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Student project to revitalize a local area wins award

Written by Alanna Quillen

Thursday, 30 October 2008 09:19 PM

Four urban planning master’s students have a vision for Hemphill Street in south Fort Worth. The historic strip south of downtown suffers from low employment, dilapidated buildings and few shopping complexes.

The students want to bring community organizations and residents together and create a business corridor that provides more office space, retail inventory and educational systems to help create and maintain jobs.

Sounds like a plan.

The American Planning Association thought so and gave the students its 2008 APA Texas Chapter Student Planning Award.

Douglas Cooper, Douglas McDonald, Donna Moore and Christina Sebastian won the award with their project, “In-Between, Connecting People and Places.”

“We all took this project very seriously,” McDonald said. “We were creating a plan that affected hundreds of people who lived around the Hemphill area.”

The team competed against schools including Texas A&M and UT-Austin for the award. It’s granted to students each year for an outstanding plan or study.

The students had to create a plan in their Urban Revitalization class for a one-mile section of commercial strip experiencing economic and physical decline.

“We wanted to create a plan for a historic part of Fort Worth that the city could not only implement, but would also set Hemphill Street apart from other revitalized urban areas,” Cooper said.

The team spent several days examining the site, taking business inventories and interviewing residents, McDonald said.

As APA members, Cooper and McDonald sent their project to be nominated for the award.

“I don’t think we were really prepared to win anything, because it was just for a class project,” McDonald said. “We wanted to be able to showcase it to the state of Texas.”

To submit the project, the team obtained letters of recommendation from Fort Worth city officials and the Southside Historical District, along with several other supporting documents.

“I knew our team put together a special plan,” Cooper said. “One that focused on both conventional planning practices as well as creative tools that could help generate redevelopment along Hemphill Street.”

The APA will award the team at its annual conference on Feb. 6 in El Paso.

“It was nice to see their work recognized,” said Carl Grodach, School of Urban and Public Affairs assistant professor.

“I felt the students’ work demonstrated an awareness of the complexity of planning for the different communities that live and work in the project area.”

The award also gives the group a chance for the national title and a feature in Planning magazine, the APA monthly publication.

“This is the profession we are all pursuing,” McDonald said. “It is good to know that what we have done here can be used for future projects.”
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 20 January 2009 03:53 PM )

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