row1
The Planning in Black Belt Alabama Project aimed to provide essential planning services to a black belt community in Alabama that lacks planning departments and connect them with potential partners and stakeholders and grant opportunities. The project also aimed to raise awareness of planning education and practice in underserved and marginalized communities and give students firsthand learning experience dealing with real-world planning issues through community involvement. This Spring, two graduate Community Planning Studios - Synthesis Studio and Urban Design Studio, led by Binita Mahato, partnered with the City of York in Sumter, Alabama, to address the project’s mission.
In Alabama, only a handful of small communities have planning departments. Most rely on planning-related training programs, like the Alabama Planning Institute, which trains local officials and staff on community planning and zoning needs. The state only has two planning programs, Auburn University and Alabama A&M University, which offer planning degrees accredited by the North American Planning Accreditation Board. With fewer planning programs and graduates, the scope of the service-learning programs is even limited in Alabama. Notably in the Black Belt region, the gap between planning needs and services is immense. The state has programs, such as Main Street Alabama and Your Town Alabama, which aim to address this gap by providing small and rural towns with community and economic development opportunities through workshops and grants. However, their capacity and reach are limited.
To address this gap, the studios, comprised of twenty Master of Community Planning students, undertook a four-month project in collaboration with the City of York focusing on economic development, community development and urban design. The studios explored the history and context of Black Belt Region in Alabama, engaged with the city to understand and identify the planning issues of the community, collected primary and secondary data to both qualify and quantify the identified issues, determined planning challenges, established guiding principles/ values, vision, mission, goals and objectives, analyzed the possibilities through a series of planning analyses, developed executable strategies, plans and proposals, implementation tactics, funding possibilities and presented plans through posters and reports to the city.
The Daniel F. Breeden Endowed Grant Program funded the project to support students’ travel to York and host two community engagement workshops. The workshops focused on including community groups and city officials in the planning process, gathering community inputs in identifying key challenges and involving the residents in reviewing and commenting on proposed plans.
The project ended with a Community Open House, held on Friday, May 2, in York’s Pop Start building, managed by the Coleman Center for the Arts. The students presented the final plans to the mayor, city officials, other community members and residents. The final plans were submitted to the city in written reports and illustrative posters, which will be displayed in the City Hall of York.
