WAUPUN — A group of Waupun High School students were invited to work on a cooperative project with the “Design Wisconsin” UW Extension team this week, focusing on redesigning spaces in the downtown area for a more attractive city.
Eight students and the UW Extension team presented their results Tuesday evening after two full days of work on the project. The presentation was attended by members of the Waupun City Council and a small number of local business leaders.
The project focused on a variety of downtown developments, including concept drawings for public space use, redesigned parking layouts, multipurpose lanes, and greenery dividers. They also discussed recommendations to bury utility poles and phase-in shielded street lights to reduce light pollution in the city.
“One of the reasons we chose to do the community placemaking project in this community [Waupun], is that it was identified as part of a strategy of the first effort of the Community Economic Analysis Program,” said Todd Johnson, who works out of UW River Falls as a Land Use and Community Development Specialist.
Johnson explained the typical scale of projects they work on, those being a small scale area, usually a single site, a medium scale area, either a neighborhood or downtown, or a large scale project for an entire community. The largest projects would take over twenty planners and engineers to bring together a cohesive community plan.
The project they did for Waupun was focused on the downtown area, and required six project planners along with eight Waupun high school students.
While the specifics of community placemaking are the specialty of the Design Wisconsin program, working with students is a huge part of the program that helps build a cooperative experience for students to learn from experts in the respective fields.
“Research shows that young people that are engaged in leadership and given opportunities to be engaged in their community are more likely to return to their community after college or stay in their community after high school,” said , whose focus in the UW Extension team is engaging students and young adults. “Our goal is to keep them invested and when they graduate from high school and go to college they will think, ‘Waupun was so awesome, I want to go back there when I’m done and be a part of it again.’”
Each of the students and experts presented slides to discuss the topics they came up with, each with a different area of focus in the downtown area.
“This was definitely an amazing experience and will definitely be great for a lot of the youth in our communities,” said Katrina Reinhart, one of the students who participated in the project. “I think it makes them a lot more represented and it accomplishes a lot more goals and what we aspire to look like in our futures.”
“On top of that I think the UW Extension program was just phenomenal and helped facilitate our ideas and make them into something that could possibly be a reality, and just overall inspire our youth in different areas of our community,” she added.
The presentation lasted about an hour with some time after for attendees and members to discuss some of the topics brought up.
