Studio VII Returning Home: Integrated Elderly Housing in the South End Neighborhood of East St. Louis, Illinois©

Faculty: Lynne Dearborn and Jason Lockhart

Course Timeline: This is a semester-long studio project. The semester at UIUC begins on January 20, 2004 and ends on May 14, 2004. The semester at Southern University begins on January 20, 2004 and ends on May 12, 2004

Number of Credit Hours: 6 credits

Brief explanation of where the studio falls within the curriculum sequence:
All studio participants will be senior students in their 4th year of either the 4-year undergraduate curriculum at University of Illinois, or of the 5-year BArch curriculum at Southern University.

Pre-requisites to the studio: Students will be required to have completed five design studios prior to enrollment and will have a basic understanding of structures and construction technology as well as architectural theory.

Approximate Number of Students: 15 UIUC, 10 Southern University

Pedagogic Framework

This is a service-learning, participatory community design studio. It will incorporate the key components of service learning: active engagement with a community client, community service outreach, and required reflection activities. The active engagement with the community will take on the framework of participatory design with our community partner, St. Paul's Baptist Church as community client. In addition to meeting 3 times each week in the studio on campus, students will also engage in 3 community forums and 2 outreach weekends with church members.

Project Overview

Many elderly members of St. Paul s Baptist Church in East St. Louis, Illinois are former residents of the South End Neighborhood surrounding the church. These individuals have moved to nearby communities in search of better quality housing. However, they maintain strong social and family connections in the South End. As they age, they feel a firm desire to return to the neighborhood to be closer to friends and family, and within easy walking distance of their church. St. Paul s Baptist Church has purchased properties surrounding the church in the South End, as they became vacant. Rather than allowing deteriorated structures to be inhabited by drug dealers, the church razed the structures, leaving the church physically and socially disconnected from the neighborhood. This project will explore the varied possibilities of creating accessible elderly housing that knits the social and physical fabric of St. Paul s back into the South End Neighborhood.

Core Objectives

1. Produce design solutions that respond to the needs and desires of the elderly users of the housing design project.
2. Familiarize students with environment-behavior research and design guidelines that focus on elderly housing.
3. Transfer to students the skills needed to engage in participatory community design, e.g. presenting, listening, and responding to community clients, embracing and developing ideas that come from a multi-voiced client, designing buildings that are good neighbors to their physical and social context.
4. Engage students in exploration of issues related to age diversity in the built environment.
5. Engage students in exploration of issues related to racial diversity in the built environment.

Clients and/or user consultants involved

1. St. Paul's Baptist Church, a nearly century-old African-American Church with a membership of over 400 located in the South End Neighborhood of East St. Louis, Illinois.
2. Board of Trustees of St. Paul's Baptist Church, ten African-American individuals who range in age from 30 to 67 years old.
3. Elderly members of St. Paul's Baptist Church, many of these individuals used to live in the South End Neighborhood but moved away in search of better quality housing. They have a strong desire to move back to the South End to be closer to relatives and live within walking distance of their church. They will make up the primary user group consulted.

Approach to the Proposed Studio Process and Content

East St. Louis, Illinois is located across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, about 180 miles to the southwest of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Although a prosperous, all-American City, in the late 1950?s and early 1960?s, East St. Louis has been hit hard by post-war industrial dis-investment and pollution, demographic shifts, and ineffectual government. By 1990, East St. Louis was one of the most distressed cities in United States. The city had lost nearly its entire industrial base, and half of its population; 40% of those who remained lived below the poverty level and nearly 30% were unemployed. In 1987, State Representative Young challenged UIUC to work for change in the city. Initially, faculty and students addressed large-scale riverfront and industrial redevelopment. Seeing no tangible outcomes from these largely theoretical proposals for East St. Louis, residents wanted university engagement that was mutually beneficial. In 1990, UIUC began a more participatory approach to redevelopment where university faculty and students, through the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP), work as a partner with community organizations. Through physical, social and economic development proposals, university-community partnerships address issues that are of greatest concern to the residents of East St. Louis.

This studio builds on previous community-based work by ESLARP in the South End Neighborhood of East St. Louis, Illinois. It brings in a new university partner, Southern University, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a new community partner, St. Paul’s Church. Students from Southern and UIUC will engage the Board of Trustees, and elderly church members in participatory design processes. This will bring students from a historically African-American College together with the students from UIUC, a University that suffers from a lack of racial diversity (particularly in the School of Architecture), to collaborate with one of the strongest African American churches in East St. Louis, St. Paul’s Baptist Church. Students will be required to straightforwardly engage issues of racial diversity and social justice in the built environment.

