UM’s Knight Program in Community Building at the School of Architecture helps neighborhoods and townships rethink and improve the way they are structured, conducting intensive one-week design and planning sessions where ideas and smart-growth strategies are proposed to help neighborhoods combat problems of economic and physical decay and suburban sprawl. The planning sessions, called charrettes, are typically held in cities that fall within the circulation area of Knight Ridder, the newspaper publishing chain affiliated with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funds UM’s Knight Program. Community-sponsored fellowships also are bringing charrettes to non-Knight communities.

team of 12 Knight fellows—mid-career professionals in architecture, planning, community development, engineering, and journalism—collaborates with School of Architecture faculty and graduate students for a week on a vision for a community’s revitalization. The process is akin to a traveling architecture and consulting firm, with experts who bring in drafting equipment, computers, maps, telephones, and copy and fax machines. They create detailed maps, drawings, and schematics of the neighborhood. Knight fellows tour the project site long before the charrette begins, meeting with community leaders and studying the area’s roadways, sidewalks, buildings, and parks. Charrettes are as much about civic engagement as design work. Local government and elected officials, business owners, and citizens ranging from the schoolteacher to the corner grocer also attend the sessions, voicing their concerns and providing input on design issues.

“A comprehensive planning process might go on for a year, and to the average citizen, it never seems to have closure,” says Charles Bohl, director of the Knight Program and a research associate professor of architecture. “Charrettes cut to the chase. They get everyone at the table at the same time, and they communicate ideas through a visual language that the public can understand: ‘Here’s a vision for the old muffler shop that’s now going to be a walkway to the community lake. Is this what you had in mind?’”

When the design workshop is completed, citizens and city officials are left with an extensive written report on how to improve the livability of their town, block by block. The charrette team often uses principles of New Urbanism—a reaction to sprawl and urban disinvestment that emphasizes creation of human-scale, walkable communities.

“Citizens feel empowered. They have a clear vision of where they want to go and how they can achieve it,” says Jaime Correa, M.B.A. ’00, Knight Professor in Community Building, whose Suburb and Town Design graduate students also take part in the charrettes.

Beall’s Hill in 2001 was the site of the Knight Program’s first charrette. More than recommendations for physical change, charrette suggestions included a slew of policy and management improvements, among them bolstering community policing with bicycle cops, establishing a trolley bus service, and rebuilding the Hazel Street Bridge. Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning officials included many of the ideas into an official master plan for Beall’s Hill’s revitalization, and today phase one of the plan is well under way.

“The whole process was the first time that people in this town really got a glimmer that something different could be possible,” says longtime Macon resident Peter Brown, director of Mercer University’s Center for Service Learning and Community Development and a member of the inaugural class of Knight fellows who staged the Beall’s Hill charrette. “It reminded me of a barn raising, where the whole neighborhood comes together, the women cook, the boys tote, and the men build, and by the end of the day, by gosh, you’ve got a barn.”

Since Beall’s Hill, UM’s Knight Program in Community Building has conducted other public design workshops.

In the Evergreen-Eastridge community of San Jose, California, the challenge for the 2002 team of UM Knight fellows was not how to lift a community out of physical decay but how to help it adjust to rapid growth around it. Swept up in the economic boom of nearby Silicon Valley, the area had experienced a dramatic rise in property values, and its citizens, many of them immigrants, needed more affordable housing options. They needed alternative transportation, and they wanted new facilities that could serve as meeting places and cultural symbols for the Latino, Asian, African-American, and Native American groups that lived there. Key proposals coming out of the design study included: building a mix of affordable housing types, introducing a light rail transit system, and constructing a community center that would house after-school programs and a health clinic and serve as a venue for cultural events.

In Coatesville, Pennsylvania, described by Bohl as the “poorest city in the richest county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” the 2003 Knight Program charrette focused on helping this old steel mill town reinvent its downtown for the 21st century.

In Duluth, Minnesota, a community of almost 90,000 people on Lake Superior, the city continues to undergo more than $190 million in construction projects. A major expansion of its hospital district is under way, and a new Sheraton Hotel with condo space is being built near the city’s Greysolon Plaza. Economic vitality has followed, with an unemployment rate that dipped to 3.9 percent late last year. That’s a far cry from only a few years ago, when the community underwent a complete transformation from an industrial-based economy to a retail/service-sector economy.

“That transition was very painful,” recalls Tom Cotruvo, executive director of the Duluth Economic Development Authority and a 2004-2005 Knight fellow. “At one point in the 1980s, we had the highest unemployment rate in the nation.”

The city’s two largest private employers, St. Mary’s/Duluth Clinic Health System and St. Luke’s Hospital, are both undergoing major growth, so a primary focus of the 2005 charrette there was the need to study the hospital district’s impact on the city. One of those charrette participants, School of Architecture Professor Joanna Lombard, conducted an analysis of how a health care setting in Duluth could support healing. “If your wound is healthy, that’s great. But what about when you have to park in a hospital garage, spend a half-hour trying to find your way, and your family has no place to walk when they’re waiting,” says Lombard, who employed principles of New Urbanism in her design proposals.

UM’s Knight Program in Community Building recently announced its 2005-2006 class of fellows. They come from places like Austin, Detroit, Kansas City, Miami, and Washington, D.C. They will conduct conferences and independent research, take part in lectures, and eventually select the site of the program’s next charrette.

“There needs to be a broader understanding of proactive community building,” says School of Architecture Dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. “Generally, the public has not been involved in making communities or cities. But there’s been a lot more demand on the part of residents and stakeholders to participate in decision-making. You can go to government hearings and say ‘no’ to things or support things. But if you want to help create them or guide them, it’s difficult.”

The Knight Program is changing that.