For years now, Michigan has been working toward revolutionizing the way its communities are designed, employing the ideas of sustainable development to mitigate the impact of urbanization on the community and environment and emphasizing promoting local resources. It is reported that several Michigan communities have been facing issues for the last few years (e.g., underutilized urban spaces, poor pedestrian movement facilities, lack of public places for city people, poor city appearance, safety, etc.). To address these issues and employ sustainable planning and design ideas for local affairs and opportunities, Michigan State University Extension (MSUE) and the School of Planning, Design, and Construction (SPDC) have jointly developed the Sustainable Built Environment Initiative (SBEI) to revitalize specific parts of cities and townships. In this regard, community meetings have been held since 2013 with a series of focus groups for each community with various stakeholders to obtain iterative input through a feedback process. The input and ideas obtained from these community meetings are used to generate actionable short, medium, and longer-term strategic plans and achieve specific sustainable goals.This study analyzes the SBEI projects in light of the future sustainable development of each community. The data for this study is collected from 14 previous SBEI projects that have taken place in 13 Michigan communities since 2014. Then interviews with diverse stakeholders, including local planners/city managers/associated entities, were conducted to understand further and analyze how these projects impact the future development approach over time. A holistic systems-based analysis of those areas from the perspective of individuals embedded in their social and institutional context is developed. In addition, three communities are selected to perform a sustainability assessment, for which a sustainability tool with indicators is used with metrics. The study attempts to evaluate whether the executed projects have met the expectations of the researchers and the community residents regarding sustainability and how the projects contributed towards the overall sustainability of the community. The findings are expected to play a significant role in future decision-making for communities dealing with sustainability challenges.
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