Important unique components of this community design studio include:

1. Required readings that will familiarize students with issues of social justice, particularly as it is related to the environment and East St. Louis.
2. Required readings of environment-behavior research and guidelines focused on aging and environments.
3. Required readings about community design practice.
4. Required attendance at least two outreach weekends where students will spend Friday and Saturday working side-by-side with members of St. Paul’s Church on clean-up, fix-up projects across the South End Neighborhood.
5. Required attendance at three interactive community forums with St. Paul’s Board of Trustees and with elderly church members who will be residents of the proposed housing project. The first of these will be during the first two weeks of the semester, to facilitate introduction to the project and our community clients. The second, just before mid-semester, will allow for interactive presentation and display of student work and the re-introduction of client feedback and response. The third will be near the end of the semester providing another opportunity for interactive presentation and display of student work and the re-introduction of client feedback and response before the student proposals are finalized.
6. Required studio journal/sketchbook where students will document their thinking and response to readings, outreach weekends, and interactive community forums, as well as documenting how these aspects of the studio are represented in their design process and products.

Students will be evaluated on their approach to process as well as product in this studio. The following components will make up evaluation for the studio:

1. Studio journal/sketchbook evaluation (3 times during the semester)
2. Midterm physical documentation of his/her studio design proposal illustrating how he/she has incorporated and responded to criteria for a universally accessible environment, e-b research and design guidelines on aging and environments, the needs and desires of the elderly user group and Board of Trustee members, the context of East St. Louis and the South End Neighborhood.
3. Final physical documentation of his/her studio design proposal illustrating how he/she has incorporated and responded to criteria for a universally accessible environment, e-b research and design guidelines on aging and environments, the needs and desires of the elderly user group and Board of Trustee members, the context of East St. Louis and the South End Neighborhood.
4. Attendance and involvement in the three interactive community forums.
5. Attendance and involvement in two outreach weekends in East St. Louis
6. Daily attendance in studio

The final products for this studio will include the students’ final physical documentation of their design proposals presented first in a large-scale format suitable for interactive community forums and then finally revised design solutions composed in 8.5 inch x11 inch format. This product will be supplied as a book to St. Paul's Church. They will use the material in this book as they continue to seek funding for the proposed elderly housing project.

Responses to Reviewer’s Questions

1. Assure that the design part of the project includes subgroups: children, elderly, disadvantaged.

   The design part of the project will include and directly involve low-income, elderly, African American individuals. The history of East St. Louis, Illinois, demonstrates that in St. Clair County and particularly in this city, this is a disadvantaged group. Low-income, elderly, African American individuals will be consulted as users of the final product; they will be integral to the interactive community forums and design charettes; and it is the intent that they will act as consults to student teams as they encounter and make design decisions.

2. Please find a way to resolve the number of solutions and narrow choices for the clients. This might include identification of key elements from the multiple solutions.

   As elaborated below (section D), the studio will generate 8 design solutions. At the final community forum, students will present their work, engage in discussions and receive feedback from members of the user group. At the end of this process they will identify the key common elements from the multiple solutions. After the student work is complete, faculty and UIUC’s NTAC (Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center) staff will work with the client to identify those project solutions that best address the users’ needs and incorporate the greatest number of key elements.

3. Please clarify the nature of the approach that will be taken to the review of students' work.

   Students’ work will be reviewed using the community forums at St. Paul’s Church in East St. Louis, as well as on-campus using a modified jury approach to reviews that include design faculty, aging specialists, and senior community members. The modified jury will encourage student-reviewer dialogue as an approach to review and discussion of student solutions. Studio faculty will encourage reviewers to offer constructive feedback that helps students improve their response to inclusive and appropriate design for elderly housing.

Responses to Specific Reviewers’ Comments

A) Incorporation of issues related to aging and the built environment will be increased in the following ways:

1. This studio project will begin from the perspective of a group of elderly members of St. Paul’s Baptist Church. This will provide specific information from the perspective of the seniors who will use the proposed environment.
2. Students will also have access to a panel of seniors and aging specialist who specifically discuss age-related functional needs with the students. This panel will include seniors who are residents of Urbana and Champaign and senior residents of Baton Rouge. The panels will also include academic aging specialists from UIUC’s Initiative on Aging and aging specialists from Southern’s School of Architecture. We will arrange these panel discussions jointly on both campuses using video conferencing so students at both universities will have the opportunity to hear and take part in the interactive panel discussions. Members of these panels will be invited to take part in interim on-campus reviews to further discuss development and implementation to accommodate age-related functional needs. The final, on-campus reviews will include aging and environment specialists as part of the team of reviewers. This will allow continued discussion so students can integrate that perspective more fully into the design knowledge they take from the studio.
3. Students will be required to read literature on age-related changes and their accommodation within the built environment and reflect on those readings in the journals that they keep and that are a graded component of the class. They will be provided with an additional list of resources on aging that they can consult when designing.

B) An understanding of universal design will be developed using the following teaching materials and methods:

1. Faculty will incorporate a lecture on the seven principals of Universal Design identified and elaborated by North Carolina State University’s Center for Universal Design (? 1997).
2. Faculty and students will together view and discuss the CD-ROM of Universal Design Exemplars available from the North Carolina State University’s Center for Universal Design.
3. Faculty and students will together discuss material on the seven principals as well as the case studies included in the book Universal Design File: Designing for People of All Ages and Abilities by Molly Follette Story, James Mueller, and Ron Mace.

