Qualify for your MOJO ribbon by reading a Planning article this fall, then commenting on it. Find out more. Sign up now.

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.

Even “socialist” Europe doesn’t have the functional equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): An American student goes abroad in a wheelchair. And he’s making a movie about it:

The name of the film is Wheelchair Diaries: One Step Up. "One step up" means that everybody with a disability has that one step up they have to take. It's not a flight of stairs, it's not a $5-million dollar remodeling. It's a piece of plywood that allows them to get up. We all deal with it in different ways. But my message is that we need to realize where that one step is, and put that ramp up. That will make the world of difference for physical accessibility and social inclusion.

You may not have yet read this Planning for Higher Education article from October 2010, so we've posted it here for you, and added this link to an experimental SCUP beta semantic analysis of the article, by Michael Rudden of DiMella Schaffer. Scroll down past the image to see a few bullets from the analysis.

Enjoy! And please share with campus colleagues. They don't often get to see what's in SCUP's journal. Thanks. 

P.S. Note this related SCUP workshop on July 23, near Washington, DC., Capital Projects in a Campus Environment: Organizing and Running a Successful Project Team.

• A review of ongoing campus facilities planning projects, coupled with a review of more than 30 recent campus master planning requests for proposals and the relevant literature, indicates that colleges and universities are finding innovative ways to do more with less in response to this challenging economic environment.
• By integrating their facilities planning with current strategic, academic, and financial plans-a key tenet of the Society for College and University Planning's publication A Guide to Planning for Change (Norris and Poulton 2008)-these institutions are better positioned to proactively evaluate and respond to economic challenges and turn them into opportunities.
• Integrating education technology planning with academic, financial, and facilities planning enables colleges and universities to explore and evaluate the potential impact of alternative pedagogical and technological approaches to delivering educational content.
• These distressed properties are being acquired by nearby institutions that plan to convert them (in some cases in partnership with developers) into, respectively, a hub for a new research venture, a technology education center, continuing education classrooms, a branch-campus expansion, an administrative office building, and short-term "swing space" with parking during campus renovation.
• These strategies include deferring or downsizing planned construction projects, using existing instructional space more intensively, reducing facilities operating costs by closing facilities, improving campus sustainability, and reducing information technology (IT) expenses.

You can read the original article, MIT Borrows for the Long Run, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The following is a new kind of SCUP Summary of the article. Please let us know your thoughts, terry.calhoun@scup.org, about this kind of summary.

betaSCUP Observations

betaSCUP Summary

betaSCUP Key Terms Map

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. 

In this article from Planning for Higher Education, Claire L. Turcotte, a member of the research team, writes about ten themes commonly reported back to the Getty Foundation from the 86 campuses which undertook campus heritage preservation planning initiatives.

• Architectural style
• Importance of landscape
• Stewardship of the land
• Adaptive Reuse
• Mid-20th century buildings
• Importance of additional design elements
• Use of students
• Development of systems used to evaluate and prioritize landscapes and buildings

• middle colleges,
• a Suffolk University restoration, 
• mission driven planning,
• UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center,
• landscape urbanism,
• Gordon College science center,
• a new housing project at URI,
• taking stock of existing buildings,
• campus heritage, and more.

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.

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