Clark Township and its two primary villages, Hessel and Cedarville, and the Les Cheneaux Islands archipelago are located in the eastern portion of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula adjacent to Lake Huron, about thirty miles northeast of the Straits of Mackinac [1-2]. This proposal for landscape preservation and town planning in Clark Township, Michigan was initiated by the Les Cheneaux Economic Forum in the late summer of 1998; and was executed between mid-October and mid-December of 1998 as an academic exercise by students in the Division of Architecture of Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, following a ten day design workshop in Clark Township at the beginning of October.

The core of our proposal is the establishment of two legal mechanisms to guide village development in Clark Township (presuming the grand-fathering of existing buildings and uses). The first is the creation of several "Traditional Village Districts" [3]; the second is the "State Trunkline Development Corridor" [4]. A Traditional Village District (TVD) is a finite area of land within which development is governed by 1) a formal Master Plan [5] and 2) a District Ordinance and Planning Code that together promote mixed-use development—especially housing, commercial, civic, and recreational uses—where the mix of activities all exist within pedestrian proximity to each other, i.e., within a half-mile, or ten-minute walk. Our proposal for Clark Township is to designate the villages of Hessel and Cedarville as TVDs, and to encourage increased commercial, civic, recreational, and residential development within these villages; and, when these existing villages have reached capacity, to promote and accommodate new economic and population growth within newly created Traditional Village Districts. The second proposed legal mechanism—the Clark Township State Trunk Line Development Corridor—calls for greater restrictions upon development on M-129 and M-134 within Clark Township, effectively eliminating most new commercial strip development and signage, and placing restrictions upon residential development that will help to maintain the rural character and appearance of these main Township roads and simultaneously promote the relocation of local businesses back within the villages.

A series of commercial and residential street and waterfront improvements are here illustrated [6-10]; as are the implications of growing by means of TVDs versus growing as sprawl [11-13]. A fuller account of this project may be obtained through either Clark Township or the Andrews University Division of Architecture.