From suburban developments sprouting instantaneously from desert tracts to the city center’s ever changing skyline, Phoenix’s development has been rapid in recent years– with no signs of slowing down. But, while this growth bodes well for developers, businesses and the city at large, residents confronted by the prospect of skyscrapers overlooking their backyards tend to have mixed feelings about this changing landscape. In response to this growing discomfort around the city’s rapid development, the City of Phoenix has shifted from simply building skyscrapers to proactively building consensus.
As part of this effort, the city engaged the College of Design at Arizona State University, hoping to connect on a number of development projects that called for the expertise of seasoned urban planners, as well as the sanction of a neutral and credible public institution.
When the Phoenix city council was debating whether or not to keep the reversible lanes on 7th Avenue and 7th Street, for example, they didn’t hire a consulting firm to survey public opinion on the highly contentious topic – instead, they enlisted the services of ASU urban planning professor Aaron Golub.
While the cost of hiring the university to conduct such a study is comparable to that of hiring a consulting firm, results delivered by the university evince a neutrality in the eyes of the community that a consulting firm might not. “The idea of neutrality is a very hot topic,” Golub says.
The City of Phoenix similarly collaborated with the College of Design on another controversial project that arose from the community’s concerns regarding the light rail’s impact on their neighborhoods, as well as the City’s plans for future development along the Camelback Road section of the light rail track.
“There are multiple interests that, on the surface, seem irreconcilable,” says Nabil Kamel, one of the professors enlisted for the project. “Developers are interested in change. Change is an opportunity to generate a better return on their investment. But the residents who have been there for decades and who are used to a particular kind of urban environment are not comfortable with changes that are not familiar to them. And, in many cases, the changes [proposed] are not well articulated to them.”
In response to this discord, city planners partnered with planning professors from ASU’s College of Design to craft two studio classes that would be charged with surveying public opinion on transit-oriented development, as well as with researching development opportunities for Camelback Road.
The first studio, taught by urban planning professors Ruth Yabes and Katherine Crewe, incorporated public opinion in researching and recommending possible development options for the Camelback corridor. The second studio, led by Kamel, took the results of the first studio and provided urban design scenarios consistent with its recommendations.
According to Sandra Zwick, principal planner of Light Rail Planning & Development, working with the university improved community involvement with the project.
“The community became much more engaged with the students than they had been previously with the city staff,” she said. “The university doesn’t have the constraints that the city has – the local politics, the community issues. They have a clean slate.”
According to Kamel, this lack of constraints on the part of the university can benefit cities in other ways. “You can break paradigms by going to the university,” he says.
“You can do something new. You can get a product that is not necessarily something you would get from the (consulting) market.”
But while the university can help reconcile the seemingly conflicting interests of city developers and the community at large, such city-university partnerships also benefit the community in less direct ways: namely, through the cultivation of urban design/planning students who are not only equipped to tackle the challenges of rapid city development, but who also understand the importance of engaging the community in the process.
“From a pedagogical perspective, the students get a real-life immersion into the problems, dynamics and tensions that exist in the city,” Kamel says, “and, as practitioners, they will become more sensitive to the kinds of issues that planners and designs and architects face when they go into the real world.”
Golub similarly emphasizes the value of experiential education for students. While his study was not conducted as a studio course, he did employ a number of undergraduate and graduate students to work on the project with him.
Though they didn’t get course credit for the work, the students did learn everything from developing access databases and survey entry to conducting focus groups. “They learned a lot of little nuance things that can actually help you in a job,” he says. “A lot of firms have to farm that kind of work out.”
Golub believes that such student education is just as valuable to cities as to students. “There’s a cycle,” he says. “You train people well and they come back to you looking for a job. Some city staff asked our graduate students during meeting if they already had jobs…because they look for good people and they know that a lot of good people go to consulting firms, instead of going to the city. The city benefits from being involved with these students.”
According to Kamel, partnering with the city on studio courses also creates opportunities for the city to learn from the students.
“Because it’s a flexible arrangement, the city has lots of opportunities for feedback and interacting with the students,” he says. “We got constant interaction with them that was much more hands-on than they would have had with a consulting firm. They can engage with the academic environment and maybe learn something they had not known before.”
Zwick agrees. “The university is a wonderful tool that cities can use to create opportunities for working with the community,” she says.
But more than simply being a tool to benefit cities, Kamel believes that the university has an obligation to partner with municipalities in this way.
“It promotes the role that ASU plays as a central figure in the development of the city as it grows,” he says. “By making ASU an active participant in this discourse, ASU takes a position of leadership in guiding and broadening it.”
