Clemson University to partner with the town of Pendleton for Your Town workshop

Published: November 1, 2011

CLEMSON — A small group of landscape architecture students from Clemson University will partner with a diverse gathering of civic leaders, designers, planners and professors to develop a sustainable plan for growth in the town of Pendleton Nov. 3-5.

The event is one of three Your Town workshops held in the U.S. this year and is funded primarily by a $22,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mary Beth McCubbin, director of the a.LINE.ments design studio in Clemson’s School of Planning, Development, Preservation and Landscape Architecture, organized the event. She and her students — along with community volunteers from Pendleton — have worked for months to line up the experts who will work with the stakeholders, develop the case studies that will be used in problem-solving and serve as facilitators throughout the workshop.

A public lecture by Ed McMahon will kick off the event at 7 p.m. in Cox Hall of the Clemson Little Theatre. McMahon holds the Charles E. Fraser Chair on Sustainable Development at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., where he leads the institute’s worldwide efforts to conduct research and educational activities related to environmentally sensitive development policies and practices.

Key participants representing the broader community have been invited to participate in Your Town, along with professionals who are experienced in community design, historic preservation, economic development and project implementation, McCubbin said.

Together they will explore pressures that threaten the character of Pendleton and propose design strategies to implement solutions to these problems. Two specific areas of interest and potential focus for the workshop are elements related to the town square as well as the creation of gateways to define and encourage a sense of identity within the town.

END

The Clemson University School of Planning, Development, Preservation and Landscape Architecture offers a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture and masters’ degrees in city and regional planning, historic preservation, landscape architecture and real estate development.