With the help of Ball State students and a dedicated committee, Muncie's south side may get a fresh makeover in a few years.
The Southside Muncie Charrette is a community-based planning and design workshop conducted by a partnership between the city and Ball State's Muncie Urban Design Studio. The program includes 14 undergraduate students from five majors.
The charrette will be conducted by Ball State alumnus Bruce Race from Berkeley, Calif. Race facilitated the Munciana Charrette for public housing in the fall of 1998.
Through this program, participants, with input from Muncie residents, will create a long-range plan for the revitalization of the south side.
"Our community is made up of a series of smaller communities," said Marta Moody, executive director of the Delaware-Muncie-Metropolitan Plan Commission. "That concept can carry out through all aspects of the natural and physical components that make up our city. (Muncie) has a lot of potential."
The charrette, which has been in the works since the beginning of summer, offers a vision of what the south side can become, said Mayor Dan Canan. It gives participating students a chance to put their thoughts on paper after getting input from the affected community, he said.
"Everybody's excited about the process and the outcome," Canan said. "At one meeting, over 100 people showed up. There is a lot of interest from the south side about the charrette."
Junior Clayton Smith is one of five telecommunications majors participating in the project.
He and the four others plan to record a documentary of the charrette, he said.
All students are receiving credit for their work.
"This is really grad school/professional experience that's being offered to undergrads," Smith said. "It's the most fantastic chance I've seen for students from different majors to come together on one project."
Fourth-year urban planning major Jared Edwards said he decided to take part in the charrette because he thought it would be interesting to learn how people's expectations have changed.
He said it would be an interesting, different focus from what urban planning students normally do.
Fourth-year architecture major Brianne Bergman and other students conducted surveys on people across the city within the first two weeks of the project's inception.
"It's a fascinating topic, how architecture can be related to society and how different people can have different ideas on what their dreams are," Bergman said.
She said she received a lot of interesting feedback.
"Hopefully this will be a process to let us design with the people instead of for the people," said fourth-year architecture student Dan Overbey.
Anthony Costello, a fellow at the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, said it will take years for many of the recommendations to be implemented, but having a plan is just the start, he said.
The committee will be based within the city, not on Ball State's campus.
Public sessions have been scheduled. The next one is at 7 p.m. on Sept. 8 at Wilson Middle School. The team will share initial perceptions of the south side.
Costello said Ball State is inviting and urging citizen participation.
"We want to conduct the workshop where it's easy for them to come by and see what's going on," he said. "We like to go to their turf instead of expecting them to come to Ball State."
Staff reporter Chet Baumgartner contributed to this report.
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