Some of State’s current landscape architecture students could significantly influence what downtown Starkville looks like over the next 20 years.
The Downtown Starkville Business Association commissioned six graduate students to develop an aesthetic plan for the downtown area’s future development.
The plan, now finished after a semester of work, calls for a new city hall, bike paths and high-end living spaces, among other things.
Steve Langston, president of the Starkville Downtown Business Association, said the group asked landscape architecture professor Pete Melby to have one of his classes draw up a master plan to redesign the area.
About 40 businesses and other interested parties were involved in deciding to have the students work on this project, he said.
Melby waited until last semester because he wanted to find a class that could handle the project, he said. He found his group in the six members of his design class; all were landscape architecture graduate students.
The class began working on the project, estimating it would take eight weeks to complete, Melby said. The team took the entire semester to finish the project.
However, Melby said he maintained confidence in his students because they had diverse backgrounds. Some were from cities such as Memphis, Tenn., and Shanghai, China, which brought in different voices for the new look of Starkville.
Melby said he was impressed with the students’ ideas as they worked on the project. They found the right design process and answered complicated problems, he said.
Eric Stortz, the team leader from Jackson, said the idea of the design was to make the downtown area reminiscent of the main streets of older towns, but also to make the area unique to Starkville.
Some of the unique features of this plan include: a bike path that runs through large parts of the downtown area, a roundabout at the end of Main Street to make parking quicker and easier and a new city hall.
The team began the project by meeting with the community, said Paul Lanning, a member of the design team from Memphis. The meeting involved about 20 people, Lanning said, and they told the team what they wanted.
The downtown merchants had certain requests, Langston said, especially upper-end living. Most college towns have upper-end living in their downtown areas, he said, but this is one thing that Starkville has been lacking.
“This plan will help draw developers for upper-end living,” Langston added.
This was one among many ideas the design team tried to incorporate into their master plan, Lanning said; they spent a long time in the design process.
They had another meeting with the community members, and the attendees provided feedback, he said, telling the team what they did and did not like about the plan.
Stortz said it was his responsibility to make sure they did everything right during this time and his responsibility if they failed.
“It was a real challenge to get five capable designers to agree, but the product we produced as a team is incredible,” Stortz added.
After tailoring the final master plan to the community’s requests, they had a third meeting, and Lanning said the people were astounded with this presentation.
“It’s a good example of how you can bring the community and the university together,” Lanning said.
Melby said the students provided several alternatives for the requests made at each meeting. The community was just looking for ideas, he said, but now they are planning on using the majority of the design.
Langston said the merchants hope to implement 70 to 80 percent of the plan, but that the plan is flexible enough in the event that other opportunities arise.
They are adding the bike path drawn out in the plan, and they may even incorporate other parts of the plan in the next 10-20 years, Melby said.
Melby added that the merchants are ready for the plan, and the response from the community proves this.