Students from the Andrews University Design Studio are making a lasting impact on the small town of Buchanan, Michigan, by helping them revitalize the urban layout, planning for both minor and major changes. Juston Foote (graduate, architecture) is part of the cohort of students involved in the remodeling of Buchanan, and here’s what he has to say:
How did you get this opportunity?
In your fifth year in the Urban Design Studio, a missionary project is typically done in which you go abroad and help people design houses to be more efficient, increasing the urban standards, and help better people’s lives in that respect. But because of COVID-19, we couldn’t go where we wanted to go since the University couldn’t approve travel to another country. About a week before classes started, Buchanan approached the University asking for help in revitalizing their downtown in order to help the urban environment get back on track.
What are you going to add or change?
Most of the changes are adjusting street widths and urban fabrics like street trees, seating areas–basically, to make the streets more pedestrian-friendly. We wanted to make the urban fabric of the downtown really nice and liveable especially for those who don’t have cars. We are also making big changes like adding missing middle housing, which is essentially a multistory-building that comprises a shop or retail area on the bottom floor and an apartment living space on the higher floors. It would help to increase the housing market in Buchanan as well, as many of the houses for sale either aren’t in great condition or they are too expensive. This would be a great option for recent graduates too, especially if some of us wanted to move there after our graduation.
How long do you think this project will take?
When the semester ends, we will give them a book of all the properties we imagined and computer-rendered for them to eventually show to developers. Perhaps this would take around 5-10 years. They are, though, trying to change their street infrastructure within 2 years, so we are helping them plan in accordance with that.
How did you feel when you got this opportunity?
I was excited because it gives me an opportunity to practice urbanism, which is likely what my cohort and I will eventually be doing in the future. As much as I support missionary work and as much as the past projects have been outstanding, a lot of them have been so specific to the missionary area that they exclude the urbanism side of things. It’s a great outreach and mission project, but at the same time, I feel like what you are taught is lacking. It’s more of a mission trip and doesn’t really prepare you in a sense towards what you might actually do in your architecture career. This opportunity gives us a chance to practice our urbanism and actually benefits us more in our field. I can look back upon this project and know that we did a lot of good here for this town close by that a lot of people can enjoy.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.