stewardship.

Conceptual Design

Our team creates conceptual designs for RiverTowns communities that help them envision the Tennessee RiverLine in their community and prepare them for implementation and funding opportunities.

As part of their participation in the RiverTowns program, communities work alongside the Planning & Design team to identify a priority project. The team facilitates community engagement, workshops, and surveys to determine what the public needs and wants on the project site.

The final deliverable is a Conceptual Design Package meant to serve as a resource for funding opportunities, show community members how their input was incorporated, and help build momentum for the project.

Click below to see concepts for each RiverTown’s priority project.

Community Outreach & Engagement

Engaging with our river communities is critical to the success of the Tennessee RiverLine. The Planning & Design team organizes and facilitates a variety of community engagement techniques that are designed to solicit feedback from a broad group of community members. Our river communities are incredibly diverse, so our methods of outreach and engagement must be too.

We facilitate in-person public workshops where participants share their input by adding flags to a large-scale community map, engaging in one-on-one conversations about their river experiences, and sharing their aesthetic preferences through images.

We also solicit feedback through virtual surveys that invite community members to share their input from their phones, computers, or through traditional form surveys on paper.

Our team continues to refine and evolve our community outreach and engagement techniques to reach as many community members as possible.