The Collaborative Campus Project

The final viewbook of the Collaborative Campus Project as it was published in August of 2010 is below:

It’s no secret that the Campus District has had a tumultuous past.

In order to better understand how the area came to be as it is, and in order to take its history into account as we envision and begin planning its future, the Collaborative Campus Project did some research.

Before it was dubbed the ‘Campus District’ in 2009, the area was known as ‘The St. Vincent’s Quadrangle Distict’.  But this is all recent history.

We wanted to find out what sort of identity this place had over the last century and how it has been shaped by the passing decades.

Anurag Saxena, Lead Researcher for the Collaborative Campus Project, set out to find answers to some of our questions by meeting with one of his esteemed professors from Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs (and Cleveland planning history buff), Dr. Richard Klein.
Read more »

An article about the Collaborative Campus Project was published on the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 website!  Excerpt from the article:

“The students are surveying neighbors, engaging with professionals in a dialogue about how the built environment can improve quality of life and sketching out solutions to issues of isolation and to promote a more a positive street scene.

The early results show one thing: These kids don’t carry all of the baggage of being told no—see their visions for bike routes, walking paths, gardens, dance programs, festivals and new housing. It’s a big goal: to redraw connections between a part of the city that the highway helped time forget.”

Marc Lefkowitz, the author of the article and Web Editor for GreenCityBlueLake, brings up an excellent point about the history of the Campus District and how it came to be so divided by car traffic.

Since the idea for the Collaborative Campus Project came out of the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Summit last year, the article mentions the project consultants who attended the Summit.  Click here to see all the other exceptional individuals who have contributed to the success of this project.  Read this post to learn more about how this project is connected to Sustainable Cleveland 2019.

To learn more about how the Campus District and this initiative have come along since the August presentation, visit the Collaborative Campus display at the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Summit this September 22-23.

{post by marianne}

Tuesday, August 3rd

The morning of the final presentation was inevitably frantic:

• A few of us were making last minute formatting and text edits to the proposal initiatives, a booklet soon to be in the hands of the Campus District Board members.
• With careful teamwork, we had to transport the 3-D maps across Tri-C’s campus to the auditorium.
• A bit of team tenseness could be heard as visual designers debated whether it was ok to make last minute alterations to the PowerPoint, in order to correct coloring glitches.
• Beside the stage, we trimmed and re-mounted the students’ rumpled scripts.
• We took multiple group photos, since of course after each one a missing team member would reappear.
• 20 minutes till show time, and a couple presenters still hadn’t arrived!

Read more »

Post by Stacey Cassidy, Lead Coordinator of the Collaborative Campus Project

As this project comes to a close, I am very excited about the end results of our proposal, but I find myself a little sad about disbanding the team. In a quick seven weeks, a very diverse group of people with a snapshot introduction was catapulted into a very complex community design/problem solving workflow.  While there have definitely been some moments of stress co-managing such a diverse team, it has been a very rewarding experience.

For starters: Wow! To get the opportunity to really work on a project that makes you actually feel like you’re making a difference in our great city has been amazing. Cleveland has received so much bad press in recent days. With the city plastered with “Believeland or LEAVEland?” billboards and other such messages it easy to become discouraged. It’s nice to be working for a district that takes the local community members into consideration. So often people are quick to rave about city issues and label a city a sinking ship. The Campus District Collaboration Project has been able to identify challenges within the district and turn them into opportunities. It’s created a very exciting workflow that can easily be adapted into a way of life. We have spent the last seven weeks filling that half empty glass. Painting our city canvas.

