In Wilmington's Future
City planner Christina Hughes is helping ILM chart its course
If you like to plan ahead, you’ll love what Christine Hughes and her team are doing.
As senior planner of long-range, environmental, and special projects for the city of Wilmington, Hughes heads an effort to shape the way the city looks and functions in the years to come. She works with neighborhood groups and individuals, recruiting input from residents to include in the city’s comprehensive plan that is currently being crafted.
“I like to think that what I do is manage people through a process of change,” Hughes says. “The city is always growing and changing. I’m always working with people to find out what they like. A lot of people move to Wilmington because they like it the way it is, and they don’t want to change it.”
Hughes grew up in Cary, earned a degree in political studies at Meredith College, and received a master’s in historic preservation from the University of Georgia. She worked in Atlanta before coming to Wilmington in 2005.
“I really do enjoy this kind of work. I’ve always had an appreciation for good public spaces and active downtowns,” she says.
Her work is part of a unit within the planning department that addresses different aspects of city planning. Some planners are working on a code amendment, for example, while others are researching how other cities of this size handle the same issues. To make it relevant, information is benchmarked against comparable cities to include such factors as size, waterfront areas, or density.
Hughes says she understands that change is difficult, but the comprehensive, twenty-five-year long-range plan she is now focused on will take a look at the geography, economic development, jobs, utilities, and housing that will be needed. Concepts that are second nature to Hughes are unfamiliar to most people, but once she produces something residents can relate to, she has them all speaking the same vocabulary.
“A lot of what we do is very visual. We find examples from other cities,” Hughes says. Individuals can post photos or drawings of a facet they loved in another city on the website createwilmington.com. For example, someone may post a photo of a water park in Charleston or Savannah and that helps with visualization.
“The plan is a guiding document to help us shape how Wilmington functions in the future. You won’t see immediate changes, but a year, or five years, or twenty years from now, people can look back and say how all this shaped what we have today. We don’t have a strong history of planning relative to other cities,” Hughes says.
She’s trying to change that.
“We want every citizen in Wilmington to know we are working on this and to participate in some way,” she says.
Public response has been extensive, Hughes says, with more than 700 people participating online and others turning out at public presentations given to promote feedback.
Using this input from residents, Hughes’ team now has six alternative visions with implementation strategies that they are rolling out one at a time in the next phase of the Create Wilmington project. These can be viewed and commented on via the website.
“There’s still an opportunity to get involved,” Hughes says. “We’ll be working on it at least through this calendar year.”
To view more of photographer Katherine Calrk's work, go to www.katherineclarkphotography.com.
