Box City Curriculum
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IntroductionLearning and Research
Pre-Planning
Planning Phase
Construction Phase
Post-Construction Phase
CUBE Background
What is Box City?
Box City is a three dimensional activity where participants “make a city or neighborhood” in a classroom or other manageable venue. Constructed of boxes, participants can visually “walk" through the city; see space and scale relationships; architectural details; and examine the importance and consequences of zoning, cars, and mass transit.
Box City was developed by architects, planners, and educators as a way to teach planning concepts and provide understanding of neighborhoods and community member roles. Although as a city-planning exercise, participants often learn as much about themselves as they do about their communities.
Who Can Participate?
Box City has been conducted with all ages and can be used with individuals, classrooms, town councils, or at or in conjunction with larger, public events. This project works well when leaders cooperate on the unit. However, it can be conducted independently by an individual teacher in any curriculum area.
Participants: All ages can participate and apply educational concepts at all levels:
Preschoolers and Kindergartners learn about their family, neighborhood, and city helpers
Third graders use it to learn about community
Fourth and Fifth graders to learn about state and local history
Sixth graders: Ancient Civilization
Middle school participants: Government
High school participants: Leadership skills
College participants, Business, and Government groups: Math, Writing, History, Music, Art, and Citizenship
Box City is valuable as a teaching tool for adults as well. Architects have used it as an informal way to educate school district patrons about the issues and challenges, not just the design elements, which are a part of any new school planning process.
Elected Officials: It is an opportunity to invite your city planner, council person, and mayor to see what good ideas might be tried in your neighborhood or town.
What Participants Can Gain
Participation demonstrates the power of speaking out and taking responsibility. Learned early, this is a powerful tool for community development as well as an important lesson to learn in any stage of life! Box City:
Incorporates concepts from history, geography, art, politics, city planning, and economics.
Instills understanding of the development of cities and their present problems and successes.
Encourages skills in group cooperation, writing, art, mathematics, spatial relationships.
Provides an experiential learning opportunity for participants of all learning skill-levels and styles to successfully participate.
Demonstrates the need for historic preservation ethics and future planning of neighborhoods, towns and cities.
About the Curriculum
Box City is an example of Project Based Learning (PBL).
See also: Walk Around the Block, another CUBE PBL exercise we recommend as a part of Box City planning and preparation.
This curriculum contains suggestions for planning, construction, and post-construction activities and can be personalized based on participant size, age, place setting, and time frame. Box City is purposefully open-ended and does not contain all of the answers. Those answers will come as the project unfolds.
Box City can be:
One afternoon, a weeklong activity, or be programmed for a full semester.
A school, neighborhood, or entire town or city.
Individuals, classrooms, town councils, or other public activity events.
Time Commitment
Box City can be a single-day event, weeks-long activity, or school semester project. It is also popular at public events as an introduction to built environment education concepts.
The curriculum offers material for both short and longer forms of the exercise.
Learning From the Past
Early Civilizations exhibited sustainable development characteristics by using easily available materials, existing geographic formations, and natural energy sources. What can we learn from them?
The Anasazi Indians on Mesa Verde
were able to both shade their settlements from intense summer sun and absorb sun during the winter. Additionally, the mesa itself protected the village from winter winds.
The Settlers of the Midwest
also produced a dwelling well-adapted to the climate. Built of a common natural material, the Midwest sod house faced south to absorb winter sun while protecting the structure from northern, cold winter winds.
The Greek City
Early Greeks are well known for their city planning, their principal cities were not planned, but evolved. They were impossibly noisy and hard to navigate. Although the citizens recognized the problems, ancient civilizations never attempted to rebuild an established city unless it had been completely destroyed by war or other natural disasters. They would build, instead, in a new place and when they did, planning principles which are common today were put in place.
Cities of Today
Philadelphia, PA
William Penn commissioned the surveyor Thomas Holme to lay out the city in 1682. A rigid gridiron plan was adopted. Two major streets crossed in the center of the town and formed a public square. A square block park was placed in each of the four quadrants of the city. The early dwellings were single-family houses. In the middle of the eighteenth century it became a common practice to build dwellings on the side lot lines resulting in continuous rows of buildings which cut off access to the rear yards. Alleys were then cut through the center of the blocks. These alleys have since become the quaint and narrow business and residential streets for which the city is known today.
