Ankeny Iowa Comprehensive Plan

Ankeny is a strong, rapidly expanding community within the Des Moines metro area. In past community visioning exercises, Ankeny residents expressed that they do not want their community to emerge as a typical suburb with traffic congestion and monotonous, disconnected housing tracts. With this in mind, the 2003 RDG comprehensive plan focused on ensuring that residential growth occurs in the context of neighborhoods, which integrate a variety of housing types, parks, schools, and neighborhood retail uses within walking distance of homes. The  Ankeny Plan also addresses the use of major streets as not only conduits for vehicular traffic, but also important public spaces with amenities for pedestrians and bicyclists, in addition to aesthetic improvements. Due to the city's continuing rapid growth, the city once again hired RDG to update the plan in 2009. The update was completed in 2010 with a continued focus on growth in a neighborhood context, while integrating that growth with a comprehensive stormwater management and greenspace conservation plan.

This comprehensive plan was developed for the City of Ankeny Planning Department to provide residents with a development plan to keep their community from emerging as a typical "suburb" and all the negative associations therein. The final deliverable to the client is this custom designed, 80 page documents that makes use of modern illustrations and fresh colors to communicate the mood of the comprehensive plan. Eleven hand drawn, abstracted illustrations of relevant buildings, landmarks or recreation areas of Ankeny define the topics of each chapter in this Ankeny Plan. The layout communicates the uniqueness of a small town--through the hand drawn look--as well as its rapidly expanding community--the modern execution of the drawings.