Who is the project for and how is it experienced?

During the past few days I have continued the research about urban sprawl and how communities that have and continue to experience this problem are dealing or have dealt with it. Some of my findings include information about a movement and a type of community design called smart growth. The idea of smart growth is basically designing dense communities that meet all the necessities of a successful community. It includes living, shopping and amenities in a densified area, making this possible by utilizing mixed use developments to accommodate all these components into a smaller area than a suburb or groups of suburbs. I also found information about ways to counteract sprawl and revert the inefficient land use caused by sprawl. In the examples I found about how to counter act the negative effects of sprawl, there they were infilling spaces in the extensive land lots use for some of the buildings and developments. They specifically where focusing on infilling large parking spaces or green areas that were between building complexes or large city mall centers. They infilled those spaces with new buildings that were dedicated to mixed used instead of having them be single use buildings.

After finding out about these, I thought it was interesting how they were trying to better the build environment by utilizing the wasted space left by urban sprawl. It was also interesting how they took advantage of this aspect of urban sprawl and use it to in some form, densify the areas and from what was there, create communities that are self-supported and better connected with their contexts and the population that occupy them.

The project takes place in the Boise, Idaho area; meaning that the project will be dedicated for the Boise community as a whole. I still do not have a specific location for the project but it will remain within the city limits of Boise. At this point the targeted audience and population remains general, but as I progress in the investigation of the topic I want to create a project that impacts the community of Boise, the surrounding cities and towns, and hopefully people from farther regions. I want to produce a project that has a positive effect in the community and that can potentially serve as example to follow as we think of new designs or existing ones.

I think the way that you experience the project is by understanding the thought behind it and why it is being completed. It could also be experience by seeing the difference of the before and after of the changes that were made; having the opinion of what worked better if the previous or the new design. It would be interesting to record how the community of a suburb reacts and changes its behaviors, if changes were made to their living environments. How would people that have lived in suburbs for long periods of time would react to living in denser areas? How would their behavior and daily activities would change? How would their living experiences would change?