Community Landscape Lab Studio Engages in Service-Learning
Katherine Melcher, an associate professor of landscape architecture in the College of Environment and
Design, has created the Community Landscape Lab to engage students and community groups
using landscape architecture as the means to acuate social change. Through the Community
Landscape Lab, Professor Melcher partners students with clients in a Master's level
Landscape Architecture (MLA) studio to provide stakeholders with design concepts and
engagement strategies useful to the community. Bringing more awareness to the lab's
work, students developed a blog to publish information about the projects they are
working on, including background information, weekly updates on community feedback,
and their design recommendations.
The Community Landscape Lab gained ground last semester when the MLA studio focused
on two projects: the Brooklyn Cemetery Landscape Project and Kate’s Club Landscape
Project. Not far from the center of Athens, the Brooklyn Cemetery was established
in 1880 to serve Athens’ growing African American population. In partnership with
the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery and the Trustees of Brooklyn Cemetery, Master’s students
Shihui Deng, David Evans, Aron Hall, and Adedamola Okunmadewa worked to collect community
input on a restored site plan and detailed design elements.
The second project that the studio focused on is Kate's Club, a non-profit organization
located in Atlanta, GA. The club aims to "empower children having experienced the
loss of a parent or a sibling through advocacy, recreational and group support programs,
engagement, and education. The club believes in the power of healing community to
overcome that grief." In collaboration with Kate's Club, Master's students Emily Whisenant,
Joshua Goeden, and Pranisha Karmacharya created designs for a healing garden with
community members' input. In speaking with Debra Brook, Director of Volunteer Services
at Kate's Club, the team was directed to create an interactive outdoor space that
would allow children to be able to spend as much time outside as possible while also
encouraging the sensory experiences of the natural world such as touch and smell.
To safely receive community feedback in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, both teams had to be creative with organizing meetings with stakeholders. The Brooklyn Cemetery team held hybrid meetings where people could attend in person and social distance or join virtually. The team for Kate’s Club used both virtual meetings and experimented with using the Google Slides platform to showcase their designs. The group found that Google Slides gave their stakeholders the ability to offer feedback on a more flexible schedule, optimizing the overall feedback they received. According to Emily Whisenant, a third-year MLA student in Professor Melcher’s studio, partnering with Kate’s Club through the Community Landscape Lab allowed “many of the students first-time experience engaging with clients outside of the college, and gave the students a valuable skill set to be able to garner community engagement with an entirely online platform”.
The students worked on this project for the duration of the semester, giving them the opportunity to see the project through from initial concepts to construction documents and implementation guidelines. As stated in the studio blog, Professor Melcher believes that “by working closely with community groups throughout the design process, students develop practical design projects that can transform everyday landscapes into meaningful and useful places”.
To learn more about the Brooklyn Cemetery and Kate's Club projects, please see the students’ Community Landscape Lab blog.