Making Westwood, Making Ourselves:

An Urban Neighborhood Revitalization Engagement Project

Research Team

Introduction & Purpose

Design Influences

Ideation & Creation

Making Westwood, Making Ourselves Exhibit Boards

Implementation

Reflection and Future Study

Acknowledgements

References

NACE Career Readiness Competencies

Research Compliance Protocols

Welcome! This site details the process and production of Abijah Bing's project for the 2026 Undergraduate Research Forum, Making Westwood, Making Ourselves.

Research Team

Abijah Bing, Class of '26

Individualized Studies:

Community Architecture & Non-profit Leadership

Andrew Busch, Ph.D.

Western College for Individualized Studies

Jeff Kruth, M.Arch.

Department of Architecture & Interior Design

Introduction & Purpose

Urban revitalization is a complex problem that architects, city planners, and urban designers deal with regularly. Community-led approaches are often appealing, yet often flicker out before they have reached their objectives. Previous studies show that lack of engagement with community-based neighborhood revitalization (CBNR) from urban residents is one of the reason that CBNR interventions don’t happen or ultimately fail (Rupp et al., 2020). In historically-disinvested communities where neighborhoods are most often in need of revitalization, understanding communal trauma and social isolation are crucial to the health of a CBNR project (Taylor & de la Sablonnière, 2013).

My social action project is an exhibit-meets-community project that seeks to educate, unify, and inspire Westwood residents of Dayton, Ohio, to advocate for their community’s revitalization needs through the Westwood Neighborhood Association. The interactive storytelling designed into this exhibit bolsters community participation in CBNR by creating a sense of unity and developing a presence in, identity within, and attachment to physical space.

Design Influences

4 Museum displays of various colors with large white text on the side reading city names along with smaller unreadable text. The displays are fabric canvas stretched on metal poles forming a above-the-head-like maze for museum visitors.

Climates of Inequality by MTWTF & presented by Humanities Action Lab. This traveling exhibition inspired the spatial design of the Westwood exhibit. It was important to the exhibition that the visitor feels “inside” the story.

a hallway with 3 metal standing frames with large artistic pictures spread down the length of the hallway. Photographs are suspended by wires which gives the appearance that they are floating.

Modular Exhibit Stands designed by Flare Expo Designs. These wire & frame stands were the primary influence in the display method used in the Westwood exhibit.

A girl leans down to place a round sticker with handwriting on a tall wooden board. The board is apart of a futuristic outdoor seating furniture. The board is covering in large white stickers with questions and smaller colorful stickers with responses.

The Confluence by Team Zac Feltoon Design. This outdoor furniture, designed for the Better Block “Creating Connections” competition. This inspired the idea of an asynchronous conversation through stickers, a key interactivity in this exhibit.

a white board with evenly-spaced pegs and black labels. Between the pegs are different colors of string creating a web across the board. All the strings end at a seperated peg on the right side of the board. Each string ends with a white tag, creating a bundle of these tags around this right-most peg.

An Architecture Student Progect by Sydney Marcum. This activity inspired the activity associated with the Well-Being Section of the exhibit.

Ideation & Creation

Collaboration. Ideas were created by conversation with the Westwood Neighborhood Association & the Dayton Collaboratory, an urban design non-profit. I also worked on a team of three to create & build this exhibit.
Narrative Design. What & how people’s stories are told can transform engagement and retention of information. The exhibit tells a positive, yet realistic history and story of the Westwood neighborhood through 4 focuses: well-being, community, economics, and youth engagement.
Interactive Story-building. 4 of 12 exhibit boards were dedicated to interactivities for participants to include their stories and experience of their neighborhood. Communication stickers were also provided to allow asynchronous conversation to happen between visitors.
Exhibit Construction. Ideation began in a Rhino 3D model of the Westwood library. The final design consisted of 4 3-sided aspen frames fashioned with tensioning cables with turnbuckles and coroplast boards.

Making Westwood, Making Ourselves Exhibit Boards

Implementation

a picture of the Well Being section of the exhibit. On the left, there is the activity board with a few strings between the pegs on the board. On the Left is the informational boards.

a head to toe picture of the wooden frame exhibit with boards attached to the frame. People surround it on all sides and a man and woman stand at the front doing an interview.

The exhibit on the day of the Opening Ceremony.

The Economic section activity included written and drawn ideas for possible new businesses in the neighborhood.

The Well Being Section activity, "Weaving Westwood Wellness" became a matrix of how residents would like to live in their community & what a health community really is.

