The Aurora project used social media to engage residents and stakeholders. These sites are no longer actively producing content.
UPDATE: The Downtown Master Plan for Aurora has been adopted by the City of Aurora and is now available for download.
Downtown Aurora is located in Kane County, while the rest of the City extends into DuPage, Kendall, and Will Counties. The City is located in the outer region of the Chicago metropolitan area, just 40 miles west of downtown Chicago. Aurora, known as the City of Lights, has a historic downtown on the Fox River and was once the main economic center for the Fox River region, employing many generations of European and Mexican immigrants who worked in the roundhouse and locomotive industry. Today the City of Lights remains highly diverse and is Illinois' second most populous city. For more demographic information, view the Aurora Community Data Snapshot.
Through the CMAP Local Technical Assistance (LTA) program, the City of Aurora led an effort to update, complement, and enhance the 2005 Seize the Future Master Plan, with a component dedicated to developing the transportation opportunities and walkability of downtown. The new downtown master plan provides policy direction in the areas of sustainability, economic development, open space and recreation, arts and culture, and other quality-of-life factors, and recommends policies to help the City and its residents address identified challenges.
The planning process, developed in collaboration with the City of Aurora, involved three phases. The first phase involved a thorough analysis of the existing conditions within the community using information gathered from the steering committee, interviews with key stakeholders, a public meeting, an online interactive survey, review of previous plans and studies, and collection of maps and data. The second phase will focused on creating strategies for Aurora's downtown based on findings from the phase one analysis and public engagement. The third phase included plan creation, community feedback, and plan adoption.