Discovering Diversity Downtown: Questioning Phoenix Craig A. Talmage, Rosemarie Dombrowski, Mikulas Pstross, C. Bjørn Peterson, and Richard C. Knopf Abstract Applied community learning experiences for university students are promising endeavors in downtown urban environments. Past research is applied to help better comprehend a community engagement initiative conducted in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The initiative aimed to illuminate the socio-cultural diversity of the downtown area utilizing storytelling methods. The initiative leveraged three broad questions: Where is downtown, what is downtown, and who is downtown? Lessons learned from the initiative, its processes, and outcomes are showcased and reviewed. Downtown is resurrection. The re-birth of the cool, the now. The happening, happening again. For the first time . . . from memory . . . from the sense of living the eternal moment.(Jack Evans, poet [Dombrowski and Talmage 2014, 3]) Like the mythical phoenix, downtown urban areas have both risen and descended over the years, but still downtowns remain the vital epicenters of today’s communities (Speck 2012). It is no wonder then that many of our colleges and universities are housed in some way or another in downtown areas because of their value (Emenhiser 2012). While these downtowns may be relatively small in comparison to the entire urban area, they considerably contribute to the health of the entire urban or metropolitan area (Sisko et al. 2014). Thus, intuitively, we know that urban downtowns have value, but we need better measures of that value (Mahoney et al. 2014). Those measurements can be complex, because these public spaces do not only have economic or physical value, but socio-cultural value as well (Madden 2014; Ward 2007). Applied community learning experiences may be quintessential tools for discovering value in urban downtown communities. In light of these notions, this paper explores socio-cultural value in the heart of an urban downtown area through an applied community learning experience, which involved university students, faculty, and community members. The experience was spurred from a grant-funded initiative that sought to illuminate the stories of socio-cultural diversity in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. A Brief Introduction to Downtown Phoenix The entire city of Phoenix consists of an estimated 1.6 million residents and is the fifth most populated city in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau 2013; World Population Review 2014); however, less than 2 percent of its residents live in its downtown area. The entire Phoenix metropolitan area is comprised of a population of 4.3 million 113 persons, making it the thirteenth largest metropolitan area in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau 2013; World Population Review 2014); thus, just slightly more than 0.5 percent of the metro-area’s population is found in the capital city’s nucleus. In many ways, downtown Phoenix might epitomize the consequences of urban sprawl (Speck 2012), but as one downtown university professor comments, “It’s starting to change, I see very real change” (Waltz 2014). Ten years ago, downtown Phoenix rarely would see activity outside of traditional work hours unless there was an event at one of the two professional sports venues, or at one of its museums or theatres (Hilton 2013; Poore 2011). The area had somewhat of an indefinite artist community, and it was without a light rail system, university campus, and thriving city nightlife (Hilton 2013). In 2006, Arizona State University opened a satellite campus in downtown Phoenix, which in the beginning drew more than a thousand students into the area (Hilton 2013); now the campus and its programs have 11,500 students enrolled (Arizona State University 2014a). The development of what would become a higher education district was coupled with the revitalization of arts districts and the emergence of boutique lodging and nightlife venues (i.e., bars, restaurants, and a bowling alley). A light rail system was built in the area, which connected downtown Phoenix to uptown and midtown Phoenix, Mesa, and Tempe, where ASU’s original campus resides (Hall 2008). What was once a blighted and high-crime region of the city now appears to be a vivacious place to visit, live, and work (E. Scott 2012; Waltz 2014). At least in the city center, much of the once noticeable blight has begun to evaporate since the introduction of Arizona State University (Hilton 2013) and because of the hard work of local artists and community leaders (Stein, Eigo, and Kahler 2014). Grants of up to $100,000 have been employed in the area to “put vacant, blighted properties to use and support the local arts economy” (Gersema 2012). Now, the downtown area hosts art walks, pub-crawls, farmers markets, and food trucks (Hilton 2013). The issue of blight has been targeted by many in higher education, and through creative place-making, universities have helped transform areas with blight (Grossman and Roy 2014). Many institutions have sought to become more socially embedded in their communities as a response to their ivory tower images (Arizona State University 2014b; Hall 2008). Hall (2008) writes, “The idea is that a campus should become a vital part of the city and its downtown, sharing its challenges and helping it build a sustainable future through useful research and teaching.” The presence of a campus, however, does not guarantee vitality; engagement with and dialogue between university students, faculty, and community members through applied community learning experiences are essential for healthy partnerships. Thus, what follows is a discussion of the importance of applied community learning experiences and a discussion of one of the first applied projects of its kind in downtown Phoenix. However, the applied community learning experience is presented knowing that the actual number of these kinds of experiences in the area is unknown; an accurate portrait of downtown development through university-community partnerships remains needed. 