Reflections and Project Update (Week of March 23, 2015)

This past week, our class was fortunate enough to have Jazmin Simmons come speak to us about changes going on in her neighborhood of Station North. We also had the opportunity to meet with our groups to discuss the next course of action and schedule for our projects.

Throughout the semester, I have enjoyed all of the guest lectures very much, especially Baltimore's Art in Transit group working on the Baltimore Red Line and Ben Stone's talks about Station North's future development. With that said, I found Jazmin to be very refreshing and charismatic, which sometimes gets lost amidst discussing business and planning. Moreover, Jazmin provided us with valuable insight into her personal experiences of working at the Bohemian Coffee House and the Charles North Garden. Her experiences seemed more relatable to a college student, and in turn, her views seemed to be the most honest and straightforward out of our lecturers in our class. Probably the most important thing I learned from her talk was her connection to the youth of Station North. Children and young adults often get kicked to the curb during the development of an arts district. Her proposal of having a safe space for the kids of Station North sounded very important and needed in order to create the best neighborhood possible for all parties. 

In regards to the term project, my group discussed the next steps of our plan. We now have all of the places logged, so now we need to gather photographs and any other additional data that we might want to add later on. For myself, I will begin to enter the data into our Google Map, and ensure that we place our data in all of the correct locations.

So far, I have already created the map online and made sure that everyone has access so they can observe the progress of our final product. In addition, I went ahead and downloaded shape files of the neighborhood boundaries of Station North. This way everyone will be able to easily locate our neighborhood. On April 14, we set the deadline to have all of our photographs gathered for the map, so that Mike and I can add those as well. We hope to have everything ready to go before schedule so that we can make any adjustments to the overall map.