Photo by Julie Meade

Secondly, our Student Consultants are the true gem in this project. They have not only been our eyes, ears and voice of the community, but they have also exceeded our performance expectations. As teenagers, they face the daily challenges of defining their own identity, balancing the responsibilities of becoming and adult, and dealing with peer pressure. As residents in the community, they have the added stress of dealing with the social issues that exist due to the impoverished state of the district. These students have a very vast scope of life experiences. They come into work every morning with a whole slate of issues and we give them a laundry list of to do items, involve them in advanced theorizing and problem solving and expect them to complete daily assignments. Now that’s a mouthful.
Read more »

Monday, August 2nd

This morning our high school and college speakers ran through the final presentation three times, familiarizing themselves with the program and auditorium and practicing their public speaking skills: speak slowly, enunciate, engage the audience, be excited, and smile.

The entire team sat in the auditorium to see the third run-through.  While waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, Dasha and Jasmean used this down time to sing duets with the microphones; they were quite good!
Read more »

The culminating presentation of the Collaborative Campus Project team’s work over the course of the past seven weeks is finally here.  Come hear from both the professional and student consultants how they envision the transformation of the Campus District.

Photo by John Malanij

To say they have worked hard to reach this point would be an understatement.  The phraseology of many of the professional consultants included that, “they were building the ship while out at sea.”  In those seven weeks, group members were introduced to one another, they came up with a plan for how to proceed, they researched the Campus District by talking to local residents and business owners, they toured best practice neighborhoods, they drew dozens of maps, they designed, they designed some more, they taught and learned from one another, and now they are presenting their final proposal.

Come find out what all the fuss is about.

The Collaborative Campus Planning Project Presentation

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Design Team Presentation: 10:30 am

Q&A: 11-11:20 am

Reception: 11:30 am – Noon

Location: Cuyahoga Community College, Unified Technology Center, Room 140, 2415 Woodland Ave., Cleveland, OH 44115

{post by marianne}

Friday, July 30^th

As I mentioned in Monday’s blog post, we are presently in the “Falling Action” stage of our project’s storyline.  This phase is still focused toward our final goal—the presentation—but it has a calm ambiance centered on reflection and tying up loose ends.  The meat of our work had to be completely finalized on Tuesday, when we sent our view book and presentation materials to the printer in time to be ready for next week’s presentation.

This morning I met with students one-on-one to discuss their responses to this week’s reflection questions (see Tuesday’s blog), advising them on how to expand their answers and provide more detail about their specific involvement in our design process and their impressions of this summer’s experience.

Photo by Stacey Cassidy

Stacey led a quick full group session, in which she asked team members to share their favorite aspects of our project.  It’s uplifting to continuously hear positive feedback, especially from the high school students, many of whom seemed less than thrilled to start this summer job in June.
Read more »

Thursday, July 29^th

ELECTRICITY OUTAGE CAN’T STOP OUR ENERGY!!!

Most of us woke this morning to calls— repeating every 20 minutes for a couple hours—from Tri-C’s notification system, alerting us that the electricity was out at Tri-C’s Metro Campus.  No students, staff, or administrators were to report to work today.

That won’t stop our group’s impetus to the finish line.  The lead coordinators had a breakfast meeting at Cleveland State’s Viking Hall—where we eat lunch daily—and then everyone worked from home the rest of the day.

I was even more pleased to hear the students report that they used the extra time to rehearse their portions of Tuesday’s final presentation.  The work is all done, it’s just tying up any loose ends and preparing for Tuesday now.

-Alex, Day 32

Wednesday, July 27th

In addition to collecting students’ written reflections about their involvement in the Collaborative Campus Planning Project, lead coordinator Russell conducted video interviews with a handful of students to gain more insight into their impressions of the project.  He took students to various landmarks in the Campus District, where they expressed—on camera—their experiences this summer, personal topics of interest with the project, and hopes for the district’s future.  I encountered Russell in the studio hallway upon his return from the interviews; he was deeply moved and brightly inspired by the students’ thoughtful and heartening words.  This blog post is Russell’s account of the day.  It is not a script of the students’ remarks, but rather an illustration of Russell’s reactions to the students’ high performance and the positive atmosphere surrounding our project:

Photo by Charles Schick

Read more »