OUR PARKS:
A Public Open Space System Master Plan | Elkhart, IN
The Our Parks Master Plan outlines a bold and inclusive vision for the City’s parks, trails, green spaces, and recreational facilities for the years 2025 to 2029. Developed through extensive collaboration between the City team and the planning team, the project redefines the role of public parks as foundational infrastructure for community health, equity, economic development, and environmental stewardship.
The plan employed a robust ‘Digital + Analogue’ process, emphasizing comprehensive community engagement and incorporating 31 previous plans. This led to a ‘Strategic Action Plan’ and ‘Strategic Action Matrix’ for tracking progress, ensuring the plan aligns with community needs and municipal roles through vision, goals, objectives, and action items.
The primary purpose of this master plan is to create a strategic, community-driven roadmap for the City’s 35-park system, which encompasses approximately 300 acres and serves a population of over 50,000 residents along with tens of thousands of regional commuters. Through comprehensive data analysis, demographic studies, stakeholder outreach, and industry benchmarking, the plan identifies actionable goals that respond to both local needs and state-level funding criteria, particularly those outlined by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. The planning framework embraces five guiding tenets: Connect, Bloom, Expand, Play, and Amplify. These described both the existing role that parks play within the Elkhart Community, but also helped shape the design philosophy and structure future decision-making. These pillars support a system that connects neighborhoods, celebrates cultural heritage, promotes resilience and ecological health, fosters inclusive play, and amplifies community voice.
Landscape Architecture and Planning Team Collaborative Process
Troyer Group’s landscape architecture team led the planning effort from start to finish, providing both strategic vision and technical leadership. Their role extended across all facets of the project: conducting field assessments, developing analytical mapping and site inventories, organizing public engagement initiatives, and synthesizing findings into a coherent vision and implementation strategy. The team collaborated closely with the client, city departments, engineers, marketing professionals, and nonprofit organizations to ensure alignment with broader municipal goals and funding opportunities. From preparing capital improvement matrices to coordinating ADA assessments and prioritizing high-impact investments, the landscape architects guided both the big-picture vision, and the granular details required to implement it.
Think Global, Design Local.
Locally, the master plan has had a catalytic effect on how the community and its leaders perceive the role of parks and the profession of landscape architecture. By positioning parks as solutions to social, economic, and environmental challenges, the plan reframed public discourse about these spaces as essential community infrastructure. It also demonstrated the value of integrated, interdepartmental thinking, embedding parks into broader conversations about transportation, housing, health, climate resilience, and economic development. In doing so, the plan elevated the profile of the Parks and Recreation Department within City governance and reinforced the discipline’s responsibility for long-term stewardship of public space.
Several distinctive elements set this project apart. Chief among them was the plan’s commitment to equity and accessibility, including a statistically valid bilingual community survey, ADA audits, and targeted outreach to underrepresented populations. Innovative engagement techniques, such as an interactive project website, nationally recognized speaker series on topics like spatial justice and economic development, and pop-up outreach at community events, created a deep and authentic foundation for public input.
In addition to numerous qualitative-based inquiry efforts, a statistically valid community survey was conducted using a sample size that ensured a high confidence level and a low margin of error. Because previous response patterns were low, surveys were over sampled in low turn-out areas to ensure comprehensive feedback was received and to reduce bias in the data. To support statistical rigor and broad applicability, residents were randomly invited to participate, exceeding minimum thresholds to ensure demographic and geographic representation. Surveys were available in English and Spanish across digital and print formats, with stratification by zip code and user type to reflect Elkhart’s diverse population. Results directly informed the plan’s priorities and dovetail previous community feedback priorities.
The plan also integrated sustainability and climate adaptation into all recommendations, with special attention to shaded areas, urban heat reduction, stormwater management, and native planting. Rather than treat sustainability and public health as an add-on, the plan embedded it in every aspect of future design and programming.
The impact drivers scoring served as a data-driven dashboard that quantified the economic, health, environmental, and equity impacts of public parks using composite indices and real-time spatial data. It was designed to meet the growing need for evidence-based investment in open spaces, empowering the Parks Department to make transparent, high-impact decisions backed by measurable outcomes.
The quantitative analysis of the Composite Impact Drivers provided a data-driven framework for prioritizing investments and guiding strategic decisions within the Our Parks Master Plan. Each park and program initiative were evaluated against a matrix of weighted criteria, such as equity, accessibility, environmental benefit, operational feasibility, and community demand. These were combined to produce a composite score that reflects both need and potential impact. These metrics were normalized and aggregated to ensure comparability across project types and scales, allowing planners to rank initiatives objectively while maintaining alignment with community values and departmental goals. This unique approach ensured that limited resources could be directed toward projects with the greatest overall benefit, supporting defensible, measurable outcomes and enabling targeted applications for grant funding and capital improvement budgeting.
More Than A Plan. Our Parks Initiative is a Tool For Local Government.
The plan importantly serves as a powerful advocacy tool for engaging policymakers by clearly demonstrating the economic return on investment that high-quality parks and recreation infrastructure can deliver. Grounded in both community-driven priorities and rigorous data analysis, the plan ties capital improvements and programming directly to economic development outcomes such as increased property values, tourism growth, workforce retention, and regional competitiveness. It highlights how parks function as catalysts for revitalization, supporting small businesses, attracting employers, and enhancing quality of life metrics that influence site selection and investment decisions. By aligning proposed investments with broader municipal goals and economic indicators, the plan is intended to equip both local and regional decision-makers at all levels of government with a compelling, measurable case for funding, positioning parks not as amenities, but as essential economic engines that strengthen Elkhart’s resilience and long-term fiscal health.
Elkhart’s riverfront integration demonstrates how better park design can ‘Support Resilient Identity,’ ‘Expand Health,’ ‘Optimize Resources,’ and ‘Reinforce Community Dignity’ for the entire community. Proposed elements like dynamic lighting, permeable railings, and river theater expansion strengthen community connections and transform the river into a vibrant recreational asset.
Ultimately, Our Parks: An Aspirational Master Plan represents an ambitious, forward-thinking approach to park system planning, rooted in professional expertise, civic leadership, and inclusive community visioning. It reflects landscape architecture’s capacity to lead interdisciplinary initiatives that advance health, equity, and environmental performance. The plan provides a clear, implementable strategy for transforming Elkhart’s parks into dynamic, resilient, and welcoming places for all.
To see the full plan document visit: issuu.com/troyergroup/docs/our_parks_master_plan