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Urban Redevelopment for People
Making space into a place
Urban renewal is a community thing. You can have the nicest neighborhoods, but if you don’t create community in the spaces that you inhabit then it’s just for show. Urban development is something I am very much aware of. I started studying human and urban geography through junior college and later majored in urban studies at the University of Washington Tacoma campus. Tacoma is the satellite campus of the main one in Seattle, but a growing and significant one, especially when it comes to urban development.
Redeveloping a City
Tacoma was and is an industrial town. In some ways it gets a bad rating for being dirty, one of its nicknames is the Tacoma Aroma. Its main industries are and have been the Port of Tacoma, a pulp mill, and earlier a smelter plant. Over the last few years Tacoma has seen numerous redevelopments popping up across the city from downtown, the waterfront, and even the hilltop, a once crime ridden neighborhood. As an urban studies student I got to see first hand this development of not just the city, but the campus as well. The whole campus used to be a row of old warehouses along a rail line and now house classrooms, a library, and student center. All of these fit nicely in the old buildings with street level retail. The rail line is now a trail and public park that…
