Students' Designs for Downtown Redevelopment Project on Display

Reprinted Courtesy of K-State Media Relations and Marketing

Manhattan-area residents will have something new to check out at Manhattan Public Library, where Kansas State University students’ designs for the downtown redevelopment project in Manhattan will be on display soon.

Models of the students’ designs, including an electronic model, will be on display at the library, 629 Poyntz Ave., Friday, November 17, to Friday, December 1. K-State faculty and students will give a presentation at noon November 17, when the display will be installed.

The design project involved a group of undergraduate and graduate students from a landscape architecture and regional and community planning class at K-State’s College of Architecture, Planning and Design. Students started with a master plan for the southern end of the redevelopment project, said La Barbara James Wigfall, an associate professor of landscape architecture who teaches the Community Planning and Design course at K-State.

Students then took what they learned in class and from case studies, combined with feedback from the city of Manhattan, and began to develop ideas for the details of each site, from sidewalk designs to placement of trees. The students worked on the project for about a month.

“I chose something close to home because I think sometimes our students think of their world as noncontroversial,” Wigfall said. “I wanted them to be in kind of a hotbed of community development. This is a very controversial issue in our community. I wanted them to wrestle with the issues surrounding community development.”

Wigfall said the display will include an opportunity for visitors to leave comments because the students want community members’ feedback.

While one group of students in the class has been learning about microscale planning by looking at the details of the south end of the redevelopment project, Wigfall said another faction in the class has been learning about the planning process by looking at potential development on the north end of the redevelopment project.

With such projects, Wigfall said students in the Community Planning and Design course have been seeing how development happens in their own university community, from attending city commission meetings to tracking changes in designs.

“It exposes them to the fact that development is not something that happens overnight,” she said.

Before working on the downtown redevelopment project, the whole class began looking at points of historical interest that could be included in a recreation trail running from Wamego to St. George to Manhattan. Students who took the class in spring 2006 laid the groundwork for this semester’s students by working with the Pottawatomie County Economic Development Corporation to develop a plan for the trail.

For more information, contact:
La Barbara Wigfall, 785.532.5961
Diane Potts, 785.532.1090