Redesigning a growing city with community in mind: First Forty Feet and Enscape Premium

Summary:

• Oregon-based First Forty Feet is reimagining cities through equitable, people-centered design that blends architecture, planning, and storytelling.
• The team partnered with the city of Vancouver, Washington, to redesign key areas of the city, including a residential neighborhood and the new City Hall Plaza.
• Enscape and Veras played a central role in the design process, enabling quick concept iteration and helping communicate ideas to non-technical stakeholders, from city officials to the broader community.
• With the help of Enscape Premium tools, the team balanced lofty design goals with engaging local voices, building excitement for a shared vision of public space.
  
  Vancouver, Washington, is embracing a period of rapid growth and reimagining areas that need greater connection and inclusivity. To ensure the redevelopment covered the community's needs, the city needed a partner who understood urban design as well as how to consider the people it was serving.
  
  Rising to the challenge was Portland-based multidisciplinary design firm, First Forty Feet. The company, whose slogan is "a better city exists," advocates for equitable, people-centered cities and bridges the gap between policy intentions and design interventions. As co-founder Will Grimm says, the First Forty Feet team "wears a lot of different hats," a strength they brought to shaping both Vancouver's City Hall Plaza and the Heights district.
  
  Designing within established neighborhoods required care and sensitivity. First Forty Feet worked closely with the city to foster curiosity and support, rather than resistance, from the community. Along the way, the firm leaned on Enscape and Veras to help test ideas quickly and communicate them clearly. Those tools would prove essential as the team moved from big vision to bold new public space plans that could serve current and future generations.

Challenge: Turning blank slates into shared spaces

As Vancouver grows, the city is taking the chance to reshape underutilized parts into more connected, inclusive spaces. In the Heights District, the site of a demolished mall is being transformed into a vibrant residential neighborhood anchored by the Grand Loop Linear Park—all while working to retain existing businesses and avoid displacement. Across town, First Forty Feet was also tasked with designing a Civic Plaza outside of City Hall that could become a welcoming civic heart.

Though the Heights site offered a rare blank slate, it came with challenges. The former mall left behind what Will described as an “outline of gravel… and a huge parking lot around it” bordered by businesses, neighborhoods, and roads that needed to be carefully integrated into the design. The team also needed to think about scale and transition, moving from a lower scale to something higher density. And finally, the team needed to be mindful of public transit routes, like the Vine bus rapid transit line that would come through the site.

The goals for this project stretched beyond aesthetics, and the revitalization couldn’t come at the cost of existing businesses. First Forty Feet focused on anti-displacement, finding ways to integrate these businesses into the new development so they would thrive as the new community took shape. It was also crucial that community members had the opportunity to share their opinions and aspirations for their neighborhood. Even children were invited into the process. 'Kids have great ideas,' Will says, recalling how the team would ask playful questions like, ‘What would you like to see here in the future?’" All of this helped shape a design that truly reflected the neighborhood, but even with meaningful input, translating the vision into something everyone could grasp and support wasn’t easy.

With so many voices shaping the outcome, from residents to local entrepreneurs, one of the biggest challenges was communicating a vision everyone could picture. For many, it was difficult to imagine how these new spaces would feel. The team needed tools that made these abstract concepts tangible and sparked new ideas, something that would show the vision and convince them of what a more connected, inclusive future could be.

Solution: From design and sketches to immersive storytelling

With these challenges in mind, First Forty Feet got to work on the redesign. When it came time to explore early ideas, Veras quickly proved invaluable in the process.

At Civic Plaza, the team focused on a pavilion area. "There's a little pavilion on that site," urban designer Tyler Sauter explains. "We were trying to think of concepts for the space." They mocked up a simple box form in their model, then ran it through Veras to test different possibilities, imagining it with trees or rendered in a range of materials. "We were able to produce a lot of imagery to get a vibe and feel of a better direction," says Tyler. "Then we could refine that with more detailed modeling."

At the Grand Loop Linear Park in the Heights District, Veras helped the team test early concepts for the park’s different zones, each tied to local ecosystems and what the designers called "the -ologies"— hydrology, ecology, geology, and volcanology. Feeding this narrative into Veras gave their prompts more meaning and produced more relevant outputs. "We are specifically giving it some relevant storyline prompts that really help us drive," explains Will. "It's like your brain can only think so much, but then [Veras] gives us an extra boost."

Not every image Veras generated was a perfect fit, but the speed and variety helped the team explore quickly and build on ideas with confidence. “It's sort of like a Darwinian process,” says co-founder James Brackenhoff. “You can get a lot more options generated very quickly and then take the best qualities and try and incorporate those into a more final, concrete design.”

As the designs took shape, the team turned to Enscape to bring their concepts to life quickly, clearly, and in real time. For the Heights District park, they used a simple white model to test light and shadow using the sun feature, helping them study how the space worked at different times of day and year. These white models also became valuable tools during client reviews, encouraging more open discussion and collaborative thinking.

When the designs became more refined, the team layered in details, adding materials, Enscape assets like trees, and region-specific planting to match what is on-site in Vancouver. Tyler explains this stage was just as important internally, helping the team validate whether their ideas matched the intended "look and vibe" of the park. For interiors seen through windows, they sometimes used Veras again to quickly generate believable scenes without wasting time.

Because the Grand Loop Linear Park project included multiple zones and elements, First Forty Feet took their presentation one step further: creating an Enscape video walkthrough to help the client understand the journey through the space. "We also created the Enscape video to share with the client and show them this is what it feels like when you walk through this linear park," Tyler explains. "It was definitely helpful to render out these scenes and be able to share it with clients."

Results: Community buy-in and developer interest

Using Veras and Enscape in their workflow enabled First Forty Feet to move quickly from a vision to detailed and immersive design, all while keeping stakeholders engaged each step of the way.

The team could iterate faster, explore more design options, and tailor presentations based on stage of design and audience, from white model reviews to immersive walkthroughs. What once took hours or days now happens in minutes.

The final step of the process was taking these new designs to the ultimate judges: the people of Vancouver, Washington. Using still images and videos, First Forty Feet and the city were able to present the plans to the public via websites, printed boards, and presentations at movie nights, festivals, and markets. All of this helped build local support, and the public loved the opportunity to not only preview the revitalization, but also share feedback.

The final assets also became a valuable tool for attracting developers. “developers love predictability,” Will explains, ”So if there's something that the community loves, the city's adopted, and we're moving forward, developers typically are like, ‘This is the vision's great. I want to be a part of your effort here.’”

With visuals created in Enscape and Veras, developers could clearly see the opportunity. “They see the Civic Plaza or a public space that's been designed in that image—they want to be next to that. They love drive-by traffic and eyes on the street and people walking back and forth,” says Will. “If they know there's something that's a community asset being built next to them, then they're like, ‘This is great. I want to be a part of that.’ And they see that through these images.”

By using a combination of the speed and flexibility of Veras and the clarity and immersion of Enscape, the First Forty Feet team not only delivered a vision, they helped shape the shared story for Vancouver, Washington’s future.