114 Applied Community Learning Experiences “Where you went to college matters less to your work life and well-being after graduation than how you went college.” (Brandon Busteed [Gallup Business Journal, 2014]) Applied community learning experiences for college and university students are essential to their future success in their work and personal lives (Busteed 2014). A recent study by Gallup found that experiential and deep learning, including semester or longer projects, are key to students’ success in their personal and work lives after graduation (Busteed 2014). Consistently, Weingarten (2014) suggests that modern- instruction requires richness and depth in student learning experiences. Thus, it is important that “students combine academic study with some form of direct, practical involvement, usually with a community close to the university” (Bednarz et al. 2008, 87), which may include an urban downtown area. Many colleges and universities foster applied- or service-learning experiences for their students, where students fulfill their coursework through activities in communities that help fulfill community needs. These activities serve to help students acquire important skills and knowledge that will help them in their work and community lives outside of their college and university and/or after they graduate. “Service-learning and other outreach activities give students firsthand opportunities to apply what they are learning in their disciplinary studies outside the academic setting, thus promoting leadership, character development, cultural and community understanding, and self-discovery” (Garber et al. 2010, 78). Applied learning helps better the civic skills, the connectedness to the university, and the retention of our students (Roy 2014). If the goal is to enable college and university students to apply their skills and knowledge in their own communities, then the strategies used to teach them should relate to their own life experiences (Grossman and Roy 2014). Syracuse, New York Mayor Stephanie Miner highlights this vital sensitivity: “We deposit all of our societal problems into our school buildings along with our children, and say to educators, teach them” (Mahoney et al. 2014); thus, how we teach matters (Busteed 2014). Faculty members, therefore, play a key role in facilitating successful applied learning experiences in communities for students. First, faculty perceptions of civic engagement and service-learning appear to influence participation in those activities (Hiraesave and Kauffman 2014). These experiences also may be more inclined to help build strong personal connections between faculty members and students. Second, Busteed (2014) noted that emotional support shown for students—in particular, professors that instill an excitement about learning in their students and professors that care about their students—are significant to students’ success in their personal and work lives after graduation. In relation to both students and faculty, institutional commitment to applied learning is a necessity (Hiraesave and Kauffman 2014). 115 These learning experiences can transform into formal partnerships with a community, a community organization, or community members (Pstross et al. 2013). University– community partnerships help students connect theory and practice (Wilson 2004). They also help universities stay grounded in their communities, thus, answering Ernest Lynton’s (1983) call to “rethink our conception of the university as a detached and isolated institution” (53). Powell (2014) implores that both neighborhoods with universities and universities in neighborhoods need to consider diversity in their work together: Neighborhoods are home to diverse groups of residents who share a common place, but not the same degree of attachment to that place or the same sense of community. Despite the increased interest in university–community relations, there is relatively little empirical research on intergroup relations in campus- adjacent neighborhoods (108). Thus, the intentional integration of the university into the community and vice versa is key to joint visioning and development, especially in urban downtown areas (Waltz 2014). Community members, however, still do not necessarily experience the same benefits as members of the university (Blouin and Perry 2009; Lear and Sánchez 2013). Blouin and Perry (2009) write, “The benefits to students are well documented, but the value to the community is less clear” (133). Benefits to the community need to be thoroughly assessed and well documented; they should not be implied or assumed (Lear and Sánchez, 2013). Therefore, sustainable university-community partnerships are founded in reciprocity and trust. Stakeholders from both arenas need to collaborate as partners, and both partners need to seek ways to leverage each other’s strengths in community engagement work. Furthermore, an ongoing commitment to the partnership must be established (Davidson et al. 2010; Holland and Gelmon 2003; Lear and Sánchez 2013). Thus, a key question must be kept in mind as community developer Richard Knopf notes: “How can we become incredibly integrated to actually reflect the vision of the community, instead of the vision of [the university]?” (Waltz 2014). Portraits of Our Universities and Communities Integration requires self-awareness, which may be more like portraiture than cartography. Barbara Holland (2014) emphasizes that we—university personnel who work to enhance community engagement—need a reasonably accurate portrait of the activity at our institutions. Efforts have been made through the use of technological resources (e.g., Community Engagement Collaboratory) to create and capture these images making up our universities (Holland 2014), yet the same efforts need to be made in the larger communities that our universities serve. Often our universities and communities seem as diverse as