Reprinted with permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette. All rights reserved.

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Designing Northampton's future

By THE DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE
Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

You are invited to join with fellow citizens, business owners and public officials in a creative exercise that will begin this Sunday at 7 p.m. Design Northampton Week offers a unique opportunity for the community to come together and develop a shared vision of our future. Everyone is invited to attend.

The University of Notre Dame Graduate Urban Design Studio will engage us in a week-long process of conversation and drawing, looking at sustainability and city planning in a new way - through the lens of urban design. These citizen-based events can be great fun and transformative for a community.

Graduate students from Notre Dame, under the guidance of Professor Philip Bess, will show us new ways to think about design and planning issues that have confounded us in the past. They will suggest solutions that we may have never considered. By seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, we can come to see ourselves differently.

While they come with no preconceived agenda for Northampton, the Notre Dame team does have a particular design philosophy, one that favors traditional place-making as it has been practiced for thousands of years, in compact, walkable, mixed-use community centers. These are the same principles that underlie the Sustainable Northampton plan.

The Notre Dame team is not coming to tell us what to do, but rather to engage with us in an extended conversation about how to apply principles of traditional community design in an age where the automobile plays a significant role, but where that role may well be reduced due to global climate change, the need to shrink our carbon footprint, and the reality of higher fuel prices. They will do this not only in words, but more importantly in pictures, providing visual images of what we discuss. There is no way to know in advance what they will produce, but whatever it is, it will be a gift to our city, which we are free to use or not as we see fit.

Design Northampton Week begins on Sunday at the Northampton Senior Center on Conz Street, where Professor Bess will give an opening presentation on how traditional urbanism supports sustainability. He will also describe the week ahead. Design Northampton Week will conclude on Saturday, Sept. 13, at 4 p.m. with a final presentation by the student team. Between those dates, there will be numerous opportunities for citizens to interact with each other and the design team at the new A.P.E. Gallery Space on Main Street. A schedule for the week is posted on the Design Northampton Week Web site: http://northamptondesignforum.blogspot.com.

Those attending will discuss the work in progress and watch it develop, viewing drawings and providing comments and suggestions that will inform the next day's work. The first part of the week will focus primarily on input to the team about planning issues in Northampton. The latter part of the week, from Tuesday evening on, will be spent on intensive design work, with twice-daily public meetings to discuss the work as it progresses. This is a chance for citizens of Northampton to get inside the design process, watch it unfold, and help shape its outcome. There is no preconceived plan here - the process is open, and we'll make it up as we go. The parts of the city where the design team focuses its attention will emerge from the discussion itself.

Professor Bess is a nationally prominent urban design expert, known for his collaborative work with communities. The Notre Dame Graduate Urban Design Studio conducted a similar project in Cooperstown, N.Y., last fall, which received rave reviews from Cooperstown's mayor and other public officials, who have since begun moving forward on implementing the Notre Dame team's recommendations. Bess is perhaps best-known to the general public for spearheading the successful effort to save Boston's Fenway Park, working with neighborhood groups and design professionals when the iconic ballpark was threatened with demolition.

The success of Design Northampton Week depends upon a good turnout from Northampton's citizens with a range of views about our city, including business owners, institutional leaders, neighborhood groups, environmental advocates, public officials, and anyone else interested in helping to design our future. For those who participate, it is especially important to attend the opening presentation, where Bess will explain the event more fully and answer questions about it. If you cannot attend on Sunday, we hope that you will watch the video of it on NCTV, Channel 15.

The cost of bringing the Notre Dame Urban Design Studio to Northampton is underwritten entirely by donations of private citizens, organizations and businesses. We need your help. To make a tax-deductible contribution, please send a check to A.P.E. Ltd. at A.P.E, 126 Main St., Northampton, MA, 01060. Please write "Notre Dame Design" on the memo line of your check. Thanks for your support and participation.

Joel Russell is an urban planner and land use attorney with a national practice based in Northampton. He chairs the Northampton Design Forum. Gordon Thorne is an artist and founder/director of Available Potential Enterprises Ltd. (A.P.E.), which ran the arts programming on the top floor of Thornes for 30 years until the building was sold in 2006. He currently co-directs, with Lisa Thompson, A.P.E.'s new space at Window, 126 Main St.