This past summer 12 rising sophomore and junior girls from eight schools throughout Chattanooga, Tennessee, took a free three-week interdisciplinary course, Placemaking: Chattanooga as Text (CAT). The course was sponsored by Girls Preparatory School (TN), CoLab, and Public Education Foundation, and was guided by the school’s faculty.
According to the Project for Public Spaces, placemaking is “a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region” that “inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community.”
The students worked in teams of four to dive deeply into a local problem or opportunity, using GIS (Geographic Information Systems), readings, discussion, design-thinking, and social entrepreneurship methods to develop a solution. At the end of the session, students pitched their solutions to local stakeholders and took home the new iPad they had been using to do their work.
Guest designers and professionals were on hand to guide, teach a “master class” on a topic, and give feedback about prototypes and final pitches. Among the guest designers were Teal Thibaud from Glass House Collective, who introduced practice design; Catherine Colby, creator and sustainer
of a water purification plant and wind energy park in the Dominican Republic; Phil Roundy, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at University of Tennessee Chatanooga; Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke; and Michael Pollock, Lula Lake Land Trust executive director. Other participating organizations included the Hunter Museum of American Art, Regional Planning Agency, Tennessee Valley Authority, Intel Corporation, and Perkins+Will Architecture of Atlanta.
“Chattanooga as Text” is an extension of Mad, Bad, & Dangerous, the entrepreneurial program that Girls Preparatory School hosts along with CoLab and the Public Education Foundation. The summer class is supported by donors who want to help students from across the community understand their potential to be problem-solvers.