GDOT Context-Sensitive Design Online Manual
Version 1.0

Introduction

“We shape our communities, and then they shape us.”
Winston Churchill

 

Welcome to the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) Online Manual on Context-Sensitive Design Solutions. 

 

Context-Sensitive Design (CSD) is a process for achieving design excellence by developing transportation solutions that require continuous, collaborative communication and consensus between transportation agencies, professionals, and any and all stakeholders.  A common goal of CSD projects is to develop a facility that is harmonious with the community, and preserves aesthetics, history and the environmental resources, while integrating these innovative approaches with traditional transportation goals for safety and performance.

The idea of “good design" has been undergoing a transformation to include the element of context—how transportation facilities can integrate and interact with the dynamics of the existing natural and man-made environment, and what can be done to preserve or even enhance those features.

Understanding a community’s value for scenic, aesthetic, historic and environmental resources is a key factor in CSD. Applying CSD principles in transportation investments will create a lasting value in a community. Originally called context-sensitive design, the practice has evolved into Context-Sensitive Solutions (CSS) to represent the multi-dimensional nature of the process.  CSS calls for innovative thinking, improved coordination and communication, and interdisciplinary decision-making, all as a part of the project development and implementation process.

 

A determination of the discrete steps to be taken to mobilize adequate staff or consultant resources to complete the tasks associated with managing a Stakeholders Group, Advisory Committee, or other public involvement process, is described in this manual.  The goal of this process is to anticipate and understand the steps needed to effectively develop and transfer the needed information to numerous business, civic, institutional and residential groups and persons in a collaborative, context sensitive effort.  This effort will seek input and feedback to consider all appropriate “context sensitive” alternatives, and to improve a project with such inputs.