Table of Contents

age-friendly communities

The city’s comprehensive plan recognizes children and seniors as populations with unique needs. It explicitly commits the city to being age-friendly in S P31 under Children, Families, and Education in the Society chapter (p. 174).

Biophilic Planning

The city’s comprehensive plan includes a core principle of action of integrating nature into the city. This core principle will involve creating a network of greenways and increasing the number of parks and open spaces, along with improving the city’s green infrastructure. The policies to achieve the goal of integrating nature into the city are found in the Conservation and Environment section and the City Facilities and Services section.

Built Environment and Health

The city’s comprehensive plan details the current health conditions before offering solutions in their Land Use and Transportation and Society sections. Land Use and Transportation goals that address health include LUT P3, LUT P5, LUT P7, LUT P11, LUT P32, and LUT P33. The Society section’s introduction discusses community health and the built environment and proposes solutions in the Health and Human Service policies, S P25, and S P30.

Creative Placemaking

This city's comprehensive plan includes a set of creative policies that support creative placemaking. The creativity section discusses the importance of arts and culture in supporting the city’s community character, quality of life, and economy. Creative policy recommendations encourage partnerships between community members and organizations, greater access to arts and culture activities for all community members, and growing community hubs for creativity. Additionally, the plan identifies a variety of initiatives, programs, capital improvements, or regulatory changes that support arts and culture in the action matrix.

Community Visioning

This city's comprehensive plan is based on a new community vision developed over a nine-month period by thousands of residents. The vision is provided in Chapter 3 of the plan and includes seven components:

• Livable
• Natural and Sustainable
• Creative
• Educated
• Mobile and Interconnected
• Prosperous
• Values and Respects People

Comprehensive Planning

This city's comprehensive plan was used to help refine the Sustaining Places comprehensive plan standards. The plan is structured around a seven-part vision and seven policy area "building blocks":

• Land Use and Transportation
• Housing and Neighborhoods
• Economy, Conservation and Environment
• City Facilities
• Services
• Society
• Creativity

The planning process included a strong and inclusive public engagement component. The Implementation section of the plan offers multiple community indicators for each vision area, as well as a detailed action matrix that identifies priority programs to implement each action item, though responsible agencies or entities are not identified.

Food Systems

The city's comprehensive plan includes food-related issues throughout many plan elements and goal areas, including access to healthy food (HN P10) in Neighborhoods policies, supporting the local food economy (E P18) in Economic policies, expanding local food markets (CE P13) in Conservation and Environment policies, improving food scrap recycling and composting rates (CFS P16) in Solid Waste policies, and providing healthy community food choices (S P6) and fresh food access (S P7) in Health and Human Services policies. Actions to improve healthy food access are also key components of the implementation strategy of creating a "Healthy Austin" program. Food is also addressed in plan monitoring indicators as well as priority actions for implementation.

Solar Energy

The city's comprehensive plan's Energy Policies, in the City Facilities and Services section, include a call to increase the share of renewable energy sources including solar used by Austin Energy to power the city, including infrastructure for on-site sources (Goal CFS P24). A priority Action Item in the Housing and Neighborhoods section calls for developing a regulatory framework to incentivize the use of sustainability features in housing, including solar power (HN A15).