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Workshops gather public input on Fairfield’s housing, amenities
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
The public had a chance to help plan Fairfield’s future Friday afternoon during a series of community workshops organized by the City of Fairfield, Grow Fairfield, Jefferson County ISU Extension and students from Iowa State University.
Nineteen students in a variety of disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning manned a series of booths in the Cambridge Building at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds on Friday, March 6. The public was invited to share their ideas about the town’s housing stock, and to describe the kind of neighborhoods they want to create.
Each participant was given a certain number of sticky dots, and they placed those dots under the amenities they liked best. Visitors got to vote on their preferred kinds of gathering spaces, street types, open spaces, commercial developments, and landscaping styles.
Yanhua Lu and Anna Aversing are both Iowa State University professors in the College of Design, and they said the information gathered at Friday’s community workshops will be used to create a strategic planning booklet with recommendations for the City of Fairfield. Students will work on this project for the rest of their second semester in Ames, and the final product should be presented to the Fairfield City Council in the fall.
“We’re trying to understand, from a community level, ‘what are people’s needs?’” Lu said.
Lu said one of the areas this project will focus on is neighborhood revitalization, and that can include improving the appearance of buildings or improving infrastructure such as sidewalks, parks and civic services. Aversing said another facet of the project is that the ISU students are mapping and documenting Fairfield’s aging housing stock.
Lu said the professors and students worked together to create 20 activities to gather information about the desires of Fairfield residents. The 19 students are divided into six teams who are each working on a different piece of the puzzle, with some focusing on traffic flow while another team might focus on how best to tackle the aging homes that are hard to renovate. Aversing said the goal is to come up with strategic planning recommendations that are specifically tailored to Fairfield. At the same time, Aversing added that other towns will greatly benefit from this data collection and analysis, too.
Lu said, “We’re hoping to adapt it to other towns in the future.”
This project was made possible in part by a grant from Iowa Economic Development Authority. Jefferson County ISU Extension and Outreach prepared an application with assistance from the City of Fairfield, and last year learned they had won the grant.
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
