The Homewood-CMU connection

So I was saying, there was a meeting last Monday night with a bunch of CMU students.

The students are enrolled in the Urban Laboratory, a community and urban design studio that is part of the University's Remaking Cities Institute.

The Urban Lab, as it's commonly called, dates back to 1963. Each year, Urban Lab students research a particular community and seek that community's participation in an urban design process.

This year, they are researching and reaching out to Homewood and North Point Breeze, two neighborhoods that share major roads (Fifth, Dallas, and Homewood Avenues) and what could be a major asset, the Homewood East Busway stop.

Their first community meeting was on September 21; the second was October 19; the third will be sometime in December. In the first two meetings they have quizzed residents about how we travel (walk/drive/bus), what we see as community assets, ways that we imagine that vacant lots could be used, and our memories and hopes for our communities - among other things.

Two big points here:

1) The Urban Lab folks are building on work done this summer by a different group of CMU students, in a new program called UDream. Those students' task was to develop a vision for Homewood-Brushton, a vision that they shared in a public meeting on August 19, and that they published in a document that you can download here.

2) For Urban Lab students, the end goal is not simply to produce a document, even a really nice one like the one above. Nope, this is what the profession calls a "design-build" project, which means that the goal is to actually build something - in this case, something "catalytic" that can help to spark transformation. So, by this time next year, there should be something new in Homewood.

I am eager to see what they come up with.

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