The Charrette

Oakhill Neighborhood, Youngstown - October 1-3, 2005

The charrette portion of the Fall 2005 Shrinking Cities Institute was conducted by the students and staff of the CUDC over the first weekend in October. At the invitation of the City of Youngstown and the Southside Community Development Corporation, the charrette team chose to develop ideas for Youngstown's Oakhill neighborhood, an area quite near Downtown Youngstown on the city's South Side.

The Oakhill neighborhood was a thriving community into the 1970s, and it boasts a number of striking natural and historical assets. Close to Mill Creek Park, it is also the site of Youngstown's most historic cemetery. Over the last 20-30 years, however, the neighborhood (like much of Youngstown) has steadily lost population. By now the vacancy rate approaches 70%, and surviving houses are surrounded by a patchwork of vacant lots and derelict structures.

The study area in context. Downtown Youngstown (yellow circle) is across the Mahoning River to the Northeast.

The opportunity to take a fresh look at Oakhill was provided by the recent completion of Youngstown 2010, a comprehensive planning process undertaken by the city in collaboration with Youngstown State University and a broad coalition of community groups. One of the key tenets of the Youngstown 2010 plan is "accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city." While the plan does not go into the specific implications of this, it implies a planning process in which neighborhood revitalization is not primarily tied to attracting new residents or increasing densities. Youngstown is perhaps the only one of America's many shrinking industrial cities so far to recognize the need for this kind of planning, and the CUDC was eager to participate in the first effort to give more specific substance to the broad intentions of Youngstown 2010.

Saturday morning at Oakhill Renaissance Place

After a tour of the study area, the charrette team met with representatives of community groups and members of the general public on Saturday, October 1 at Oakhill Renaissance Place, a former hospital that now serves as a community center. These discussions gave the design team a sense of the aspirations and concerns of the current residents, and they were key in guiding the process that followed.

Saturday afternoon was spent on field surveys that were used to create a series of analytical diagrams of the area. The students then split into four groups and developed four significantly different design visions for the neighborhood. These were developed over the next 36 hours with the help of the UDC staff, Charles Frederick of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, and our guest Frank Popper from the Bloustein School of Planning at Rutgers.

Working at the CUDC on Sunday and meeting the public on Monday

The charrette team returned to Youngstown on the evening of Monday the 3rd to present the four schemes, along with general policy reccomendations to assist their implementation. While none of the schemes is definitive, the present a variety of stimulating options for making a viable urban place that is adapted to reduced density. Members of the public were invited to look more closely at the four visions and "vote" for ideas that they particularly liked or disliked. This information about community preferences will inform the charrette teams further recommendations, which will be packaged in a report along with all the images produced over the weekend.

The charrette concepts will be presented in detail at the Symposium on October 14, and the report should be completed in early November. In the meantime, go to the next page for a very preliminary look at the four neighborhood concepts.

The aftermath at the CUDC