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An examination of the University of Akron's newest residence hall, and some of the planning that took place to make it happen.

The days of bond-funded campus buildings and two-dimensional architectural drawings are drawing to a close at many public universities. The money, for now, is available through public-private partnerships, and plans are made in three dimensions, making for an easier sell to top decision makers.

Campus construction, particularly residence halls, starts with projections meant to keep a college or university years—sometimes decades—ahead of student demand. Those projections, once passed along the campus’s chain of command, tell the mathematical story: We’ll need more dorms, or we won’t.

That’s how it started at the University of Akron (UA), a 220-acre campus with 29,000 students.

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Begins with the perspective of its introduction to its first students. They learn this night that the New Community College (officials want to give it a catchier name someday, ideally that of a generous benefactor) would be unlike any they have heard of.

What they do not learn is how much will be riding on it. Unknown to them, these students have applied to be test subjects in a multimillion-dollar experiment in how to fix what ails community colleges. CUNY has designed from scratch a new structure and new curriculum that it hopes will greatly improve students’ chances of earning an associate degree and transferring to a four-year college. Experts across the country are watching closely, hopeful that the college can serve as a national model.

The experiment raises many questions, of course. The most pressing may be whether its resource-intensive approach can be carried out on a large scale at a reasonable cost. And long before a single class was to be held, faculty members and administrators battled over what was best for students.

These are responses to a recent question on SCUP’s LinkedIn group. You may want to contribute to it?

The question: “Can someone recommend good master planning precedents for campuses that are more wooded, where the traditional collegiate green is not the best answer? I have looked at Wellesley, Mills, UC Santa Cruz and Woods Hole Quissett Campus. Surely there are others?” And some of the responses already:

• Neither Indiana or Kansas have traditional collegiate greens, and both have wooded areas.
• JCU and Griffith in Australia are good examples too (not woods but more jungle like - same theory can be applied though)
• I would look at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. Both have significant wooded areas on their campuses as part of the overall campus master plan. Here at Wisconsin, about a third (300 acres) of our main campus is within what we call the "Lakeshore Nature Preserve" which is mostly wooded as well. We have a master plan for the latter to manage vegetation and cultural resources along with academic research and outreach activities.
• Lewis & Clark College outside Portland, OR certainly comes to mind.
• You might also want to look at the master planned development of the UC Santa Cruz campus, set on a hill in a Redwood forest overlooking the city and ocean beyond. It was initially planned in 1964 and has undergone more recent planning updates. There are some very distinctive elements in their development guidelines. The campus architect Emeritus. Frank Zwart, FAIA, might be able to help you.
• Smith College. Arboretum master plan by Towers Golde.
• Swarthmore is largely arboretum. Guilford College in North Carolina has a tree filled center and large forested area.

One of the many good things about the society's annual conference is the opportunity to learn from recipients of SCUP's awards, either in formal professional development sessions or more informal settings.

The SCUP's 2011 Excellence Award recipients have been announced. Congratulations to you all.

We're taking this opportunity to once more bring out information about the 2010 recipients, via SCUP's 2010 Tribute to Excellence newspaper. It is a useful resource that some may overlook, as are the web pages about the recipients. 

This workshop is offered on July 23 near Washington, DC.

The SCUPers listed as authors of this post will be repeating their renowned pre-conference workshop this summer on Saturday, July 23, at National Harbor, Maryland, outside of Washington, DC., at SCUP–46. SCUP–46 is the Society for College and University Planning's annual, international, integrated planning conference and idea marketplace.

Please turn your volume up, as this was the first-ever such SCUP interview and our microphone was a little far from the workshop presenters. Also, this is just after they spent an entire day of heavy interaction with a room full of SCUPers in the workshop, so they're just a little tired here. 

Below is the abstract for this year's workshop, and here is a link to the SCUP–46 workshops page:

Fast Company magazine has a section devoted to the intersection of design and business. In it, Jack L. Robbins writes about Active Design. Here is, also, the Wikipedia article on Active Living by Design.

Given the size of the nation's obesity problem, intentionally integrating active design elements into every campus facilities and landscape planning process - especially in areas of student services, housing, pedestrian circulation, and so forth - seems a no-brainer. We've seen campuses to things that align with this philosophy, although unintentionally, or for other reasons. If you know of campus planning that has incorporated this in an integrated fashion, please share information about it in the comments, below, or in SCUP's LinkedIn group. Thanks.

