The university’s new strategic plan serves as the unifying force to achieve the vision of “One Emory: Engaged for Impact.” The comprehensive scope elements include land use, urban design, academic planning, transportation and mobility, landscape and open space, sustainability and infrastructure, and historic preservation. The effort relied upon an inclusive engagement strategy of focus group meetings, campus-wide presentations, and online tools/surveys.

Emory is a relatively decentralized institution, yet the new strategic plan calls for a more integrated “One Emory.” To break down these silos, the approach required the team to develop a culture of planning from the ground-up. This meant facilitating conversations to understand individual unit needs, ensuring each entity felt heard and understood. Once these individual needs were documented, we were able to identify opportunities of mutual interest and overlap, and present these back to thematically-organized focus groups. The strategic plan became the lens through which priorities were identified, with projects meeting multiple strategic initiatives rising to the top of the capital plan.

One example of this integrated planning involves the Business School and the Law School. Both units had space needs, and Law had a failing building. During the planning process, we came to understand that many of the future space needs were common to both units. Rather than construct two new facilities/additions, the Framework Plan designates a shared facility that meets each school’s programmatic objectives but in an integrative, and more cost-effective manner. This approach also required changes to university policy since, up to this point, units charged each other to share space.

Results

Launched together with the Framework Plan, the university’s strategic plan is the guiding force for the plan, and also provides the platform upon which results are measured. Specific examples of results that are measured based on the strategic plan include the following.

Atlanta as a Gateway to the World: Both of Emory’s two existing campuses lie outside of Atlanta’s urban core, yet the university seeks to engage more with the city. Planning for Emory’s new health science campus considered how metropolitan Atlanta would access the campus and development of a place to support the patient experience. For Emory’s Midtown properties, the plan considers functions that will draw in community members, including a resiliency center focused on outreach and education. For the Druid Hills campus, the Framework Plan designates specific strategies for connecting to Atlanta’s MARTA system to improve connectivity between the campus and the city.

Enhance the Student Experience: The Framework Plan tackles improvements to the student experience by developing a comprehensive approach to wellness including spaces for meditation, spirituality, mental health, lactation rooms, and recreation.

Emory’s Strategic Plan, “One Emory: Engaged for Impact,” articulates a unified vision for the university. Presently, Emory’s physical locations are uncoordinated from one another. The Framework Plan establishes a common platform for shared identity across Emory’s four metropolitan Atlanta campus locations. The plan clarifies programmatic distribution and mission for each location, while ensuring consistency in elements relating to the student experience, spaces to promote collaboration and discovery, and design standards to reflect Emory’s brand identity. The result is a comprehensive and integrated plan to unleash Emory and Atlanta’s shared future to mobilize change for the world.

The majority of student life uses on the Druid Hills campus, including the Woodruff Physical Education Center and the recently constructed Student Center, are concentrated along Asbury Circle. In order to strengthen this centrally adjacent corridor and improve overall accessibility of amenities for students, the Framework Plan proposes to extend this student life spine to the north to the proposed Athletics District and to the south to the proposed Arts District. This extended pedestrian connection will contain student life uses strategically integrated with both academic and residential uses.

Sustainability Strategies

The Framework Plan included a comprehensive assessment of energy and water use across the university. Emory needed to understand the trade-offs between energy and water use intensity, capital costs, and life cycle costs in order to empower informed decision-making about which strategies to implement. The project team assessed a range of infrastructure investments on a district-by-district basis. The analysis allowed the university to review a set of low-cost strategies and consider their impact to sustainability goals as compared to a set of more optimized strategies that required some additional financial investment but had significant impact on energy and water reductions.