Imagining the Future of Downtown Watertown

Fang Xu; Mitchell Daniel Woldt; Gregory Thomas Zens

Touted as South Dakota’s rising star, Watertown is a growing city with a population of around 24,000. For the past 20 years, its residents have been talking about a revitalization plan for the city’s historic downtown. The current municipality takes varied measures to crowdsource urban redevelopment ideas and initiatives.

This video short showcases a participatory urban design initiative that involved 14 undergraduate architecture students and dozens of Watertown residents, many of them are downtown building owners. For students, the outreach initiative was integral to their community-based design studio for the fall semester of 2018. The goal was to identify urban design opportunities in downtown Watertown and propose design strategies after empirical investigations of pedestrians’ walking and seeing experiences in the downtown area.

The initiative was carried out in two stages. For the first stage, students collected first-person video data from long-term residents who adopted different walking patterns in downtown for their daily routines. Students then performed cinematic analysis of the data and identified 14 different sites that could be retrofitted or redeveloped for the improvement of pedestrians’ visual experiences. For the second stage, students proposed design concepts for new hotel complexes on two specific downtown sites. By the end of each stage, students displayed their works in Watertown City Council Chambers and interacted with locals.

The initiative demonstrated several participatory urban design methods to elicit and utilize residents’ experiential knowledge about urban environments. Students and participating residents co-created large amounts of visual materials that significantly promoted the local awareness about downtown revitalization. Empowering residents to recognize the relevance of design and to pursue better design services now and in the future, the initiative foregrounded Watertown residents’ role in the City’s downtown redevelopment agenda to build on social sustainability and enlarge social capital.

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