Here's more from the Fact Company article:

Environments that are unwalkable are boring, feel vast and scaleless, and present blank unvaried views. Contrast a vast parking lot with a lively café-lined street and it’s clear what makes an environment walkable.

Variety and stimulation is especially important for the young digerati who have grown up in a wired world that brings a universe of entertainment and social interaction to them through a screen and a keyboard.

To motivate the under-25 crowd to use their legs—instead of their thumbs—to explore the world, the real world must compete with the digital one in terms of stimulation. Dense, multi-use urban environments with a variety of offerings can provide the stimulating surroundings that encourage walking and real-life social interaction.

Consider visiting and contributing to SCUP's LinkedIn discussion about if and how college and university campuses may be inventorying and valuing their trees, and how integrated that is to master planning and overall planning work. We're looking for people to share current best practices.

It turns out that a campus tree has more value, and more kinds of value, than most people would think. A 2006 study of the value of New York City's tree inventory is one of a number of such studies, reflecting a growing number of institutional entities which consider trees to have both capital and operational value. If your campus is planning in an integrated way, in fact, it makes good sense to understand your tree inventory and its value to the institution.

• The article linked-to here, mentions i-Tree, a free software suite that lets people managing tree inventories to do so while taking many important variables into account.
• If you have an interest in campus heritage landscapes, you should visit SCUP's Campus Heritage Planning Network where, among other resources, there are several reports on campus-wide heritage landscape planning.

Trees provide solar reflection for energy savings, clean air pollutants, and intercept water to reduce stress on storm water runoff. New York figured that measuring the value of its 600,000 trees in this way results in a savings for the city of nearly $120 per tree, annually. Figure in aesthetics and things like property value, public health (visible trees reduce the length of hospital stays), stress, and so forth, and another $90 per tree per year in value brings the total to $210 per tree.

In New York City, that is a total of $122M in benefits from a department of the city that spends less than $15M on trees and forestry staff, resulting in an annual net positive value to the city of more than $100M, from urban trees.

SCUP's LinkedIn group is growing, and is now beyond the size it needs to be, in order for real community to develop there.

A post in January by Michael Radner of Radner Design Associates asked colleagues for images and other information about campuses that have turned streets into landscaped or shared vehicular/pedestrian spaces. To date there have been 28 responses to Michael's query, many informative on the topic.

Below is a summary of the discussion thus far, by me. (Note that one new volunteer opportunity for SCUP members is finding, starting, participating in such conversations, and summarizing them in this manner It's a great way to dive into a topic for professional gain, and then share it with others.) 

Among other things, we learned that if you search for "woonerf," you find that term describes the concept, in the Netherlands and also in other parts of Europe, of a "street where pedestrians and cyclists have legal priority over motorists."

Both the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, with the cooperation of the City of Toronto, are piloting a one-year street closure on each of the campuses. It's part of the Toronto Walking Strategy. The University of Toronto's is called Willcocks Commons, and is partially pictured at left.

San Jose State University was part of a partnership that redeveloped West San Carlos Street, in San Jose, into a very much more pedestrian-friendly environment. Here's a brochure (PDF).

Here's a photo of St. Thomas University's Student Life Mall.

There are a lot of nice photos here of Texas State University. Scrolling down you will find images of the location where the university of turning what was Concho Street into the Concho Green landscape mall. SCUPer Nancy Nusbaum, an AVP at Texas State, shares the following:

"The two projects I would have mentioned are the Concho Green (closure of a street and parking to students living in nearby residence halls) and the North LBJ Bus Loop. Both have been highly successful in that we have received many favorable comments. We have conducted two surveys of the nearby student residents on the use of Concho Green since opening. You see students on the Concho Green every day - studying, exercising, visiting, playing, etc... We also have plans to close Bobcat Trail, another street in the core of campus, to convert it to a pedestrian mall. The project is currently waiting funding but will most likely begin in 2012. The schematic design is gorgeous."

