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Course shows benefits of cooperative efforts among architects, planners
Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
217-333-5491; melissa@illinois.edu
4/20/04
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
Although they typically function independently from each other, architects,
landscape architects and urban planners sometimes cross paths while
engaged in community development or urban renewal projects.
But rarely do they begin working together as a team from the outset,
according to Lynne Dearborn, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “So
many of the firms I’ve worked for don’t work that way,”
she said. “Instead, we find things out late in the project …
things that go wrong, that end up costing more money to resolve.”
With more communication among all the players early in the process,
such cost
overruns might be avoided, she said.
Helping students of architecture, landscape
architecture and urban and
regional planning appreciate how professionals from all three distinct,
but interrelated disciplines, can benefit from a more cooperative approach
was just one of many lessons to emerge from a course Dearborn co-developed
and co-taught with urban and regional planning professor Stacy Harwood
and landscape architecture professor Laura Lawson. Clients, too, may
be better served by such arrangements, the students learned.
The studio-based course, “Envisioning
the Future in the South End Neighborhood,” recently received
one of two 2004 Education Honor Awards from the American Institute of
Architects. The award was presented at the annual meeting of the Association
of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s in Miami in March. The
AIA award recognized the course as “an exceptional model of instructional
and educational excellence in classroom, studio, community-based service
learning, or laboratory work.”
The course was offered during the spring 2002 and 2003 semesters, under
the auspices of the university’s East
St. Louis Action Research Project. Founded in 1990 and administered
by the U. of I. College of Fine and
Applied Arts, ESLARP promotes the revitalization of distressed areas
of East St. Louis by creating partnerships between university students
and faculty members, and members of neighborhood organizations. The
university and community groups work cooperatively to identify problems
and apply design and planning solutions that best address the needs
of targeted neighborhoods.
“This city has dramatic needs for technical assistance and no
existing city-level agency to provide needed design, planning or community
development support for non-profits,” Dearborn, Harwood and Lawson
noted, adding that most municipalities have their own planning staffs.
Over the years, they said, one thing that has become apparent to ESLARP
faculty members is that the “complex, nested relationships within
East St. Louis’ neighborhoods require very close interdisciplinary
collaboration.”
Lawson explained how those layered, complex problems require coordinated
solutions involving more than one discipline:
“The South End neighborhood is the traditionally African American
neighborhood of East St. Louis from the period of residential segregation.
It was developed with narrow lots for shotgun-style houses. Now, two-thirds
of the lots are vacant. The community wants new development to happen,
but the lots are not amenable to current lifestyles. Proposals for wider
lots and new homes have implications for street and sidewalk design.
In addition, there is a problem of illegal dumping on vacant land. To
solve those kinds of problems calls for multifaceted solutions involving
planning and design, as well as legal and policy solutions that no one
discipline can handle.”
The teaching team developed two primary goals for the course: “to
provide technical assistance to the South End New Development Organizations
(SENDO), with the ultimate goal to produce a neighborhood plan proposal;
and to teach university students about community-based design and planning.”
Those goals were achieved, in part, during class trips to East St. Louis,
where students surveyed residents, analyzed Census and other data, participated
in work weekends, met with SENDO members and sought their input.
“The folks involved in SENDO made this project possible,”
Harwood said. “They welcomed us into their homes and churches.”
In the end, students from the 2003 class delivered a planning document
to SENDO that serves as a working framework for change. That document
remains a “work in progress,” according to Harwood, who
said ESLARP staff and research assistants have facilitated the transition
from planning to implementation by using the planning document to identify
new projects, some of which are under way in the neighborhood.
