By JOHN H. West, PhD, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning
The planning students who I teach every year are typically enthusiastic about working with or for ‘the community.’ In everyday-talk, planners invoke the community as a justification for one project over another, they convene public meetings and then describe the people who attend them as the community, and refer to a geographic area (roughly the size and shape of a neighborhood) as the community. As a planner, and engaged scholar, and the chair of the Urban Planning Department at Ball State, I have been working on a project that defines community by what a collection of people and institutions in a particular place can do and how planners can help them do more.
Paraphrasing Jane Jacobs’ basic story, people on a block, depending on how it is designed, take small everyday actions that promote safety. They make community by sharing space and acting collectively. From this perspective community exists prior to planning activities like naming, labeling, drawing lines on a map, or holding public meetings. Writing in the 1950s about a largely intact neighborhood, Jacobs was making the case that planning was more disruptive to community than helpful. When we look across the urban landscape of today, especially in the industrial Midwest, we see fractured communities that have suffered massive disruptions. People in these places are still making community—mowing weed-grown lots, calling on local government officials to fix vacant and abandoned properties, making a pocket park on vacant land and organizing a neighborhood association—to promote safety. At the same time, they desire urban planning interventions to help make their efforts stronger.
As planners, we should build up existing community through the process of enacting a better future. The role of planning, as an idealistic, future-oriented profession, is then:
1) To understand what work is already taking place to enact community;
2) To understand what people want next;
3) To draw in new resources to create greater capacity for action.
For planning to fulfill its idealistic goals, we cannot simply get people together, deliver a plan and walk away. Community building requires sustained attention, mobilization of resources, and building new connections, both inside and outside of the neighborhood.
I write all of this as the context for understanding a sustained engagement that the Ball State Urban Planning Department has undertaken in the oldest residential neighborhood in Muncie, the Old West End. We are now entering the second of year of partnering with a cluster of existing neighborhood-based organizations to build greater capacity for local action. Through three consecutive studio classes, our neighborhood partnerships have snowballed, gaining size and strength, as we make more of the connections that build community.
Because of student work conducting analysis, holding community meetings and proposing developments, our local partner the Muncie Land Bank was able to write a fantastic READI grant for a $22 million development project that garnered the support of the City Council and the Mayor and is currently being considered by the state for funding. That same student work was the basis for convincing the Delaware County Commissioners to awarded 44 tax delinquent properties to the land bank for the development project. One of our studios was co-taught by an alum who works for Intend Indiana, and now that non-profit housing developer is using its non-profit bank (Community Development Finance Institution) to help secure loans for the project. Professors Pam Harwood and Tom Collins, my colleagues in the Architecture Department who recently won a national competition to develop environmentally sustainable housing units (the Department of Energy Solar Decathlon), have run their own studios in the neighborhood, and will be working to build carbon net zero housing as part of the development project. This fall our third-year studio is being co-taught by the president of the neighborhood association in the Old West End, Brad King.
Through long-term, engaged scholarship, students in our program are learning firsthand a definition of community that focuses on the action that planners take to build it.
A version of this column first appeared in the Department of Urban Planning Summer 2024 Newsletter.