Duke University, located in Durham, NC has commissioned DMS/AS, Inc. to prepare a Master Plan for the University’s Central Campus. Separating Duke’s historic Gothic West Campus and Georgian East Campus, the Central Campus currently contains over 250 acres of underutilized land.  The Master Plan for Central Campus addresses two of the University’s major goals: the creation of a unique mixed-use neighborhood that includes housing, office, retail, entertainment, and retail development; and the development of viable pedestrian, vehicular and mass transit links between the East and West campuses.

Phase I of the development envisions up to 2,000 residential units (undergraduate housing, graduate apartments, townhouses and single family homes for faculty), 250,000 to 2.5M square feet of office space, ground-level retail, a hotel/conference center, recreation facilities, and parking for about 9,000 cars.  A major emphasis of the plan will be to expand the historic Sarah Duke Garden, which sits adjacent to Central Campus, into the new development in the most ecologically sensitive manner, maintaining and extending forested areas in low-lying land and limiting dense development to the higher, more accessible land.  The plan also intends to diminish impermeable surfaces and utilize forested areas to mitigate the presence of heat islands.