BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

74. Several examples of this kind of mapping now exist (see paragraph 44
above). Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a university city. To an outsider it
would seem that the university is an unparalleled resource to citizens
and to the school system. The university dominates the city. With an
enrollment of 25 000 students, and responsible for one-third of the city's
economy and one-fifth of the city's real estate, it turned out that the
university and the city were in fact two different and virtually autonomous
systems, one inside the other, with little interrelation except friction.
Mapping was an essential technique in achieving, for all concerned, an
understanding of what resources in the university could be available to
the citizens, and in return how the university could use the city's resources
better and more sensitively. Most of all the rich potential of
interrelating and co-ordinating university and school resources was revealed.
(1)
75. Lowell, Massachusetts, is the oldest industrial city in the United
States. It was built in the eighteenth century as a city of cotton mills.
But over the years it became a ghost city. Today its huge mills stand
empty beside unused canals and rusting waterwheels and other silent machinery.
Mapping has enabled citizens and local government officials to see
with new eyes the architectural beauty of the old red brick industrial
buildings with their rusted remnants of great machines standing high in
weeds, and the beauty of the engineering in the old locks and gates on
canals in which the water had gone green with age. It also caught the
eye of the government, which agreed to create in Lowell the country's first
national park and open-air industrial museum based on urban history. Plans
are presently being developed using the canals as an infrastructure of
tree-shaded walkways and waterways for passenger boats, for linking historic
buildings and places. But the citizens, less interested in the
past than in the present, are using the same infrastructure to interrelate
the city's many ethnic groups and neighborhoods, the Greeks, Irish and
French Canadians, and to develop comprehensive strategies for neighborhood
improvement. A non-profit agency, the Human Services Corporation, has
been formed to turn Lowell's historic and ethnic heritages into new job
and career opportunities, "and one of its programs is to press for ethnic
cultures and local industrial history to be included in school curricula.(2)
1) Urban Design Associates, Education Plan for Ann Arbor, Michigan, op.cit.
2) Michael and Susan Southworth, Lowell Discovery Network (1971), also
Lowell Urban Park (1973-74), Human Services Corporation, Lowell, Mass.
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