Description

Neighborhoods: Fairgrounds and Kingsway East “Segregation by Design” (SBD) was first offered during Fall 2016 and has been offered each fall since then at both SFS and at HSSU, enrolling students from both universities. As with the three previous offerings, SBD 2018 offered SFS and HSSU students a cross-university, cross-disciplinary environment to respond to the importance of this issue. Taking advantage of the academic resources in the region, inter-university student teams developed mitigation plans for two communities in the St. Louis metropolitan region: Fairground and Kingsway East. These two communities were selected because they both represent a unique challenge of attempting to undo decades of racial segregation without displacing long time, low income, African American residents. As in previous semesters, the course was structured into two parts. The first part entailed a series of lectures and panels by scholars from universities in the region and professionals from the metropolitan area examining current literature and issues in segregation as well as data analysis and textual analysis of community-based publications and scholarly literature review by the students. The second part consisted of field-work in communities in metropolitan St. Louis involving extensive systematic observations, stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and visioning sessions (charettes) and the production of a report for the given community. For this, the teams were assisted by volunteer professional mentors from diverse fields and residents from the selected communities. Residents helped collect data through neighborhood surveys, organized neighborhood meetings, and helped devise mitigation strategies. A three-part project looking at: i. causation, ii. consequences, and iii. mitigation strategies led to the final report that analyzed segregation in each community and proposed potential design and policy remedies.This document serves as the compilation of the work of the students in detailing the history of the communities, causes and consequences of segregation, as well as, potential policy and design strategies. In addition, the work produced during the semester was added to the Segregation By Design in a traveling exhibition.