UO students get busy on sustainability

Project pairs courses with city planning to create wise growth

By Mara Stine

The Gresham Outlook, Dec 1, 2009, Updated Dec 2, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

ADVERTISEMENTS

Rena Schlachter grew up in Gresham and has watched the city change for better and for worse. Now the University of Oregon graduate student is taking part in shaping the city’s more sustainable future.

She’s one of approximately 250 students in the UO’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, taking part in a groundbreaking collaboration between the university and Gresham.

As part of a pilot program called the Sustainable Cities Initiative, graduate students are spending a year putting their studies in architecture, landscape architecture and planning to real-world use, researching a variety of Gresham developments, programs and initiatives.

In the Rockwood neighborhood, students are proposing six development schemes for the urban renewal district’s Catalyst Project, also called the Cultural Marketplace.

Meanwhile, the city – which has reduced its staffing to bare bones because of budget shortfalls – benefits from cutting edge study and research for free, said Gresham City Manager Erik Kvarsten.

For years, students have performed projects for individual cities and agencies, said Nico Larco, assistant professor of architecture who co-directs the initiative with professors Robert Young and Marc Schlossberg.

But professors and students alike craved a larger-scale endeavor –a yearlong project for students of multiple academic disciplines to take part in. A project that tackles the larger varied issues of sustainable design that growing communities face.

University teams with Gresham

Last year, the university’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts approached Kvarsten, a UO alum who still has ties to the university, with the idea of a yearlong curriculum based on sustainability that revolves around a single city.

“Erik ran with it,” Larco said. “There’s a tremendous need out there for cutting-edge research into sustainable communities. All city governments across the country are limited by budget cuts.”

The university chose Gresham as its first yearlong subject for many reasons, Larco said.

The city of 100,000 is the fourth largest in the state, so it’s not too big to benefit or too small to have the kind of projects professors and students had in mind.

“It’s also a city in transition,” Larco said.

Once renowned for its strawberry fields, Gresham has grown away from its agricultural roots and is considered by some a bedroom community to its larger neighbor to the west, Portland. Now Gresham is positioning itself as a magnet for green industry and highly values the environment and sustainability.

“At first we were thinking of maybe four or five courses,” Larco said. But Kvarsten and his staff just kept coming up with more projects, development areas and issues perfect for the kind of focused attention the Sustainable Cities Initiative was designed to provide. “We ended up with something like 20 courses,” Larco said.

The collaboration is a huge benefit to the city, Kvarsten added.

Not only are students bringing fresh, innovative ideas to the table, they’re saving Gresham taxpayers big bucks by doing it all for free.

1 | 2 Next Page >>