Community engagement enables the planning faculty and students to address community needs. Community engagement goes beyond service because leaders of public, non-profit, and community-based organizations define the problems that need to be resolved and seek our help to resolve them. Through application workshop courses, faculty and students work collaboratively with these North Carolina clients to specify the class projects to be undertaken.

Over the course of the semester, students combine creativity and technical capabilities to produce plans, strategies or recommendations for community improvement. Projects vary each year but generally focus on affordable housing, community development, economic development, environmental protection, growth management, land use planning and transportation.

In addition to workshops, students are also active in community engagement through their individual Master’s Projects. Below are some examples of previous workshops and Master’s Projects at DCRP.

Fall 2007 / Spring 2008

DCRP Master’s students have been participating in community development workshops focusing on recovery efforts in the Gentilly neighborhoods of New Orleans during the fall and spring semesters. The workshops allowed students to work directly in post-Katrina revitalization efforts at the neighborhood level and gain practical experience in the field. Students worked with UNC’s New Orleans Recovery Initiative (NORI) and neighborhood representatives from the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association.

The fall workshop was led by Roberto Quercia of DCRP, working with Spencer Cowan of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) and Joanne Caye from the School of Social Work. Students in the workshop realized that they needed accurate information about the extent of rebuilding before they could develop any scenarios to help the community move forward with recovery. Because of a lack of available data from the city of New Orleans, the students decided they could be most effective by developing a neighborhood audit tool that they could use to gather and map data. By creating maps of the neighborhood, with data at the individual lot level, the students would be able to show where residents had returned to the neighborhoods or begun reconstruction.

All of the students in the fall workshop traveled to New Orleans in November to carry out the neighborhood audit in eight sections of Gentilly, working both by car and foot as they moved house by house and block by block. As they worked, the students were able to talk with community residents and learned a great deal about local conditions that might not be apparent from a less personal approach. Students also interviewed community leaders to learn more about their neighborhoods.

This spring, William Rohe of DCRP is leading a second workshop with Spencer Cowan to continue the work begun in the fall. Half of the students in the spring workshop went to New Orleans in March to gather more data in two additional sections of Gentilly and test the audit tools that community residents can use gathering follow-up data. Students have also mapped and analyzed the data collected by students in the fall. The other half of the students in the workshop traveled to New Orleans at the end of April and presented recommendations to help explain the data and develop ways for the communities to carry on the work themselves as they seek to revitalize their neighborhoods and the city of New Orleans in the future.

The community will benefit from the audit and mapping in several ways. The data the students gathered and the maps they generated provide residents with information to help them guide future development efforts. The community can also use the information to gain leverage in dealing with city institutions by showing where the population has returned. The community can use the maps to attract developers by showing where opportunities exist. In addition, the audit tools are relatively low-tech, allowing the residents to continue gathering and mapping data to show the progress their community is making over time.