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Sustainable Community Development

In designing communities, Macdonald Environmental Planning is very sensitive to what the community needs for bringing residents together.  Pedestrian friendly planning and design includes bicycle and walking trails, community parks with water features, arbors and native plantings to help support wildlife and promote water conservation.  Providing access to open natural spaces and activity areas reinforces a healthy lifestyle and healthy community.

Green Building

Sustainability is like a thread that is woven through all of our work as we feel that a careful balance between the built environment and nature is essential to successful project outcomes that will endure the test of time. In pursuit of this philosophy, we embrace many sustainable design elements such as green streets, living green screens and walls, ecoroofs and green roofs and soft storm water treatment solutions. Other sustainable components found in our housing projects are community gardens, centralized gathering plazas, and live work elements.

In designing landscape for housing projects, Macdonald Environmental Planning, PC, is:

  • Maximizing the sustainability of the site
  • Creating aesthetically appropriate and maintainable landscapes for each housing type
  • Using native plantings
  • Maximizing Community Gathering Areas including Courtyards, Garden Plots
  • Installing water efficient irrigation

Green Living

We strive to create spaces for all ages within the development in order to encourage residents to commune together.

Green Belt Development

Providing interlocking green spaces for gathering and accessing the more active community parks  helps to ‘promote the community internally‘.  This weaving of natural elements from the immediate surroundings into the newly designed community, combined with restoring natural systems that once existed, makes for a more sustainable community.

Multipurpose Community Development

Creating a variety of  spaces that offer active, passive, recreational, and educational experiences add quality to the residents living experience.

Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED)

Our deep commitment to sustainable practices leads our Neighborhood Developments towards the use of soft methods of stormwater management or ‘keeping the pipes out of the ground‘.  Also, the use of native plant materials and providing pedestrian friendly pathway systems is essential to the environmental vitality of the each community we touch.

Our featured community projects: