Three new plans designed to update specific neighborhoods on the East and West sides of Cleveland aren’t about to become reality overnight.

But by winning unanimous approval on Friday from the city’s planning commission, all three visions gained an important measure of validation and took a step toward realization.

One plan highlighted opportunities for parks, housing development and streetscape improvements in the Duck Island neighborhood south of Tremont on the city's West Side that's poised for growth.

Another called for making a two-mile stretch of West 65th Street from Detroit Avenue south to Denison Avenue more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly.

And the third proposed creating an arts and entertainment district in the Kinsman neighborhood on the city’s far East Side, just south of Shaker Square.

The plans for West 65th Street and for Kinsman Road in Mount Pleasant were funded by the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency’s TLCI project, or Transportation for Livable Communities Initiative.

The Duck Island plan was a collaboration among Tremont West Development Corp., Cleveland Neighborhood Progress and Kent State University's Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative.

“The connecting thread is about multi-modal [transportation] accessibility and Cleveland finally embracing the things that cities are good at,” said Terry Schwarz, director of the Kent State University Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, which produced the plans for Duck Island and Kinsman. “It’s about reinforcing the urban experience.”

Developed at the behest of local community development corporations in collaboration with members of City Council, the plans could be used over time to justify significant local investments.

These could include a two-mile multipurpose trail along West 65th Street from Detroit Avenue to Denison Avenue, estimated to cost more than $5 million.

No funding for the proposal has been identified yet for the trail, said Michelle Johnson, a senior planner and project manager for the Cleveland office of Environmental Design Group, which authored the vision for the West. 65th Street Corridor.

Yet she said the city has committed $400,000 for initial improvements such as bike lanes and curb extensions that could have a dramatic effect.

The question facing the neighborhood is whether to spend the money now, or to use it as a local matching amount for larger sums to be sought through the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, or NOACA, which coordinates transportation investments in the region.

In the Kinsman neighborhood, the new plan called for installing a traffic circle at the five-point intersection of East 140th Street and Kinsman and Union roads.

The proposal would smooth the flow of traffic at a complex intersection and create the opportunity for new development. Another goal is to make the neighborhood more walkable.

“We realized the biggest barrier to this district is we realized we are not a pedestrian friendly area,” said Leslie Conwell, assistant director of the Mount Pleasant Now Development Corp.

The Duck Island proposal examined ways in which the small neighborhood, framed by Lorain Avenue to the north, West 25th Street to the west, and Train Avenue and Scranton Road to the south and east, is also framed by a continuous ring of wooded slopes, as if it were a small hill town set apart from Ohio City to the north, and Tremont to the south.

The plan suggested ways in which the green slopes could be used to capture storm runoff, planted with produce as terraced community gardens, or cultivated to create seasonal bursts of color, like Daffodil Hill at Lakeview Cemetery.

In a sense, one edge of Duck Hill is already powerfully defined, Schwarz said during her presentation of the plan. The western edge of the neighborhood is flanked by the Red Line Greenway, a recreational trail along light rail tracks of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority that are maintained by the Rotary Club of Cleveland.

The plan also identified parts of Duck Island where the neighborhood could accommodate townhouses or multi-unit apartments without disturbing the single-family residential character of the area.

Each plan attempted to update a portion of Cleveland that was planned and built in a great hurry a century ago when the city was an industrial powerhouse on the rise.

Now that the city is shrinking dramatically in population – and trying to attract new residents to old neighborhoods – it is grappling with how best to redefine itself, physically. And there’s no single, cookie-cutter answer.

“What’s striking to me about the three plans is that even though we have common tools, each neighborhood is telling is something a little bit different about what it needs,” Schwarz said.