A group of students at SUNY-ESF is getting hands-on experience while giving back to their community.

The Center for Community Design Research at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry has teamed up with the city of Auburn, New York to prepare a master plan for the improvement of parks and playgrounds throughout the city. The CCDR is an outreach program within the Department of Landscape Architecture at SUNY-ESF. The center assists various communities in generating plans for the development of parks and other recreational areas.

Maren King, director of the CCDR, said the center has been in contact with the city of Auburn since the summer, and students began working on the project in October. She anticipates they will work on the project through May or June.

“The main goal is to prepare a master plan that the city can use to guide decisions about parks in terms of types of improvements, management and maintenance,” King said. “It’s going to provide a framework for their decisions.”

The CCDR represents the aspect of nature design in which stakeholders take part in the creative process, said Douglas Johnston, chair of the department of landscape architecture at SUNY-ESF. Landscape architects identify the needs of people and design with those needs in mind.

“Each person has different needs and desires — different activities they like to do,” Johnston said. “Landscape architects design to make it possible for those different uses to occur within the same place.”

The CCDR has worked on numerous projects since its creation in 1999, including the Canal Landing Park in Fayetteville, Onondaga Park and the revitalization of Main Street in the Village of East Syracuse, according to SUNY-ESF’s website.

After the CCDR works to refine the city’s needs, the city takes the plans to an outside consultant in order to make the physical changes, Johnston said.

King is currently teaching a class in which students have begun the process of community engagement for the Auburn project. Students held two workshops to meet with 30 Auburn community members to try to understand their values, King said. They collected data on how community members define their neighborhoods, which parks they use and how often they use them.

King added that the students are in the process of documenting and analyzing the data they collected, which they will then translate into design.

“Our students learn a lot about communication through interacting with community members,” King said. “They also learn about documentation and analysis.”

The students bring a different viewpoint and understanding to the community projects, King said.

Johnston attributes this to the fact that most students are not biased — they are not constrained by politics or local knowledge. He said they often develop useful ideas that go on to be implemented.

The framework produced for the Auburn project will suit a vision for production 10 years into the future, King said.

Most students involved are from the landscape architecture program, but students from the environmental studies program at SUNY-ESF and from the School of Architecture at Syracuse University occasionally participate in CCDR projects as well, King said.

On working on the Auburn project, Sally Lee, a Master of Science in Architecture student at SU, said, “I have never done anything that relates directly to people and the community, so it was a really good opportunity.”

Published on November 29, 2015 at 9:05 pm

Contact Taylor: tnwatson@syr.edu