UO's sustainable cities program grows

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Michael Parkhurst describes the dynamics of the Rockwood district.

Standing at the edge of a brightly painted plaza nestled into a barren parking lot, Michael Parkhurst described the past, present and hoped-for future of the corner of Gresham known as Rockwood.

Parkhurst, senior planner for the city of Gresham, has been wrestling with this site, a former Fred Meyer store in the midst of an urban renewal zone, since 2005.

But last year, the city and Parkhurst received free labor and specific ideas for the site from dozens of University of Oregon students taking classes through the school’s interdisciplinary Sustainable Cities Year program.

“It was invigorating to work with the students,” Parkhurst said. “Several of their ideas fed into our current plan for this site.”

For example, the idea of combining the uses of park-and-ride (during the week) and outdoor market (on weekends) came out of a class that met in the fall under the title “Sustainable Suburbs.” Eventually, the city plans to develop other retail on the site and some live/work spaces, but in the meantime, with student input, a walking trail has been established beyond the bright colors of the mural known as Plaza del Sol.

“For the city it was a natural link between what we were already doing as a jurisdiction around sustainable development and what they wanted to do with this project,” said Laura Bridges-Shepard, spokeswoman for the city of Gresham.

Nico Larco is the assistant professor of architecture at the University of Oregon who taught the Sustainable Suburbs class with the assistance of Parkhurst. He’s also the pioneer of the Sustainable Cities Year program, which aims to take an integrative approach to city sustainability by involving transportation, planning, design, government policy, environmental engineering and green building in a series of credit courses that tackle real city problems as part of the curriculum.

Gresham, with a population of about 101,000 people, was chosen as the guinea pig for the program in part because City Manager Erik Kvarsten is an alum of the UO Planning, Public Policy and Management department and serves on the alumni board.

Larco figures Gresham received more than 50,000 student, staff and faculty hours of free labor. Thirteen courses were taught based in Gresham covering everything from data analysis and community engagement to landscape design and the use of natural light within city buildings.

“It’s really a different model for learning, the service-learning idea,” Larco said. “We’re recapturing the role of the public university and putting it back into the role of serving the community.”

This fall, Salem moves under the UO’s academic microscope, one of five cities that applied to participate in Sustainable Cities’ first official year after the trial in Gresham.

The details of the year’s contract are still being finalized, but money will change hands, a six-figure fee that will help cover the expenses of the program and the work provided.

“We’re not competing with the private sector,” said Larco, who added that a consulting firm would charge several times more than the nominal fee the university will receive for similar work. “With budget constraints, this kind of work just wouldn’t happen.”

Larco said he hopes to work with the business community on future projects such as architecture firms that may be hired to eventually do some of the work recommended by the students.

But what about the businesses on the ground?

Dina Dinucci, president of the Rockwood Business Coalition and owner of Park Place Coffee, helped students connect with the disparate communities that make up Gresham, hosting a meeting with neighbors at her shop.

“I was really impressed with what the group came up with,” Dinucci said.

She loves the idea of the former Fred Meyer site becoming a neighborhood marketplace and was thrilled when students mocked up a streetscape and had a Park Place Coffee location central to their plan.

The only hitch is that Dinucci, like many business owners still reeling from the economic downturn, isn’t sure how much longer she’s going to be able to keep her doors open.

“The problem with things like this is that they’re just ideas,” Dinucci said. “I hope there’s a mechanism in place to track them.”