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We are a 7th Grade Class at Fayetteville High School in Sylacauga, Alabama. This website was part of a class-wide project that we spent over 1/4 of the year working on. One of our standards for this Nine-Weeks Unit was Urban Renewal and City Design. This is why we chose the topic of Revitalizing Birmingham. In our opinions, this has been a challenging yet very interesting topic to spend time on. Through this project, we have been able to learn about the city of Birmingham, many of its wonderful features and some parts that need reviving.
When deciding which city to choose to revive, we had to think about what city affected us the most. We live in a small, rural, and secluded town. Some of our parents work in Birmingham. Some of us play on travel sports teams based out of Birmingham. When we want to shop or go to the movies, we go to Birmingham for those fun activities. Traveling to Birmingham takes 45 minutes from Fayetteville, which is about the same as getting to Talladega. For these reasons, we chose Birmingham to be the city we study and revive.
We have thirty-three students in our class that all worked very hard on this project. We were divided into several different groups over the nine weeks to learn more about The Magic City. Our research and ideas were guided by these two essential questions:
(1.) Is Urban Renewal/Revitalization a realistic goal for Birmingham?
(2.) How could/would you change the city of Birmingham, Alabama to be a thriving urban area?
We started our project by talking about why revitalization generally was or was not necessary. We looked at several sources for and against revitalization to decide if we felt revitalization is needed for Birmingham, our first driving question. We then focused on the city design aspect of our project. We investigated how and why city blocks are designed a certain way to better understand the geography of downtown areas. We put our knowledge to the test by creating our own city using Tinkercad.
We studied the Burgess Model which is a sociology theory explaining the zones and setup of urban areas. This model helped us understand the geography of downtown Birmingham. We broke into eight different groups to become experts on Birmingham. We focused on the history of Birmingham and their revitalization processes. We created brochures on our group topic and had our friends critique and provide feedback to prepare us to answer our second question and for our final part of our project.
At the end of this unit, we created this website with the help of every single individual in the class. Our Geography teacher, Miss Morris, divided us into four groups: Content, Video Design, Web Design, and Solutions. The team assigned to content took their notes from earlier on in the unit to make a content pages. They then partnered with the Web Design students that had created this website to add in the content. The Video Design students are making a video using a video creating website, WeVideo, to present more of our topics. The solutionists came up with different solutions to some of Birmingham’s problems to help revitalize the city. The solutionists wanted to find solutions that could be applied to other cities like Talladega too. All this put together makes our website you are now reading about.
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