A map of westwood with color-coded instructions. Several push pins are scattered all over the map, with many clustered at the elementary school and commercial district.

The Community section activity, "Our Streets, Our Stories" was the most popular and was the favorite activity from participants.

Reflection and Future Study

Each activity received participation. The Community section received the most input. The Economic section received the least input. I believe this is due in part because of the complexity of the activities. Activities that are more straightforward and quick are usually more successful. The communication stickers were not used besides 3 that I found on the youth board. In hindsight, I would have made the stickers more apparent as a function.

After interviewing city & neighborhood leaders, the exhibit started momentum in the neighborhood association & helped residents experience a connection to place & sense of unity. Jonathan Johnson, a Community Engagement Specialist with the city of Dayton, mentioned the benefit of having an exhibit like this in the schools, which I think is a great idea. The exhibit was created to include youths' voices as well.

In the future, this could be replicated for other neighborhoods with themes catered to fit unique needs. In addition to an exhibit, an engagement plan should be made to utilize and sustain the participation garnered from the exhibit. The exhibit does not solve the issue of sustained participation in community-led initiatives, but it did achieve its tasks of gathering community voices and encouraging input and ownership of Westwood. Another change I would implement would be to include more community voices in the creation of the exhibit. The president of the Westwood neighborhood association was a fantastic resource, but even two or three more people in the creation process could have made it even more authentic.

The following is an image of poster presented at the 2026 Undergraduate Research Forum.

All text from this image has been used on this website.

Acknowledgements

This project was completed as a part of the year-long Individualized Studies capstone course. My Individualized Studies advisor, Dr. Andrew Busch, and Western College professor, Dr. Jacqueline Daughtery, aided my process with literature recommendations and procedural advice. This project would not have been possible without my design team, Professor Jeff Kruth and Agbeyenu Madison, who helped ideate, create, and build this exhibit with me. A very special thanks to them all!

References

Blanc, F., Mulkowsky, K., & Rotolo, M.. (2021, May 4). Exploring the link between urban planning and structural racism. The London School of Economics and Political Science. https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/society/reclaiming-the-streets-addressing-the-link-between-urban-planning-and-structural-inequality

City Beautiful (Director). (2019, March 7). A Brief History of U.S. City Planning. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q5bICcek6s

City of Dayton Department of Planning and Community Development. (2023). Dayton Housing Condition Survey [Dataset]. https://dayton-housing-condition-survey-daytonohio.hub.arcgis.com/

Department of Services and Buildings Division of Engineering. (1935, April). Dayton, Ohio [Map]. Retrieved November 2, 2025 from https://reconstructingdayton.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/dayton_redlining.jpg

(n.d.) EPA - Cleanups in My Community [Map]. Retrieved October 8, 2025, from https://map22.epa.gov/cimc/superfundZoom&params=0510164&15

Ettema, J. S., & Peer, L. (1996). Good News from a Bad Neighborhood: Toward an Alternative to the Discourse of Urban Pathology. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 73(4), 835–856. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909607300406

Freire, P. (2020). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In Toward a sociology of education (pp. 374–386). Routledge.

Galster, G. C. (2020). Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226599991

Hayvon, J. C. (2024). Assessing inequalities in storytelling & narrative media: Conceptualizing a Freirean methodology. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 41(5), 476–489. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2024.2417987

Home. The Collaboratory. (n.d.). https://www.daytoncollaboratory.org/

Jones, P. (2011). The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities. University Press.

Joshi, U. V., & Kumar, A. (2024). Unfolding the Socio-Spatial Dimensions of Third Space in a Contemporary Milieu. Architecture and Urban Planning, 20(1), 188–201. https://doi.org/10.2478/aup-2024-0016

Khavarian-Garmsir, A. R., Sharifi, A., & Sadeghi, A. (2023). The 15-minute city: Urban planning and design efforts toward creating sustainable neighborhoods. Cities, 132, 104101-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104101

Kim, G., Newman, G., & Jiang, B. (2020). Urban regeneration: Community engagement process for vacant land in declining cities. Cities, 102, 102730-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102730

Kim, Y.-C., & Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (2006). Community Storytelling Network, Neighborhood Context, and Civic Engagement: A Multilevel Approach. Human Communication Research, 32(4), 411–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2006.00282.x

LSE (Director). (2021, May 4). Inequalities in Urban Planning: A History of Detroit | LSE Research. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytqJKy9KIOc

Many fled as change came to Westwood. (1977, February 27). Dayton Daily News, 18.

