Spaces to Places: How Placemaking is Benefitting Alabama Communities

Alta
Alta
Published in
4 min readApr 26, 2022

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Contact: William Hargrove, ASLA, PLA, Design Associate, Alta

As designers, one of the most important tasks is to elevate seemingly mundane, everyday pieces of the earth into vibrant public spaces with a true sense of place.

The Project for Public Spaces puts it this way:

“As both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.”

By striving to achieve something more than a nice looking place for people to congregate, public spaces can become essential components that provide quality of life for residents and visitors of towns and cities of all sizes. Alta has been busy helping municipalities in Alabama achieve their placemaking goals, and the team is happy to share two examples below. The first, a 32-acre Park Master Plan for a former poultry processing plant site in the steadily growing City of Athens, AL (pop. 25,406), and the second, a pocket park nestled in the urban form of the tiny downtown of Linden, AL (pop. 1,930).

Rendering of Pryor Park in Athens, AL

Pryor Park Master Plan — Athens, AL

As part of an effort to revitalize blighted properties in the city, a group of local Rotarians approached the City of Athens’s mayor over 10 years ago with the idea of purchasing a vacated 32-acre former poultry processing facility to redevelop into a public space to serve residents and visitors. Fast forward to 2021 when Alta was asked by the City (based on the previous work completed on the Singing River Trail Master Plan) to convert the site into a multi-use development with a city-scale park as its main attraction. Alta’s project team included a local architect and civil engineering firm that planned the layout of the site to include a playground, splash pad, dog park, a Singing River Trail trailhead, beer garden, restrooms and concessions, and outdoor classroom, in addition to mixed-density residential, mixed-use buildings, a retail incubator, and community facilities.

Utilizing previous public engagement and planning efforts allowed the team to jump right into concept design and design development to outline programmatic zones, and after coordination with the City and local stakeholders, move quickly into creating the illustrative master plan, circulation plan, and photosim renderings that led to a final phasing plan and order-of-magnitude cost estimates to guide implementation. Since this project’s completion, the City has formally adopted the Master Plan, and is currently working with Alta’s civil engineering team partner to develop a rough grading plan for the site. Once complete, the City plans to continue implementation by designing and constructing the project per the recommended phasing plan.

Rendering of Thomas Terrace plaza looking east in Linden, AL.

Thomas Terrace Pocket Park — Linden, AL

Emerging out of Alta’s previous work with ALProHealth, a community coalition in Linden, AL approached the Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ALProHealth project leaders) about the potential for redeveloping a vacant lot within the urban fabric of their downtown into a multi-use space for the community. The envisioned space would hold events such as school plays and seasonal farmer’s markets and provide outdoor dining areas and space for food truck vendors.

The presence of buildings on either side of the vacant lot, combined with the streetscape front edge and service alley in the rear made for a challenging exercise in making a space that is very public, but provides a respite from the daily grind. The Alta team created two options for layout of the pocket park and hybridized those concepts into a final Illustrative Master Plan that includes public art, partial walls to create an inviting space, overhead lighting and shade sails, movable café seating, and fold-down table tops to serve both the farmer’s market and daily events.

By utilizing rough-hewn or recycled wood and corten steel branding elements, the team captured the patina of the aging downtown infrastructure without compromising design integrity. Due to constraints of the structural strength of adjacent CMU building walls, all overhead elements were required to be freestanding — driving up the cost of the proposed improvements. Alta provided phasing guidance and value-engineering recommendations in order to make sure the design intent wasn’t lost due to budgetary constraints. Alta can’t wait to see this project progress, and the team feels honored to have been able to help a small town improve the quality of life for its residents and visitors.

Though Athens and Linden are quite different in size and location within the state, they both recognize the importance of transforming spaces into places, and that Alta is especially well-poised to help them achieve their goals for active and vibrant public spaces.

“I encourage you to think about ways your communities could benefit from placemaking within your planning and design projects,” said Alta’s Will Hargrove. “Big or small, placemaking is extremely important to quality of life for our clients and communities, and Alta is ready and waiting to help you identify placemaking projects in your community!”

Contact us to learn more, and in the meantime, follow along for monthly updates here.

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