Have you ever wanted to design your ideal neighborhood? Put a park here, place a retail store there. Well, the children in Gainesville’s Porters neighborhood got that chance thanks to Urban and Regional Planning Adjunct Lecturer Laura Dedenbach’s URP 4000 class.
Held at the Porters Community Center, the children in the afterschool program, with the help of the URP students, built a 1/8” scale version of how they wanted their neighborhood to look. This process taught them city planning concepts, such as neighborhoods and citizenship.
Dedenbach felt the event was a rewarding experience for both the Porters neighborhood children and her URP 4000 students.
“We were so pleased that the kids had fun and learned about planning, building and their neighborhood,” Dedenbach said. “The students in the URP 4000 class learned quite a bit about citizen engagement and the planning process too.”
The Porters Community Center kept the Box City model the children created along with the extra supplies to continue teaching these neighborhood lessons to the children.
The Gainesville Sun also visited the event and featured an article and video on their website at http://bit.ly/2ftQuar.
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