Sustainable Cities Initiative

The Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) is a program through the University of Oregon where classes at the University partner with a nearby city to work on real-world sustainable solutions. For a year, I was the in-house reporter and wrote blogs on various on-going projects that were published on the SCI website and in the Medford Times.

If you can’t find your way downtown, does the downtown actually exist?

Originally Published 2014.
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As you drive by on the I-5, you get a glimpse of Medford’s downtown on the horizon. You see the iconic old style buildings such as the Holly Theatre, the Elks Lodge, and the Sacred Heart Cathedral, as well as the newer booming businesses such as the Lithium Headquarters, the Rogue Valley Community College and Southern Oregon University Building, and the new library. However, as you exit onto Crater Lake Highway, the downtown disappears from the skyline and trying to find it amongst the weaving streets and changing road names becomes nearly impossible. Then when you get there, there is no way to determine whether you’ve made it or not.

To solve this confusion, several Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP) classes are working together to create and place signage that will direct more tourists and residents to the downtown area. This term, a Geography class in Advanced Geographical Information System (GIS), will be inventorying the current signage in downtown Medford and determining its effectiveness. During summer, a Community Planning Workshop will take the information and determine the types of signs and where they should be. Next year there is a plan for a Digital Art class to design the look and feel of the signs.

“There’s a need to direct people in the right direction and there’s also a need to inform people that they are now entering this district known as the downtown,” says Geography Professor Chris Bone.

It is more important than ever for people to locate downtown, as Medford’s downtown grows. Several new businesses including Pacific Retirement Services, Rogue Disposal, and Procare Software are planning to move downtown, increasing the number of people who eat and shop in the area.

“In the last twenty years or so, the Medford Urban Renewal Agency was formed for the downtown and they did quite a lot of work there,” says the City of Medford Principal Planner, Kelly Akin. “There’s been a lot of investment so it’s a great place to be, but it’s important to get people here.”

Bone’s GIS class will create an interactive and editable map using an iPhone and Android app that will show the locations of the signs, have a picture of each one, and have information determining their effectiveness and a physical inventory of the wayfinding signage in Medford. Afterwards, they will preform spatial analysis to show what types of signs are located where and then recommend where Medford should consider putting more signs.

This project will include creating signs for drivers, bikers, and pedestrians. The road signs will direct people to the downtown area and other Medford landmarks from multiple parts of the city. The bike signs will be placed on the Bear Creek Greenway to assist bike commuters on how to get downtown and the pedestrian signs will focus on where the important shops and businesses are located when people are walking around the downtown district.

Medford takes pride in bringing the community together downtown for several events that show the character of the city, including the Saturday Market and the Pear Blossom Festival.

“I think the downtown, at least the historic parts, are the heart and soul of any city,” Akin says.

This is a great opportunity for both the UO classes and the City of Medford. The city is looking forward to seeing a fresh perspective and getting results that they can implement over time, sign by sign. The classes are anticipating getting experience with an actual client.

“It’s a great project for a GIS class,” Bone says. “It almost acts as an internship, in a sense that students in the class are working for an external agency, so they get real world, hands on experience, with the need to develop something that is going to be utilized by an agency outside the university. That’s not something you often get experience with, so that’s a big thing.”

Student project studies RVTD

Originally Published December 2013.
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As part of a program matching college students with projects in the city of Medford, seven University of Oregon students spent eight hours riding a Rogue Valley Transportation District bus earlier this month, talking with riders about their reasons for using the bus system.

The students' class, Strategic Communications Research, is one of 29 UO classes that are part of the Sustainable Cities Year Program, which is working with the city of Medford throughout the year on projects ranging from redevelopment plans to protecting open space.

The seven students, including senior public relation majors Sierra Kemp and Michele Aggrey, were sent out on Nov. 15 to find out the stories behind why people choose to ride RVTD buses. They also met with RVTD planners.

"Now that we've been to Medford, we have a lot more insight into how RVTD works," said Aggrey. "I don't think we could have understood this project in its whole scope unless we went to Medford."

During a two-hour trip to Ashland and back and another two-hour trip to White City and back, the seven women students found out that almost everyone riding the bus had a very specific reason, whether they were trying to get to work, get parts for their car, or get to school.

"A lot of recovering addicts were using the bus to get to their meetings or to get to their court-appointed session," said Kemp. "If they didn't have the bus, they wouldn't be able to respond to that, improve themselves and participate in a recovery system because they wouldn't have anyway else to get there."

Many of the Sustainable Cities classes have visited Medford to get a feel for the city and the area they're working on. They spend the day walking around a given site and talking to city officials and community members.

The Sustainable Cities Year Program is a partnership between the University of Oregon and the city of Medford. Throughout the year more than 400 students will work on projects in their field to generate ideas and plans for a sustainable future.

Medford was chosen out of several applicants. SCYP's manager, Bob Choquette, said he decided to partner with Medford because the projects incorporated many fields and majors at the university, including planning, public policy and management (PPPM) classes that are creating redevelopment plans for specific areas, journalism classes looking at emergency preparedness plans and transportation plans and a law student proposing ideas for protecting open space.

"It's really useful for students to get out on the ground early in their education and get this hands-on experience," said Rebecca Lewis, a PPPM professor teaching Human Settlements. "They really enjoy going out and feeling like they have an impact on the community."

While students get real-world experience, the city gets a variety of ideas for how to expand their projects.

"It's really cool to go in there as a student and propose these wild, out-of-the-box ideas that actually could work but they could never come off the ground if city staff were to propose them," said law student KC McFerson. "Because it comes from students, people are more likely to give it a shot."

McFerson is developing a plan that accesses the legal tools Medford can use to protect its open space. This involves helping Medford define what land it wants to declare as open space, which can be anything from wetlands to parks to golf courses.

Through these projects, Medford gains insight from undergraduate and graduate students who are working at a professional level and are close to starting their own careers.

"Medford gets the energy and expertise of students and faculty at the U of O, they get exposed to new ideas that they may not be aware of, and they get help in moving projects forward that they don't have the time for or are politically sensitive," Choquette said.

Some of the projects span three university terms and others will start after the school's winter break, bringing new students and new ideas to Medford.

The students working with RVTD are busy analyzing their data to build a report, which they will present to RVTD officials during the final week of the term.