AU’S URBAN STUDIO REDESIGNING ALABAMA ONE TOWN AT A TIME

Faculty members from Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction are working to educate civic leaders and decision makers in small towns across Alabama about the benefit of good community planning and design. This initiative is the foundation of the School of Architecture’s Urban Studio, an outreach program that gives fifth-year students opportunities to pursue design in an urban setting and engage in community projects.

Based in downtown Birmingham, the Urban Studio has assisted more than 40 towns and communities throughout the state. One way the Studio has achieved this success is through the Your Town Alabama workshop.

Held each June, the workshops provide participants access to professional assistance and information regarding the application of planning and design to their respective communities’ needs.

Now in its ninth year, Your Town Alabama is already making a difference. Martha Cato, city clerk in Valley, Ala., first attended the workshop nine years ago and learned of the importance of the assets-based design process: evaluating a community’s assets and focusing design efforts around those resources. For officials in Valley, a town once centered around the booming textile industry, an assets-based plan meant capitalizing on the Chattahoochee River to increase eco-tourism and developing two of the town’s abandoned textile mills, located on the river, into future commercial and residential space.

This new vision for Valley was formalized following an intense four-day study that resulted in a charrette, or planning session, that involved collecting data from interviews, observations and discussion with Valley’s residents and leaders. The effort was led by Cheryl Morgan, professor of architecture at AU, and her students at the Urban Studio.

Because of its leaders’ willingness to embrace change in their community, Morgan said Valley has served as a “poster child” for the Urban Studio’s work during the past eight years.

“There is nothing that Valley would tell you that they could not do. Believing makes it so in Valley,” said Morgan, director of the Urban Studio.

The partnership has been mutually beneficial. Because of her experience with Your Town Alabama and AU’s Urban Studio, Cato said Valley now has a solid plan to reinvent itself, much like the other areas across the state that have benefited from working with the Urban Studio.

“We really think that the small towns in Alabama are one of our assets, especially as an economic asset that can begin to change our opportunities statewide,” Morgan said. For more information on the Urban Studio, visit www.cadc.auburn.edu/soa/urban-studio or contact Cheryl Morgan at morgace@auburn.edu or (205) 323-3592.