Andover Master Plan

2023

Utile worked collaboratively with the Town of Andover to lead a robust community engagement and planning process for the Town’s Comprehensive Plan update. The planning team heard through its outreach work concerns around sprawl, improving schools, ensuring that the town’s open space assets and development patterns stay familiar and desirable. This comprehensive planning process sought to proactively address these concerns through a long-term plan, so that the potential downsides of growth can be minimized as much as possible, and the collective benefits of that change can be maximally realized. With that in mind, the Andover Comprehensive Plan focuses on three key strategies: Densifying and expanding job centers along I-93 in the business and industrial parks, Encouraging new “middle missing” housing types in town and improving open space access along the Shawsheen and Improving east-west connectivity with improved multimodal transportation links.

Andover Blob Map
Shawsheen Regional Map
This plan suggests combining a more comprehensive effort to improve the recreational and historic character of the existing town centers and natural resources alongside the Shawsheen River.
Office Park Large Site - after
For the purposes of this plan, the planning team selected prototypical indsutrial sites representative of existing industrial businesses or buildings in one or more of the existing Andover employment centers. By allowing for higher density and increased overall development potential, modern industrial sites can be developed.
Downtown Infill Site Site - after
The levels of density suggested for new housing typology infill, “missing middle” housing, sits between individual single-family houses (which exist to the southwest of the site as context) and the larger multifamily adaptive reuse or construction envisioned for the Historic Mill Overlay District.
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