what we might see in a Jackson Pollack painting. Where to start or what to focus on seem to stress our minds as we seek to construct more accurate portraits of our institutions and communities. Holland (2014) notes that measurement may be one of the biggest deterrents of engagement, including the need to track different perspectives in our community 116 engagement work. Thus, broad strokes are needed on the canvas to reveal the true diversity of our communities, our universities, and all the interwoven pieces between them. Applied community learning experiences can be one of the paintbrushes we use for discovery and, perhaps even, development. The “We Are Downtown” Initiative Sit down with a good book, open your mind to experience something new, and use the experience to go out and change your own community. (Alex Stevenson, university student, [2014]) In the interest of integration and engagement, an initiative was proposed to Arizona State University’s Office of Academic Excellence through Diversity. This initiative was accepted and was carried out through an applied community learning experience in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, that utilized university students, faculty, and community members. The aim was to highlight the stories of socio-cultural diversity in the downtown area through efforts initiated by university students and staff. The We Are Downtown initiative began as a small grant-funded project. The purpose of the grant offered by the Academic Excellence through Diversity office at Arizona State University was written as such: To provide our university community including students, faculty, staff, and local communities, with opportunities to explore and discuss together current and cutting-edge scholarly topics and issues, including but not limited to behavioral, societal, cultural, historical, scientific, and political perspectives, that advance an understanding of access, excellence, and inclusion from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives. The goal of this program is to elevate the university dialogue across disciplines in order to educate our students and provide critical insights into the multidisciplinary opportunities and challenges in working with our diverse peoples and communities in the 21st century.(Diaz 2013, 1) Proposal responses were required to contain multidisciplinary teams and multidisciplinary methods. They were particularly encouraged to offer at least one community event to exhibit the university’s commitment to diversity and commitment to working with underserved professional and neighborhood communities. The parameters, though broad and somewhat ill defined, had great promise for the team. The multidisciplinary We Are Downtown team engaged students and faculty from three university schools: 1) the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, 2) the School of Community Resources and Development, and 3) the School of Letters and Sciences. They provided the following response: The We Are Downtown project seeks to amplify storytelling in and of the diverse communities in downtown Phoenix. This effort will strengthen relationships between schools, faculty, and students at ASU’s downtown Phoenix campus and 117 individuals and private and public sector organizations in downtown. The many expressions of this story will be showcased in a summit that weaves connections between ASU and the downtown communities, and offers the opportunity for the community to discover its soul.(Knopf et al. 2013, 2) After formation, the multidisciplinary team grew to include other schools even after the grant was funded. The team was motivated to discover the diverse downtown story through an applied community learning experience, which was to conduct both traditional and nontraditional community-based research. Undergraduate students in a senior-level tourism development and management course held at the university’s downtown Phoenix campus were the primary surveyors for the more conventional research portions of the first phase of this initiative. However, the diverse downtown story was chronicled not only through traditional survey methods, but also through a student- directed documentary film and sourced poems, writings, and photographs from university students and downtown community members. Stories were assumed to contain the rich details of diversity desired. Specifically regarding Phoenix, Yoohyun Jung (2014) writes: People interact with things or other people, creating stories and leaving traces of those stories as memories in the minds of other people or the physical space of places they go. Those bits and pieces accumulate in the pockets of this city, giving the people an experience more special than all the rest. Thus, the team’s methods aimed to elucidate a portrait of downtown Phoenix through stories of diversity. The Essential Questions Downtown is the celebration of the city’s non-concealment of our very selves. (Michael Bartelt, university student and poet, [Dombrowski and Talmage 2014, 6]) An open process was agreed upon to paint the portrait of downtown Phoenix from its diverse perspectives and through its stories of diversity. Lees (2003) expresses the basic philosophy of this kind of process: Urban revitalization initiatives must embrace diversity—cultural and economic, as well as functional and spatial. This diversity of different ‘diversities’ is often under-theorized, as are the benefits of, and relationships among, social and cultural diversity, economic diversification, mixed-use and multi-purpose zoning, political pluralism, and democratic public space. It is my contention that this ambivalence is not simply a smokescreen for vested commercial interests, but also provides opportunities for expressing alternative visions of what diversity and the city itself should be. (613) 118 The team established the three essential questions to guide the applied community learning experience: 1) where is downtown Phoenix; 2) what is downtown Phoenix; and 