Getting the Most from Urban Schools
Education is Essential to a City's Future, 
But Can Schools Help Shape the City, Too?
CUDC Quarterly, 3:1 - Winter, 2003

Traditional school buildings were designed for what might be described as a one-size-fits-all model of education. Rows of identical classrooms filled with rows of desks would be supplemented by service facilities for recreation and assembly. While growing suburban school systems have had the need and the resources to expand, adding a range of spaces for more flexible uses and an array of extra-curricular activities, most urban school systems have had to make do with increasingly inappropriate facilities. This is not just due to changes in educational philosophy. Schools everywhere now attempt to address students’ needs individually, and those needs are especially pressing in disadvantaged urban areas.

As the only refuge from difficult circumstances for students whose needs may be very complex, schools have become de facto community centers, even though their physical form may not be very well suited to that function.

For these reasons, the rebuilding of urban school systems presents enormous challenges and opportunities. Budgets are tight, and the core issue of providing quality education is daunting in itself. In addition, school design is increasingly straightjacketed by onerous (though understandable) security requirements. Given all this, how does one imagine schools that help define and enliven urban places while performing the increasing range of services demanded of them?

Fortunately, there are experiments elsewhere that provide inspiration and practical guidance. Britain and Australia both have substantial "learning city" movements that have worked to link educational reform to lifelong learning and community development. The emphasis in these movements is on process (not physical planning), but their ambitions are quite striking. One British report proposes community involvement in schools and adult learning as a means of generating grassroots democracy, reducing dependency and increasing local self-government in urban areas.*

All of this implies that schools can do much more than dispense instruction to the young, but physical models that catch up to these ambitions are still being developed. Here, some American initiatives point the way, most notably the Cities of Learning Project in Paterson, NJ. This project, led by urban designer Roy Strickland (who is now on the faculty of the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Planning), envisions a network of learning facilities – schools, libraries, arts groups, even mobile computer labs – all turned loose to infiltrate the economic and social life of a mid-size industrial city that desperately needs to reverse its fortunes.

There’s a lot to the Paterson initiative, a whole book’s worth in fact. The intitiative was developed in close consultation with the community and the Paterson schools, and its proposals are very concrete, though ambitious. Some of them, like the ones on the facing page, would face numerous practical obstacles. Given the harsh realities of today’s urban schools, it’s difficult to imagine how one would get from here to there. But the Paterson initiative points to a goal worth working for, even if it requires re-thinking the rules and re-learning some institutional habits. That goal, simply put, is a city in which the education of the young is not segregated from the community. Instead, the investment in education becomes a source of lifelong growth and renewal for city-dwellers and urban communities. – Steve Rugare

 
The school of the future? The "Cities of Learning" project in Paterson, NJ arrived at the conclusion that schools don’t have to be self-contained buildings. This street section shows school facilities woven into a "lesson plan" distributed throughout a commercial neighborhood. The facilities provide services to secondary school students, but they also interact with local businesses, helping to stimulate economic development and build relationships that will create future opportunities for the students. Urban design elements tie the dispersed "school" into a whole. The upper stories include affordable loft apartments for teachers.

The proposed downtown campus of the Paterson Public Schools combines school programs with cultural facilities, as well as commercial uses. With adult and continuing education as an important function, these facilities are intended to be active into the evenings and on weekends. Combined with vest pocket parks and an enhanced pedestrian environment, the goal of these projects is to support commercial and social revitalization of Paterson’s moribund downtown.

The biggest challenge to implementing this sort of project is that it requires a substantial rethinking of the way schools approach issues of management, security and control. Older students would have to become engaged, responsible participants in a safe, environment, rather than internees in a heavily policed facility. The change in culture involved is enormous, but the Paterson project suggests that the reward could be even greater.

Illustrations from Roy Strickland, ed., Designing a City of Learning: Paterson, NJ, 2001.

Paterson Schools: Patersonk12,nj.us