From My Bottom Step

Last Friday saw the wrap up of a week long design charrette that focused on re-developing and re-imaging the downtown core of Wallaceburg, Ontario. Working with the students of Fanshawe College’s GIS & Urban Planning Program, the Wallaceburg Community Task Force (WCTF) hoped that this collaboration between the students and community would help to provide some ideas, provoke interest and bring some youth back into Wallaceburg, a town which in recent years has been plagued by a declining manufacturing economy and decreasing population. More details on the specifics of this design charrette can be found in a previous article titled Students Generating Ideas.

For a video about the design charrette please click here

After a week of intensive work all of the students involved had the opportunity to present their concepts and visions to developers, members of the WCTF, members of the community and their instructors. After a successful day of presentations displaying the students hard work and creative initiatives four of the nine student groups were asked to return to Wallaceburg on March 11th, 2009 to present their ideas to the whole of the community. The hopes at the end of this evening of presentations is that interest will be sparked amongst those living in the community and those that want to invest in the community.

I congratulate all of the students who participated in this design charrette and I have to extend a warm thank you to the town of Wallaceburg and it’s Community Task Force for involving the students and supporting them so very well. Best of luck to those students who are returning on March 11th, 2009.

As I have said before, these types of community collaborations, between educational institutions and the communities which they reside in, are nothing but win-win situations. The students (in any educational program) have an opportunity to work on real-life projects that most likely will be able to affect members of the community and invoke change, even if only at the smallest level. The communities involved have a chance to gain the ideas, input and opinions of the students, who are not only the youth of the communities but the people who will (hopefully) be the residents of the community in the future.

Echoing what GIS & Urban Planning students have been up to over the past weeks are two other stories.

The first involved the Graphic Design students at Fanshawe College and the design competition they were involved in sponsored and in collaboration with Nova Craft Canoe (London, Ontario). Read more about this story here: Tradition with a Twist

The other story which was in the news today (March 4th, 2009) involved the University of Western Ontario Engineering Students who participated in an annual contest to re-design a series of bridges (and other pieces of municipal infrastructure) across the City of London. As a contest that has been run for the past 12 years this design process allows the students to work with the community in order to achieve and end goal, much like what has been mentioned previously in this article. Read more about this story here: Real world is the test

Kevin Van Lierop is a part-time professor teaching in the GIS & Urban Planning program (and Landscape Design program) at Fanshawe College.