3) who is downtown Phoenix? The team then reached out to community members, university students, and others to discover the variety of possible answers these questions. More specifically, the undergraduate students, who conducted the more formal research efforts, were asked to reflect upon their own answers to these questions. Where Is Downtown? Before surveying the community, the undergraduate students were asked in-class to respond by drawing on a paper map, “Where is downtown Phoenix?” The map pictured a geographic area that spanned three miles north and south and four miles east and west. The students drew their perceived boundaries of the downtown area on the paper map. The undergraduate students then went to their local friends, fellow students, family members, downtown residents, workers, and passersby on the street with maps of the general downtown area. They asked the participants to draw an outline of downtown Phoenix’s boundaries. The maps collected were synthesized and organized by two undergraduate students not enrolled in the senior-level tourism development and management course to elucidate possible themes. As to be expected, definitions varied between individuals. Out of the more than three hundred maps collected, four common responses emerged from the collection of answers. These responses are found in Figure 1. Figure 1. Four Common Representations of Answers to “Where Is Downtown?” Survey 119 The discovery of where was furthered through an open house event hosted by the university at its downtown Phoenix campus. At the event, the We Are Downtown team asked more than sixty visitors to indicate on a map projected on a wall to answer the following questions by using sticky notes: • Where is the heart of downtown Phoenix? (represented by hearts) • Where do you go in downtown Phoenix? (represented by people) • Where do you avoid in downtown Phoenix? (represented by exclamations) • Where is your favorite part of or place in downtown Phoenix? (represented by flags) • Where do you live in downtown Phoenix? (represented by houses) The team using Google’s map engine then captured the answers online, which are depicted in Figure 2. Figure 2. The Notable Places of Downtown Phoenix Also to be expected, the heart of downtown Phoenix seemed to yield consistent answers within a dense area of the map. The heart was found within the Downtown Phoenix 120 Business Improvement District’s boundaries, which helps corroborate this portion of the project’s findings (Downtown Phoenix Partnership Inc. 2014; Hilton 2013). The center or heart included many of the individuals’ favorite places and places where they usually go. Through informal conversations with event visitors, places individuals went and favored were noted to include sports arenas, restaurants, bars, historic neighborhoods, the university, and museums. The places that were avoided were noted as government agency buildings, abandoned areas with a lot of blight, and the local city jail. Finally, the few persons who indicated that they lived in downtown did not live near the perceived heart or center, but still emphasized that they lived downtown. The undergraduate students then were divided into eleven teams and were asked to speak with additional residents, workers, and passersby in downtown Phoenix. Ten of the teams of three to six students focused on the different official, unofficial, and overlapping districts of downtown Phoenix. These districts are depicted in Figure 3. The districts were based on City of Phoenix development plans (City of Phoenix 2014b) and historic neighborhood districts (City of Phoenix 2014a; Historic Phoenix Real Estate 2014). Finally, one team specifically focused on elucidating the university’s downtown Phoenix campus’ assets. Figure 3. Downtown Phoenix’s Overlapping Districts What Is Downtown? Two sub-questions were deemed necessary to better understand what is downtown: 1) What is a downtown?, and 2) What is our downtown? Before surveying the community, the undergraduate students were asked in-class to reflect on and respond to the following question, “What is a downtown?” Following this reflection, these students ascertained the appropriate human subjects training certifications before surveying and having informal conversations with downtown community members 121 and fellow university students around the question, “What is our downtown?” Meanwhile, other students and faculty involved in the initiative gathered poems and photos from community artists and fellow students around these two questions as well. What is a downtown? The undergraduate students generated, in-class, their own definitions of downtown and downtown spaces before data collection in the community began. Their definitions had both positive and negative connotations. The following are excerpts (Dombrowski and Talmage 2014) of their definitions of what is a downtown: A place of hustle and bustle . . . a place of business and a place where everyone can have fun. (13) Where everything happens. (13) An area within a major city that has places to go, things to do. (13) Rich with culture and has an abundance of shops and businesses. (13) A place that takes bits and pieces of surrounding environments in order to create its own unique experiences. (13) A place where the community goes to get together and enjoy sports and other events. (13) A city area that has a different vibe . . .not a suburb or a rural area. (14) Where events and activities take place for locals and tourists. (14) An urban community. (14) The heart of the city. (14) Oldest area of the city. (15) A corporate culture filled with monotonous jobs and daily activities. (15) Traffic and expensive parking. (15) Tall buildings, narrow streets, not very convenient for cars. (15) Common themes appeared to include a central location, a place for the community (in general), government, businesses, and tourism. The more negative themes centered on parking and traffic. These definitions likely were influenced by the students’ 122