The foundation of facility planning is our strategic and academic direction - our goals, aspirations, current challenges, and opportunities for the future. The campus planners gain a deep understanding of the campus’s existing facilities condition, capacity, and the way they are currently used. The campus planners assess systems affecting the daily life of the campus. In addition to the main campus and regional campuses, the planning examines connectivity with the broader Norfolk community, the region, and the state. These systems determine the physical framework of the campus and opportunities for sustainable development.

The campus planners use data and analysis completed in the Understand phase to produce a comprehensive understanding of the campus’s challenges and opportunities. The campus planners test different ways to organize uses on campus, accommodate new building footprints, enhance systems, and enliven campus spaces. The ODU campus community explores these potential new facility investment patterns and determines the preferred approaches.

The strongest ideas that emerge are combined into the campus master plan. The plan describes the character, location, and amount of new development, renovation, reuse, or re-purposed space. Additionally, the plan recommends improvements to circulation, parking, open space, infrastructure, and resiliency. The final plan is a flexible framework that will help guide our facility investments to support our collective vision for the next decade.