Landscape Architect Articles

LASN Technology February 200902-01-09 | News

Inventory and Analysis of Newtown, Ga.

By Jacob Lange, UGA MLA candidate

The industrial character of Newtown imposes itself on the neighborhood aesthetics. With years of municipal oversight and the absence of zoning regulations in mid-century Gainesville, the lands surrounding the neighborhoods were overtaken by industrial operations such as Purina, Cargill, ConAgra, and Milliken.
Photos: Jacob Lange

Integral to any design program, regardless of scale, is the generation of a comprehensive site inventory and analysis. To provide the client with the best possible solution, the designer must become intimately familiar with all variables and nuances of the site.

Traditional approaches to inventory and analysis have led to the compilation of existing physical, environmental, aesthetic, and contextual characteristics in the form of color-overlay maps evocative of GIS applications. While these methods may also attempt to map a sociocultural element, they do so in the form of demographic statistics incapable of communicating the human character inhabiting the site. It is this human element, the dynamic interaction between landscape and user, that three MLA students from the University of Georgia?EUR??,,????'?????<

This is the initial inventory and analysis conducted for Newtown, Ga. and surrounding Gainesville by the author before the project was defined and became the foundation for further detailed mapping of the site.

Following the aftermath of the 1936 tornado that leveled a large portion of Gainesville, the community of Newtown was constructed to the southeast of downtown atop a landfill that received much of the tornado debris. The residential community, composed of three to four room shotgun houses occupied by an almost exclusively African American population, is, as described by resident and neighborhood advocate Rose Johnson, ?EUR??,,????'?????<

Today, many of the houses are still owned and occupied by the families who founded the neighborhood three-quarters of a century ago.

The GIS base map was made in ArcGIS and exported to AutoCad for further simplification using parcel ownership data for Gainesville, Ga.

Just as longstanding as the residents who comprise Newtown is the industry that envelops it. With years of municipal oversight and the absence of zoning regulations in mid-century Gainesville, the land surrounding the neighborhood was overtaken by heavy industrial use and is still home to such operations as Purina, Cargill, ConAgra, and Milliken.

Because of the breadth of operation these facilities encompass, it is largely inconceivable they be removed. Therefore, the neighborhood has turned to the scrap iron and metal recycling facility immediately adjacent to Newtown?EUR??,,????'?????<

Parcel ownership in Newtown and surrounding Gainesville were simplified and blocked in using AutoCad and overlaid with corresponding colors using Adobe Illustrator. Residential, commercial, industrial, greenspace, government lands, churches and even a junkyard are easily identified at a glance.

Enter the second year master?EUR??,,????'?????<

A single component within a class-wide project, the inventory and analysis described here, and in a subsequent article, seeks to accurately illustrate the juxtaposition between a historically significant and contemporarily viable community and its industrial neighbors. Initial exploration into the community, its residents, and their needs relied on traditional methods of documentation. The students photographed, sketched, and mapped the physical character of the site, and conducted interviews to get a sense of the historic and contemporary cultural character of its people. It was quickly determined that a traditional approach to visually communicating an inventory of existing conditions would not sufficiently capture the dynamic landscape and its defining human element. Therefore, a multimedia approach was chosen.

After insertion of the base map into SketchUp at high resolution, students massed different land uses and site characteristics to analyze spatial relationships in and around Newtown.

Specifically, the students combined video footage and photographs from the site and its periphery to contrast the residential and industrial zones interspersed with computer graphics generated by ArcGIS, AutoCAD, Adobe Illustrator, and animations created in Google SketchUp to illustrate the dichotomy between land uses. All images were then arranged and edited using Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as all audio and text used to explain those visuals. This multimedia approach provided the opportunity to document the usual elements of a site inventory and analysis while simultaneously expressing Newtown?EUR??,,????'?????<

Generally a tool for the designer, the final product not only fulfills its conventional function, but because of the accessibility of the video format, it becomes a tool for the residents to raise awareness about their community. Establishing an interface between client and designer is the most advantageous result of the video documentation, and offers designers a new and innovative approach to developing more site and culture sensitive solutions.

In an upcoming article, the three graduate students from the University of Georgia will explore the specific process taken to complete the inventory and analysis, including a detailed description of the computer applications used. To view the Newtown video, and other projects produced for Newtown by the second-year master?EUR??,,????'?????<www.ced.uga.edu/index.php/degree/list/cat/mla.