Tulsa Comprehensive Plan - PLANiTULSA

Within the Downtown building block are two general
plan categories, Downtown Core and Downtown
Neighborhood. These two general categories are
designed to encapsulate the concepts developed in the
Tulsa Downtown Area Master Plan, developed at the
same time as PLANiTULSA.
Downtown Core is Tulsa’s most intense regional center
of commerce, housing, culture and entertainment.
It is an urban environment of primarily highdensity
employment and mixed-use residential uses,
complemented by regional-scale entertainment,
conference, tourism and educational institutions.
Downtown core is primarily a pedestrian-oriented area
with generous sidewalks shaded by trees, in-town parks,
open space, and plazas. The area is a regional transit hub.
New and refurbished buildings enhance the pedestrian
realm with ground-floor windows and storefronts that
enliven the street. To support downtown’s lively and
walkable urban character, automobile parking ideally
is located on-street and in structured garages, rather
than in surface parking lots.
Downtown Neighborhoods are located outside but
are tightly integrated with the Downtown Core.
These areas are comprised of university and higher
educational campuses and their attendant housing and
retail districts, former warehousing and manufacturing
areas that are evolving into areas where people both
live and work, and medium- to high-rise mixeduse
residential areas. Downtown Neighborhoods
are primarily pedestrian-oriented and are wellconnected
to the Downtown Core via local transit.
They feature parks and open space, typically at the
neighborhood scale.
A center is the focal point of one or more neighborhoods.
Centers provide convenient access to shops, restaurants
and community-oriented services, such as day cares,
libraries and meeting halls. There are shorter auto
trips and more walking and bicycling in a center since
residential and commercial areas are near each other.
Centers often are the site for transit stations and bus
route intersections. Those centers with pedestrian
and bicycle-friendly streets entice residents to walk to
major transit facilities. Attractive and safe pedestrian
connections from the surrounding neighborhood to the
center encourage people to walk or bike to destinations
such as transit stations, bus stops or businesses.
The size of a center and its role in the city vary
correspondingly with the scale and accessibility of the
surrounding neighborhoods. Ideally, centers should
support both daytime and evening activities to create
an attractive and safe neighborhood destination.
The Centers building block includes three types
of plan categories, Neighborhood Centers, Town
Centers, and Regional Centers.
neighborhood Centers
Neighborhood Centers are small-scale, one to three
story mixed-use areas intended to serve nearby
neighborhoods with retail, dining, and services.
They can include apartments, condominiums, and
townhouses, with small lot single family homes at the
edges. These are pedestrian-oriented places served by
transit, and visitors who drive can park once and walk
to number of destinations.
July 2010
Land Use – Tulsa comprehensive plan