The East Main Street Urban Visioning Project will hold its "Design Day" starting at 10 a.m. on Saturday (March 31) at the Salvation Army building, 250 East Main St., in Newark, Ohio. The day-long event, which will include lunch for the participants, will bring residents, business owners, stakeholders and designers together to develop specific community-based designs and development goals for the street and its surrounding neighborhoods, following the principles in Destiny 2020, Newark's recent comprehensive plan.

Denison Associate Professor of Art Karl Sandin and groups of Denison students have been working with Newark residents and leaders and with planners from the Columbus-based Neighborhood Design Center to help residents and stakeholders design and redevelop the area of East Main Street in Newark.

The project started last fall when Sandin taught a freshman seminar, "The Culture of Survival." Students in the course studied urban areas and homelessness, interviewed residents and helped to research and collect data for the East Main Street Visioning Project. A spring semester class, "Cities Ancient and Modern," continued student involvement with the project. Their efforts produced detailed maps indicating the types of housing and vacant land, and data on businesses in the area. All buildings on East Main were photographed to create a panorama of the street. The "Charrette" on Saturday is another important mile-post for the project.

Among the local groups supporting the project are: the Licking County Coalition for Housing, the Licking Metropolitan Housing Authority, the East Mound Community Development Corporation and Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, Habitat for Humanity, members of Newark City Council, the Newark departments of Community Development and Economic Development, and the McGregor Connections Initiative, the John F. Alford Center for Service Learning, the department of art and office of first-year studies at Denison.

The Neighborhood Design Center is a non-profit architecture, planning, and design organization. Also participating on Saturday will be graduate students from the Ohio State University's school of architecture who will be located at each of the tables on Saturday to translate ideas to paper.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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