C) Increasing students understanding of issues related to disability and the built environment will be accomplished in the following ways:

1. Several students and community members with varying physical disabilities and of varying ages will be invited to speak to students in the studios about their disabilities and their specific needs in relationship to movement and use of the physical environment on a daily basis.
2. Students will carry out and in their journal reflect on one of the empathic exercises (i.e. experience the environment from a wheelchair, or with limited sight or hearing) included in the book Strategies for Teaching Universal Design, edited by Polly Welch. They will be asked to share their reflections in a discussion with others in the joint studios.
3. The discussions in A2 and C1, above, will provide students with the opportunity to hear about how the impact of different types of disabilities increases with age and how needs in relationship to those disabilities change over time.
4. Students will be introduced to the terms used to define housing as: Accessible, Adaptable and incorporating Universal Design, and will be involved in a discussion of the differences between the meanings of these terms.
5. Faculty will introduce students to the specific criteria and coverage of Fair Housing Amendments related to accessibility and the specific criteria and coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. As one of their journal assignments that will then share with the studio groups, they will be asked to reflect on both the requirements and the intent of these two pieces of legislation. They will be asked to consider the limitation of ADA in relation to the aging population, based on what they know from the user group as well as the various panels and presentations by persons with disabilities, seniors, and aging specialist. They will be asked to suggest design ideas that fill the gap between the requirements of fair housing, ADA, and the needs of individuals as they age.

D) Provide fewer design solutions at the end to reduce confusion for the client and to provide a more useful product for fund raising, also allow Southern students to interact on an equal basis with UIUC students:

1. UIUC will have approximately 16 students in the studio. Southern University (SU) will have approximately 12 students in the studio. These students will work in teams of three or four, with one or two SU students teaming up with two UIUC students. Students will interact with team members across campuses via email, fax, phone, tele-conferencing, and a web site where students will post their design work as it develops over the semester. Faculty will work jointly and confer on a weekly basis (or more frequently if necessary) to ensure that the work of the eight teams is progressing in a reasonable fashion and that all team members are contributing equally to the process and the product. This will further the aim of having Southern students interact on an equal basis with UIUC students.
2. This project takes place under the auspices of UIUC’s East St. Louis Action Research Project, which has a fully staffed (with urban planners and designers) Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center (NTAC) in East St. Louis. At the final community forum, students will present their work and at the end will identify key common elements from the multiple solutions. After the student work is complete, faculty and UIUC’s NTAC staff will work with the client to identify those project solutions that best address the users’ needs and incorporate the greatest number of key elements. Faculty from both universities, and the coordinating staff member from NTAC, will work with the client to reduce the number of solutions to meet the client’s needs when seeking funding. This will allow the congregation of St. Paul’s to examine the pros and cons of each solution from multiple perspectives and eliminate some solutions that may be deemed less successful in meeting the needs of the users in the particular project context.

E) Increasing hands-on active participation between community members and the students:

1. The model of hands-on active participation between community members and the students proposed in the original submission included three interactive community forums and two 2-day outreach weekends. This is the participatory model that has been successfully developed and employed by ESLARP studios over the past ten years in working with community partners in East St. Louis.
2. We intend to add to this an additional day on each outreach weekend that will include joint student-client charette activities. On the first outreach weekend, the joint charette will address initial conceptual development for the project. On the second outreach weekend, student-client teams will address specific unresolved issues that have arisen in the design studio as well as in the interactive community forums.
3. At the charette, faculty will team two or three elderly clients with each design team so that design team members build a close relationship with a few of the members of the client group. Both faculty members hope that this close relationship will provide students with several contacts that they can consult further through conference calls in relationship to specific design options and decisions in the design process

F) Addressing the issue of distance between Champaign-Urbana, East St. Louis, and Baton Rouge:

1. Faculty members from UIUC and SU realize that the distance between the three locations will be an issue that we must constantly address. Given the limited resources of the two universities and the clients, the currently proposed number of trips, for joint university-community encounters in East St. Louis, consumes all the funds currently available for travel. Faculty have considered and are investigating other ways of unimpeded communication between individuals at the three locations including: email, phone conferencing, fax, video conferencing, and a joint web site where students from both universities can post, and clients can view and comment on, design ideas being considered by various teams.

For more information contact Lynne Dearborn at dearborn@uiuc.edu and Jason Lockhart at jason_lockhart@cxs.subr.edu

Read the Forum on this topic

Citation: Dearborn, Lynn & Lockhart, Jason (2003). Studio VII Returning Home: Integrated Elderly Housing in the South End Neighborhood of East St. Louis, Illinois ©. Retrieved (Enter date here), from Universal Design Education Online web site: http://www.udeducation.org/teach/asj/dear_lock.asp