Sustainable City Initiative - Salem

Trafton B.

October 1, 2010 - 1:23 PM

I meant to give you all a course preview for my Fall classes, but there's just been too many exciting things going on this week. Oregon vs. Stanford this Saturday will surely prove to be a good matchup. ESPN GameDay usually doesn't show up in Eugene for nothing. But the focus of my week has inadvertently been centered on the University of Oregon's Sustainable City Initiative (SCI).

The Sustainable City Initiative is a partnership between UO and one city in Oregon per year where a several university courses across a few different academic departments focus on assisting that city with their sustainability goals and projects.

The range of projects includes Landscape Architecture courses designing new concepts for the Civic Center and Police Facilities and Architecture Courses redeveloping the North Downtown Waterfront area between the downtown and residential sectors. There are courses in the Lundquist College of Business focusing on business cluster and market analysis, creating an economic prosperity strategic action plan and assessing the opportunities to expand industrial by-product reuse (whatever that means).

This year SCI has also partnered with several departments at Willamette University, Portland State University, Western Oregon, Chemeketa CC and Corban College on several projects regarding civic engagement, civil engineering, downtown traffic engineering. It's incredible that SCI has gained so much popularity and expanding to other universities in only it's second year of existence.

The project that my class is working on in our Social Plan GIS course is focusing on downtown connectivity between Salem's municipal parks - Wallace Park, Riverfront Park, Minto-Brown, Bush's Pasture Park and so forth.

Our entire class just took a field trip to Salem yesterday morning to meet with several city officials and urban planners about our project.

We heard from Julie Warncke, Transportation Planning Manager, about designated bike lanes and sharrow - ie shared streets for automobiles and bicycle commuting. Kevin Hottman, Salem Traffic Engineer, brought us up to date on the recent infrastructure improvements and classification of downtown streets. Parks and Transportation Services Manager, Mark Becktel, spoke at length about the desired outcomes of the project before Courtney Knox (pictured standing above), Salem's Senior Project Manager in the Urban Development Department, concluded our day by providing some ideas brought up in previous meetings about our Bicycle Pedestrian Connections Project.

It was a long morning, full of great information and lots of idea being thrown around. The one thing that I remember being repeated over and over yesterday morning it was that each one of those individuals kept saying that they are really excited to see what ideas we come up with. And that makes me excited to work with them, too.

In any normal university course you'll do your work, take a few tests and/or submit a final project a then receive a grade at the end of the ten weeks, but this isn't a normal course. Our ideas will actually be given to city officials who will take it into consideration and put it into action. Real world experience while we're still in school! Crazy, right?

This afternoon I attended the official Salem Sustainable City Kick-Off Event to hear a little more about the overall project. SCI Co-Director and UO Architecture Professor, Nico Larco, spoke about the recent fame that SCI has been receiving. "We're changing the way education works! Universities are starting to model programs like this after ours. It's very exciting!"

I couldn't agree more, it's incredibly exciting! I'm excited to gain experience in the field. I'm excited to do something with real world implications (and not have to worry about losing a job if I screw up). And I'm especially excited to work with Salem. The more I learn about Salem, the more excited I am to make it better.

The more information about the entire project below, include links to recent articles in the New Times and Huffington Post.

I'll leave you with the words of Linda Norris, Salem City manager.

New York Times - "In Oregon, Students Seek Key to A Sustainable City"

Huffington Post - "Rebuilding Oregon Through a University"

City of Salem - Salem Sustainable City Initiative