Putting It All Together

Last night, our class met for our design “charet” if you will (I can’t believe I’m actually using that word). After our last couple of meetings, we had decided to focus our efforts on connectivity of major community hotspots in Bamberg. We had also discussed restoring a historical site, such as the old cotton mill site or the civic center, to create a nice, multifunctional facility for the community. We especially focused on the mill site with its old smoke stack as a potential community landmark and center for community events.
I joined a team that would focus on revitalizing and/or creating a community site or facility because of my strong interest in this type of work. I was hoping to either restore the civic center that is nearly falling apart, or to create a multifunctional facility for the old mill site. However, perhaps due to our lack of time and lack of resources, our team decided to mainly focus on issues of connectivity and community center. The mill site was chosen as the town center. Barak and I will work together to create a collage of images of what the site could become one day. Allison and Lauren are going to use photoshop to create a new streetscape of downtown Bamberg. Felix and Noelle are going to do a write-up on walkability and how it could bring positive affects to Bamberg. I think the rest of our team is going to be mapping out major ways of connectivity and looking at the Berm as a major connection-way to downtown and the mill site.
At our “charet” we were all encouraged to pick up markers and contribute to mapping of these connections. This was a little frustrating to me because I just didn’t feel like I was qualified to know what good planning strategies were in comparison to the classmates of mine who are in that program. Hopefully I was able to contribute something. Nevertheless, it has been really amazing to work with students from other disciplines and gain understanding from each other. I really hope that I will have more opportunities to do so in the future at Clemson.
To conclude, our group is planning to collect and organize all the data and research we have been working on over the semester and comprise it into a single document for the Mayors Institute.