Savannah, GA
Laid out in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, Savannah was a regular grid pattern of rectangular streets with park squares liberally spotted in alternate blocks. Each park is different in foliage and focus: sometimes a gazebo, sometimes a fountain or monument. Savannah is similar to Philadelphia with a more generous allocation of open spaces. The streets linked these parks and created a continuity of open space when the town was built only with single houses.
Washington, D.C.
In 1649 the first American City to adopt diagonal avenues and circles as the basic layout was Annapolis, Maryland, a small settlement on the banks of the Severn River. It was followed by a more dramatic display, the classic survey for Washington, DC, by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant.
George Washington selected L’Enfant, a French designer, with a background which embraced the Baroque planning of Paris (this appealed to the aristocracy of the United States)
L’Enfant began, not with the gridiron street system, as city planners of today might do, but with the principal buildings and squares. “Lines or Avenues” of direct communication were laid between these cardinal points. Washington was envisioned, therefore, as Lewis Mumford explains it as “a series of interwoven spider webs”. Diagonal streets were overlaid upon a gridiron pattern.
A Movement in Sustainability
Sustainable Development
The sustainable development movement advocates policies that encourage development that is environmentally benign and respectful of community character.
Recycling a building uses fewer new materials and addresses resource efficiency. This avoids adverse environmental effects from logging, mining, or other resource depletion and from the manufacture and transport of new construction materials. In addition, adaptive use does not require new land or infrastructure.
Elements of an Environmentally-Sensitive Development
In the same way that a real city might begin the endeavor to retrofit the community and make it more responsive to environmental issues, an eco-city concerns itself with the following issues:
Phase I:
Conservation of water and energy, reduction of waste stream, community recycling, consumer and academic education, planning for future resource use, urban gardens, preservation of neighboring agricultural lands.
Phase II:
Development of mass transit, urban tree-planting program, urban agriculture, pedestrian-friendly developments, retrofitting older buildings, creating social programs to meet local needs, strategy and forecasting system, tracking of all social and environmental services both paid and volunteer to create a coherent whole.
Phase III:
Local markets rather than imported, avoiding fossil-fuel intensive goods, full-scale recycling program of all commodities, life-cycle analysis costs of all products, cost of environmental degradation and resource depletion, eco-tourism such as arboretums, eco-theme parks, “envirotainment” such as children’s museums and theatre.
Discussion Questions
Does our city have a master plan? An updated land use plan? If not, is it working toward a future plan?
Does the city layout create workable streetscapes?
What is the state of preservation in our city today?
What is the city doing to preserve or create a sense of community to its neighborhoods?
What incentives are there for developers to re-use buildings? For businesses to re-establish themselves in older parts of the city rather than move to the suburbs?
What are the qualifications of those appointed to planning commissions and other committees responsible for the aesthetic as well as physical quality of life in our city?
Terminology To Be Familiar With
The Built Environment
The “built environment” is a community as a whole, not separate parts. The built and natural environments are one and interdependent.
Sprawl: A City Without A Planned Future
The dictionary definition of the word “sprawl” means to spread out carelessly. Sprawl is uncontained and unplanned development which stretches as far as the eye can see and usually sparked by commercial enterprises out of scale with existing communities. Sprawl often gluts communities with more commercial space than the local economy can absorb, killing off existing (often locally owned) businesses, turning downtowns into ghost towns.
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Activities To Get You and Your Participants Thinking
Field Study: Explore Your City
Go yourself or lead a field trip to explore the city. Exploring the city provides a glimpse of other lives, other ways of doing things. Field studies are essential for a complete education.
With a basic understanding of planning terms like node, district, landmark, edge and path, participants are able to identify strategic areas on a base of the field trip destination prior to the activity. Experiencing the planning elements on site provides motivation for continued investigation.
