Leveraging the urban development expertise of its nearly 33,000 members, and armed with a $250,000 grant, the Urban Land Institute plans to provide guidance on transforming isolated, auto-dependent commercial arterial roads and commercial strip centers into vibrant, safe, and healthy corridors.

With the $250,000 grant received from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Land Institute will be investigating best practices to reinvent under-performing suburban and urban arterials in health-promoting ways.

The plan calls for three communities receiving support and advice to advance efforts to reinvent commercial corridors in healthier ways. The global research and education institute's District Councils will play an integral role in developing new approaches to healthy corridor redevelopment, and will help develop strategies that can be replicated nationwide.

Through this project, slated to be conducted in 2015 and 2016 and led by the Building Healthy Places Initiative and the Rose Center for Public Leadership, ULI plans to:

• Develop and refine a replicable typology for a holistically healthy corridor.

• Identify problematic arterials and commercial strips and strategies for reinventing them as healthy places with strong connections to surrounding communities, many of whom are immigrant and low-income.

• Leverage new understanding among the ULI networks, nurturing and informing a community of practice around effective approaches to creating healthy corridors.

• Draw upon its district council network, as well as mayors and other public officials who have participated in the ULI Rose Center for Public Leadership Fellowship program, to disseminate knowledge and inform a broad community of practice around transforming high-traffic arterials and commercial strips into healthy corridors.

"Reviving commercial strip centers as healthy, multi-use corridors can help meet a variety of community needs, including expanding affordable housing, connecting workers to jobs, and offering underserved communities better retail options," said ULI global CEO Patrick L. Phillips. "The generous support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will greatly enhance the scale and scope of ULI's work in this important area. We are thrilled to have been selected to receive the foundation's support as we share best practices of healthy corridor development and help urban and suburban communities thrive."

"The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is pleased to support ULI and its work with those at the forefront of innovative urban design where we live, work, and play," said Sharon Roerty, senior program officer at the foundation. "Our zip code may be more important than our genetic code in influencing our health, and this work is an opportunity to place health at the center of how we design, build and re-imagine our communities."

ULI has a long history of exploring ways to revitalize aging commercial corridors throughout the United States with a particular emphasis on making them more pedestrian-friendly and appealing as neighborhood gathering places and on redeveloping and reusing the properties within commercial strips to meet community needs. This work is part of the Institute's ongoing pursuit of design development practices that are environmentally conscious, economically sound, and which provide community-wide benefits.