Your Town Workshop A Huge Success!• A mixed use center anchored by a movie theater in Boiling Springs. • A children’s museum on the Westside of Spartanburg. • A mix of residential and light retail on Spartanburg’s Eastside. • Small shops in a shopping center with improved These are some of the new uses for abandoned big box stores that a group of Spartanburg County developers, local officials, and community activists devised as part of a 2½-day workshop hosted by Upstate Forever’s Spartanburg office this past September. Upstate Forever received one of four grants nationwide from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund the workshop as part of the program Your Town: The Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design. The NEA launched Your Town in the 1990s as a rural equivalent to its Mayors Institute on City Design, which has successfully brought mayors and design professionals together to improve the livability and design of cities for the past 20 years. Both programs are implemented through extensive workshops that examine the role of design in community efforts to develop economically sustainable futures.
Spartanburg’s Your Town workshop was the first to take place in South Carolina. Participants included three of seven county council members, city and county planning commissioners, commercial developers and realtors as well as lenders, shopping center representatives and community activists. During small-group sessions, participants used team problem-solving exercises to explore goals and options that might improve commercial design in Spartanburg County. In addition, national and regional experts in fields such as planning, economic development, architecture and landscape architecture presented special sessions about architectural and site design, and they worked closely with participants on issues specific to several sites in Spartanburg County.
The workshop also included a panel discussion featuring citizens who have worked to successfully address similar issues in other South Carolina communities. Rebecca Crown, Mayor Pro Tem of Travelers Rest, described the process her community went through in adopting design standards following its negotiations with Wal- Mart for better design. Fred Delk, Executive Director of the Columbia Development Corporation, explained how Columbia’s design standards have provided a foundation for economic development in that city, and Darrell Snyder, a member of the Beaufort County Corridor Review Board, described how Beaufort County regulates design issues along its highways. In the end, Your Town participants took these testimonies to heart. Many of them decided that, although adaptive reuse of vacant big box stores is desirable, our communities need to takemore proactive steps to encourage improved design for these buildings in the first place. If the design and scale of these buildings better fit into their community context, they would be much less likely to experience prolonged vacancies.
Workshop faculty left Spartanburg with a concern for its communities and an interest in its future. Several of them are continuing work in Spartanburg County–Craig Lewis, Principal with The Lawrence Group, is heading up the City of Spartanburg’s Downtown Master Plan, and Bob Bainbridge, Director of the South Carolina Design Arts Partnership, is working with the community of Glendale as part of the South Carolina Mayors Institute. Your Town participants left the workshop with a commitment to move Spartanburg forward by advocating for many of the recommended policies. Upstate Forever looks forward to working with this group of advocates in 2007.
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