Graduate school as life affirmation: An early project outline
Future cities will be compacted into clearly defined neighborhoods that will be smaller and more densely populated than our sprawling suburbs and ex-urbs today. These new cities and towns will combine the best of traditional urban design with modern mass transit and communication technologies . . . Offices, stores and restaurants, housing, parks and open spaces will all be within walking distance for the people who live there. Tentacles of restored land with healthy watersheds, river banks, ravines and hills will reach into the heart of the city, while clear boundaries will honor spaces in which farms and wild lands flourish and nurture the new metropolis.
As our resurgent cityscapes mature, architecture, cuisine and the arts will re-develop regional styles and celebrate local choices, resources and sensibilities.
In this future, the differences between our cities become apparent and delightful. The joy of walking and the convenience of alternative transportation will diminish the need for the single-passenger automobile, reduce its infrastructure and restore a human scale to the cityscape.
An increasingly ”walkable” environment will allow us to cluster our important civic institutions, such as, the city hall, library, and museums, shopping and work. As a result, more and more people will find themselves drawn to the middle of our new town where they will also find a beautiful, intentional space where they feel welcome to put up their feet, play games or discuss the matters of the day. This space, the community’s gathering place, is the heart for communal identity, welcome, and social rejuvenation. Every neighborhood will build such a space where people create together something that captures their collective talents, their aspirations and their appreciation of the many community connections. –Milenko Matanovic, Multiple Victories
1. What is the topic that I am interested in working on in my program of study?
The heart of my topic, like the heart of my city, is Midtown, New Albany.
Like a lot of cities, New Albany flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its location along the banks of the Ohio River just west of the falls made it a gateway to the West and South and residents took full advantage. When railcars replaced steamers, New Albany’s already establishing industry made it a natural stop and growth continued. It was during those times that Midtown was built. With hills to the west and the river to the south, residential areas spread mostly eastward. Wealthy riverboat captains and industrialists had claimed Main Street overlooking the river for their own grandiose mansions early on. The merchants, craftspeople, and laborers, then, began purchasing lots just north of them, on the remaining east-west streets with homes generally moving from larger to smaller as they were located further away from the river, though building scale varies greatly even within the same blocks. Though historic records show class stratification has been a problem since the city’s earliest days, the Midtown neighborhood was a place where those of varying means lived side by side, intermingling in the streets, and successfully working in tandem to improve their respective futures.
The massive suburbanization that has plagued other parts of the country, however, did not spare New Albany in damaging once proud urban neighborhoods. Today Midtown is known as a center of poverty, with slumlords more common than craftspeople and the neighborhood school struggling to maintain test scores with an overly transient student population. Though the scope will have to be narrowed for the purposes of a MACS project, the implementation of strategic interventions to reverse those negative trends and return Midtown to a thriving neighborhood of choice, a place where it makes financial and emotional sense to invest, is my project.
The notion of “creative cities”, too, and the impact of creative activity on communities is a popular topic, a potential antidote to the sometimes dehumanizing affects of suburbanization and loss of urban community, and of great personal interest. Some of the challenges lie in identifying what constitutes creativity, or at least “acceptable” creative activity, and questions around who sets the boundaries and assigns value to them, or even if there are or should be boundaries. Delineations in these areas often lead to unintentional anti-community sentiment rather than a sharing of mutual values so that what is superficially supportive of creativity sometimes actually serves to subvert or marginalize further creative endeavor. As such, a part of this project will inevitably focus on those perceptions of community and creative value, how various cultural lenses affect them, and what can be shown or done to encourage the cross-pollination rather than compartmentalization of creative endeavor, a condition which my beginning work causes me to believe is necessary for cultural and community sustainability.
2. What background knowledge will I need in order to be successful in working on a meaningful set of projects in this area?
First, knowledge of the area’s history (including recent history) will be necessary both to place the work in a broader cultural context and for use as an educational tool in highlighting the area’s stories and possibilities for internal and external audiences.
Second, baseline data showing current demographics, real estate and educational trends, resident attitudes and desires, and other potentially actionable and measurable indicators. I’ll also need to be connected with various creative enterprises, both institutional and individual. What’s working and not working and how do we measure that?
Third, an understanding of responsible, culturally informed intervention strategies that have proven successful elsewhere and could be replicated or adapted for use in Midtown. This is an obviously broad category that I’ll be using MACS opportunities to better accentuate and prioritize. I have some neighborhood revitalization and community development training and hope to better understand the cultural and creative underpinnings and tools of such movements as I progress both in the classroom and on the ground. The creation and/or maintenance of confidence in the neighborhood, both internally and externally, are paramount.
Fourth, competence with measurement tools and the good sense and flexibility to adapt will be required. Some interventions will work. Others won’t. I’ll need to realize that and respond positively.
3. Why is this topic important to me?
My wife and I both have extensive family history in New Albany, quite a bit of it in Midtown. In that sense, it’s reclamation of our personal heritage. From a broader view, though, it represents the reversal of what we believe to be dangerous global trends of overconsumption, sprawl, and loss of civic and intellectual engagement. It’s an opportunity to leverage my strengths, partner with those who are strong in other ways, create an arena more conducive to achievement and sustainability in various forms, and to validate that I’m alive and contributing.
By that same token, it’s become clear that what’s been missing from my considerations of revitalization, creativity, and community is commitment to my own creative endeavors, robbing others and me of the learning opportunities offered only by direct practice. It’s by personally engaging in creative activity that I will realize and celebrate my own identity and hopefully thus be able to apply that learning in support of the same type of realization in others so that it and they, too, can be shared and celebrated as a part of the community building process.
4. Why is this topic important to the people with whom I intend to work?
Some agree with the sentiments expressed above. Some just want to feel safe and able to better themselves educationally, socially, spiritually, or financially– to have a chance at a better quality of life. Still others just wish people with my attitude would go away because I’m quite purposely interrupting their exploitation of people and circumstances. Unfortunately, it’s important to them, too. What’s more important, though, is that opportunities for self-realization and growth become reality for a group with potential to be intellectually, economically, and spiritually more inclusive and of greater presence. If the interventions my project eventually encompasses are successful, the perception of their importance will change among other people as they take ownership of them for themselves.