Survey Report
The Survey Report is a short oral description of their building (Box) that is made when placing it in the city. When you or the team are on site or researching the neighborhood, make notes and drawings and take photographs for the report. It should include, but is not confined to:
the date built
the architect or family who built it and interesting architectural features
the construction materials, construction and the way it fits into the neighborhood
anything historically significant (particularly great quotes)
issues and challenges that may affect the building’s future
Scavenger Hunt
Everyone likes a good scavenger hunt. It’s fun to do as the participants tour the city. Keep it to about 10 items, with simple illustrations and tie-ins to real town buildings. Ask questions like:
Can you find the clock tower? What time is it in Box City?
Where is the eagle on a flagpole? What does it stand for?
How many domes can you find?
Can you find a building with three round windows?
Can you find the hospital?
Who is sitting on the bench in front of town hall?
Where are the crosswalks?
How are the trees planted?
Make Space For Your Box City
What is the best grid size?
We probably get more questions about creating a grid than for any other topic. Allow a space of about 24x24 feet, the approximate size of a standard classroom. That way you can allow for "sprawl" or a suburb or park. A 15x15 foot space would be the minimum. Be creative with the space you have!
*Most people do Box City for about six weeks and then set up their entire Box City for only a day or two in a special place where everyone can see, like a Library or City Hall.
Starting Your Box City
Understanding the Layout of the City
People influence the city when interacting with geography, government, history, and economics. Here are some starting points:
1. Begin with what the participants know
• the neighborhood around the school
• the neighborhood around the most frequently used shopping center
• the future plan for your town or city
2. Contact the city planning department to ask for a land use of your city, delineated by color. In order to personalize the Box City experience for your participants, this can serve as a drawing guide for the base map.
3. Next, define the boundaries for the city. If curriculum outcomes would benefit, select a certain time period, a particular city or geographic location. Begin with the early nucleus of the city and then have a second wave of construction which represents more current growth in the city.
4. Write a clear description of the city before. This can be a cooperative learning project if participants can work together over an extended period of time.
For instance:
“This community is located in the rural Midwest in the early 1800s.
It is located on the Missouri River near a place where fur traders had first established a trading post. The first settlers are just moving out of their sod houses and beginning to build more permanent homes and structures. What buildings would they build first?”
Consider The Neighborhood’s Layout and Box arrangements
Transportation
How do you get from one neighborhood to another? From one place in the city to another?
Which ways are the quickest? Why? Should there be more of these routes?
If so, where will these go? What changes will need to be made in order for this to happen? What will be the positive effects? What will be the negative effects? If you were asked to move from your home to make way for highway construction, would you? Why or why not?
Services
What public services or needs do people in a neighborhood or city share—police, fire, schools, parks, utilities for electricity, maintenance, landfill?
Where are these places located? In your neighborhood? In your city?
Where should they be? Who decides where these will be? Do you want to live near them?
Rights, Responsibilities, and Limits
Does a building have rights?
Who is responsible for someone else’s land? Your neighborhood? Your city? How far does that responsibility go?
When is it “my” neighborhood? When is it “their” neighborhood? at the corner? when you step outside your house? across the street? a few blocks away?
Greenspaces
Are there green spaces in your neighborhood? In your city? Why? Where?
A green space is not always a park. It can be a planted area which separates two land use types such as residential from commercial.
Who takes care of the green spaces? Should there be more green spaces? Who should pay?
Box City Materials
Get Resourceful
The Box City activity is as much about the process of community-making as it is about the way buildings look. Box Cities are constructed of boxes, often recycled, and sized 4–6 inches, which will help the Boxes relate to scale. Boxes of this size allow for easy management and adequate building representation (industrial, commercial, civic, and residential) to form a comprehensive city. The boxes are decorated with paper, paint or rubber stamps to encourage a developing knowledge of architectural details and styles.
By choosing ready-made boxes, rather than making models, there is more time for that “organizing” process to take place. See More on Scale in this curriculum. Reused boxes from home or local grocer or business make great opportunities for unique shaped buildings.
Design possibilities and materials: paint, magic marker, rubber stamps, sponges, crayons, photographs, cut construction paper, magazine cutouts, mixed media or a combination of materials. A selection of photos taken on walking tours or reference books will help participants recall specific architectural details. For participants who enjoy research, this is an opportunity to choose a style they have always wanted to learn about.