Marshall Kaplan, G. (1969). The model cities program: A history and analysis of the planning process in three cities: Atlanta, Georgia; Seattle, Washington; Dayton, Ohio. Washington: Dept. of Housing and Urban Development; f̀or sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32437000227328

Plakhotnyuk, A. (2026). Narrative as an Exhibit: The Use of Interactive Storytelling in Museum Spaces. In: Bakaev, M., et al. Internet and Modern Society. IMS 2025. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 2672. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05144-8_4

(1898). Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio, Vol. 2.. Sanborn Map Company, to 1898 [Map]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn06671_003/.

(1919). Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio, Vol. 2.. Sanborn Map Company, to 1932 [Map]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn06671_006/.

(1950, Oct). Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio, Vol. 2.. Sanborn Map Company [Map]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn06671_010/.

Schröder, J. M., & Neumayr, M. (2023). How socio-economic inequality affects individuals’ civic engagement: A systematic literature review of empirical findings and theoretical explanations. Socio-Economic Review, 21(1), 665–694. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwab058

Scott, R. (2011). The Role of Public Libraries in Community Building. Public Library Quarterly, 30(3), 191–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2011.599283

Shach-Pinsly, D., Bindreiter, S., Porat, I., Sussman, S., Forster, J., & Rinnerthaler, M. (2021). Multiparametric Analysis of Urban Environmental Quality for Estimating Neighborhood Renewal Alternatives. Urban Planning, 6(4), 172-188. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i4.4405

Taylor, D. M., & de la Sablonnière, R. (2013). Why Interventions in Dysfunctional Communities Fail: The Need for a Truly Collective Approach. Canadian Psychology = Psychologie Canadienne, 54(1), 22–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031124

ThinkTVPBS (Director). (2022, February 28). Redlining: Mapping Inequality in Dayton & Springfield (online version). Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt72OXJ8LPQ

Tillson, B. (1972, June 18). Inner West Dayton for working or living? Dayton Daily News, 1, 8.

Planning Division | Dayton, OH. (n.d.). Retrieved December 8, 2025, from https://www.daytonohio.gov/222/Planning-Division

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NACE Career Readiness Competencies

Through this project, I practiced several of NACE's career readiness skills: Leadership, Teamwork, Critical Thinking, Equity & Inclusion, Technology, & Communication. Below are definitions for each of these NACE competencies and how I practiced each through my work.

Leadership: Recognize and capitalize on personal and team strengths to achieve organizational goals.

I sought feedback and advice from my team members on how to move forward. I organized a schedule for completing tasks and delegated who would handle each task. I took charge of problem-solving and pivoting when it was necessary to meet goals and deadlines.

Teamwork: Build and maintain collaborative relationships to work effectively toward common goals, while appreciating diverse viewpoints and shared responsibilities.

I collaborated with the Westwood neighborhood association, Dayton Metro libraries, and Dayton Collaboratory to achieve this exhibit. This took teamwork, which involved ensuring everyone was informed about progress, seeking feedback, and keeping meetings productive and efficient. I worked with my design team of 3 (including myself) to graphically design the displays cohesively and on time.

Critical Thinking: Identify and respond to needs based upon an understanding of situational context and logical analysis of relevant information.

I assessed the information about Westwood and crafted an intentional story that showed its strengths and history in a way that was respectful and honest to those you live there. I took history, geography, and policy into account when interpreting data and let this context show in the presentation displayed for visitors.

Equity & Inclusion: Demonstrate the awareness, attitude, knowledge, and skills required to equitably engage and include people from different cultures and backgrounds. Engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.

As noted above in the critical thinking section, I was careful to be inclusive and critical of the story I told through this exhibit. Every story has assumptions, and I analyzed the story I told through the lens of racism & classism. The exhibit was designed to attract many different participants, particularly those of different ages and identities. The exhibit was physically designed to be inclusive of different abilities--from the height of the boards to the design of the activities.

Technology: Understand and leverage technologies ethically to enhance efficiencies, complete tasks, and accomplish goals.

I utilized several familiar and unfamiliar technologies in the creation and implementation of this project. This includes Miro for a digital collaborative space for ideation & brainstorming, Adobe products for graphic creation such as Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, Rhino 8 for 3D modeling, and QGIS for creating the many maps included.

Communication: Clearly and effectively exchange information, ideas, facts, and perspectives with persons inside and outside of an organization.

The creation of this project took an incredible amount of communication and collaboration. Weekly meetings were set up to ensure progress. Miro Boards were utilized to have a common digital place to post ideas, updates, questions, and graphics to ensure team members could easily and efficiently communicate and share their work.

Research Compliance Protocols

No protocols were required to complete this research.

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