In 1996, Worcester Polytechnic converted West Street to a pedestrian plaza. This nice, informal summertime tour of that campus offers some nice photos of the plaza, which is described as:

Reunion Plaza is pretty much the hub of WPI because it’s a relaxing gathering place and is right in front of the Campus Center. This part of campus actually used to be West Street not too long ago, and cut right through WPI to the other side. I think somewhere around 1997/98, WPI reclaimed it from the city and closed it off so that all of their pedestrian traffic would be safer. That’s also around the time the Campus Center was being built as well.

At Georgia Tech, the Fifth Street Bridge over I-75/I-85 connects the campus with the Midtown neighborhood. As noted here by the National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse, bicycle and pedestrian users of the bridge enjoy the stark contrast with the 14 lanes of traffic rushing under them. Maybe they feel like an Elk feels, while crossing a natural wildlife overpass (image at right).

Bucknell University landscaped over a former parking area and through way between its engineering and science buildings, creating a nice entrance for the Engineering Building.

Locust Walk, at the University of Pennsylvania, is listed in the Project for Public Spaces "Great Walks."

Berks Mall at Temple University was renamed Polett Walk, garnering some Facebook opposition. One post suggested that Temple was currently creating an "interior pedestrian walk," but we have found no further details about that.

Winona State University has, over time, developed from a city block transportation infrastructure to more of an open, pedestrian-oriented campus. At this link, to a student project, you can view old and more current aerial campus images, and also some geographical "morphs" over time.

Arizona State University also, over quite some time, eliminated nearly all streets on campus. 

At Ohio Wesleyan University, the James A. Young Memorial Walkway, known as the "JAYwalk" is currently undergoing an upgrade using funds (PDF) from its Class of 1961's fifty year reunion gift.

North Park University's master plan won a state ASLA award, with VOA, for a master landscape plan, partly described this way: 

'The landscape architect envisioned a circulation system of clear visual and physical links to bring the disparate elements of the university together into a single, unified place. This was accomplished by a series of actions which included converting a disruptive city street and parallel alley into major pedestrian corridors.'

SCUP LinkedIn Group Conversation Participants as of February 1, 2011

Michael Radner, Radner Design Associates

Todd Maxey, Associated Spec Consultants

Jennifer Adams Peffer, University of Toronto

Donald Graves, Graves Engineering

Niraj Dangoria, Stanford University

Trent Rush, TBG Partners

Frederic Mulligan, Cutler Associates

Howard Wertheimer, Georgia Tech

Jeff Fullerton, Acentech

Nancy Nusbaum, Texas State University

Jill Morelli, University of Washington

James Goblirsch, HGA

Jaime Pumphrey, Sterling Barnett Little, Inc.

Lisa Macklin, Comprehensive Facilities Planning, Inc.

John Kellar, Kellars Associates

Conrad Fink, Moody Bible Institute

Duke University's mission statement has not been amended for ten years. Its current strategic plan, Making a Difference: The Strategic Plan for Duke University, was produced in 2006. A series of executive summaries of departmental plans is part of the website and an appendix to the document. A link is also provided to a Duke resource on its campus planning.

Duke's plan is only one of about a thousand plans in Links From SCUP to College and University Plans, a Web-based resource for SCUP members. SCUP members can access the links in a sortable online spreadsheet that also includes useful data fields like Carnegie Class, Enrollment, FICE, Unit ID, and so forth. 

If you use it, please tell us how we can improve it: terry.calhoun@scup.org.

Interesting concept: Redfields to Greenfields. Could your institution find some value in turning formerly densely-populated urban areas into green spaces?

In the language of urbanism, “greenfields” usually means rural land at the metropolitan edge, where suburbia metastasizes. “Brownfields” are former industrial sites that could be redeveloped once they are cleaned of pollution. “Greyfields” — picture vast empty parking lots — refer to moribund shopping centers.

Recently another such locution was coined: “redfields,” as in red ink, for underperforming, underwater and foreclosed commercial real estate. Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other distressed, outmoded or undesirable built places: failed office and apartment complexes, vacant retail strips and big-box stores, newly platted subdivisions that died aborning in the crash.

Now comes “Redfields to Greenfields,” a promising initiative aimed at reducing the huge supply of stricken commercial properties while simultaneously revitalizing the areas around them.