BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

this growth is unplanned in the formal sense. It responds instead to
factors of location of interchange roads, competitive assembly of land by
developers or the outcome of local battles over sewage and water systems.
Considerable and far reaching social changes are accompanying the changes
in metropolitan form. Attractive regional shopping malls are challenging
downtown shopping centers; young college-educated professionals are
flocking to new homes and schools in the suburbs, thus undermining the
vitality and stability of the old inner city.
148. in one respect the opportunities for planning education and with it
other developments in Ann Arbor are unique. Unlike most other cities where
city and school district boundaries coincide, the School District of Ann
Arbor includes several adjacent townships, suburban developments and rural
areas. The Board of Education is, in fact, Ann Arbor's only metropolitan
agency. The school district covers not only an enormous social range, but
also a great complexity of inter-agency and inter-governmental relationships.
Dr. Bruce McPherson, who became superintendent of the Ann Arbor
Public Schools in July 1971» inherited a school district which was typically
centralised in form and tradition. He also inherited a newly passed
bond issue providing him with a capital program of over $12 million to
build four new elementary schools and improve one existing junior high
school. Prior to his appointment he had made it clear that he would take
steps to decentralise the system, and make education more directly responsible
to consumer and community needs.
149. In order to bring together the competing interests of agencies and
jurisdictions in the metropolitan area which up to that time had hindered
most efforts at comprehensive planning, the Ann Arbor Board of Education in
1971 hired Urban Design Associates (UDA) to develop a unique planning
process. On the basis of their work in Pontiac, Michigan (see Part One),
where they had been the planners and designers of the Human Resources
Center, UDA were commissioned to:
i) develop an education master plan for the district as a whole;
designed to serve as a framework or comprehensive "infrastructure"
for linking resources to one another and to education throughout
the metropolitan region;
ii) co-ordinate the capital program with respect to five new schools
at the level of the neighbourhood or the community with a view
to demonstrating how solutions could be found which would, at the
same time, bring out local characteristics and relate to the
whole through the infrastructure of the master plan;
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