The Role of the University | Nov 7th at 2:57pm
One of the key goals of this conference is to draft a manifesto on where urban design education must go in the future. Tomorrow, we will sit down as a group and parse this question. I’m going to jump the gun here and suggest one of the answers. Universities need to be more than just good neighbors, they need to become advocates for and partners in creating a sustainable city. The university must become the idea lab, the researcher, and the generator for the local community.
You can see this already happening in several instances. David Orr talked this morning about the plans at Oberlin College to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood with renewable energy sources, living systems from John Todd, new cultural containers, and infrastructure. More than just opening up their campus to the city, they are extending the boundaries of their work into the community to change the landscape.
I just got out of a session on engineering and product design and Robert Harris of ENVIRON and a professor at Princeton talked about a nonprofit in Trenton called Isles. Founded in 1981 by a group of Princeton students, Isles works with local residents to foster community planning, financial self-reliance, education, real estate development, and environment and community health.
They are now developing a physical Center for Environmental and Energy Training, which will teach people how to do energy audits, weatherize homes, and install photovoltaic panels—the kind of Green Collar jobs that Van Jones espouses. Harris’ students are working with Isles to help renovate this mill building to LEED silver. It will house the nonprofit’s offices as well as the green collar job training center. “It will be an example to all of Trenton as to how the rehabilitation of such buildings has to occur,” Harris said. “We can’t bulldoze them under and fill up landfills.”
“My class is now working with the design team. It will be a teaching tool,” he added.
Universities are ideally positioned to play a role in providing research and design services, true, but more than that, students can be an excellent conduit for community buy in. I spoke with Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at Georgia Tech, and she told me that students have a way of diffusing heated meetings where residents bump up against designers and planners. Student engagement actually mitigates angst. “They have no horse in the race,” she said, so people tend to listen to what they have to say.
I will also throw out another challenge to this group as they think about the new curriculum. Don’t forget public education. Anyone who has read the report Rising Above the Gathering Storm about the state of science, technology, engineering, and math education in the United States cannot help but be alarmed. We are spending more on tort litigation in this country than we are on scientific research. Our students are not prepared to address the emerging needs of our increasingly technical world and our curricula is not engaging them in real-world problem solving. How can we start to bring design education into the public school system in a real way?
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture and design for publications like The New York Times Magazine, Architect, and Metropolis. In addition to her own blog, Urban Palimpsest, Dickinson is a regular contributor to the Metropolis blog, P/O/V.
