Lee Highway Visioning

A grassroots effort led by community leaders in north Arlington paved the way for a community-wide visioning process and the recently published Lee Highway Visioning Study.

The vision, a culmination of a seven-month study, illustrates the best of the community’s ideas and proposes key ingredients for the future of this important east-west corridor. If the vision becomes reality, Lee Highway will become a walkable, urban main street with a string of neighborhood activity centers between Rosslyn and East Falls Church, along with new transportation options, better public spaces and more.

The civic engagement process was a unique, joint effort between Arlington County and the Lee Highway Alliance (LHA) to achieve a vision that balanced a broad range of perspectives. LHA is a coalition of 18 civic association leaders who have actively engaged communities along Lee Highway since 2012 to develop a community-based vision, and identify actions and strategies to achieve it.

The Lee Highway Community Visioning Charrette was held over four days, November 6 - 9, 2015. The multi-day workshop, led by award-winning design team Dover, Kohl and Associates, was held in a "charrette" style format with hands-on design participation and engaging conversations. Outcomes from the charrette, along with public reviews, informed the content of the final visioning document, which the LHA presented to the County Board on May 17, 2016.

The visioning document is not an adopted plan, but rather a compilation of ideas that provide a framework for more formal county plans and studies that will come later. The next steps include pre-planning tasks, in particular project scoping by planning staff, for a County-led planning process that is anticipated to kick off in early 2017.

• Lee Highway Visioning Study   (May 11, 2016)
• Visioning Updates