Designers of a new Baton Rouge Health District will unveil new ideas for improving traffic, improving land use and building parks along the Essen-Bluebonnet corridor at a public meeting next week.
Members of the Perkins+Will team, which was selected by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to create a master plan for the proposed health district, will lay out the ideas from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 18, at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
“Perkins+Will is writing a blueprint for a busy hub that has it all: the largest hospitals and clinics, educational institutions, destination shopping, dining, parks and established neighborhoods,” says BRAF in its announcement of the meeting today. “More than $500 million in new medical facilities are expected in this unofficial medical corridor in the next decade.”
BRAF was asked by the FuturEBR Implementation Team, which is tasked with implementing aspects of the city-parish’s new master plan for development and land use, to oversee the health district master plan, and it in turn hired Perkins+Will.
“The planners began by looking at ways to relieve traffic and guide smart growth around the major hospitals. But they quickly realized that so many health care resources concentrated in one part of town provided an opportunity to create a first-class, high-performing health destination and a healthy, walkable, cohesive community,” BRAF says. “Bringing together the leaders of a dozen major institutions in Baton Rouge, Perkins+Will proposes coordinating land-use and transportation investment decisions and tackling the bigger challenge of preparing for the future of health care.” Get more details on the health district and next week’s meeting.
