City of Kent! (Cleveland, Akron, Canton: 2013, co-op, buy)

[theurbanfiles]

Creating a Strong Town-Gown Relationship -- College Planning & Management

It's always cool when I'm doing research for my Higher Education Graduate classes, and I hear something positive about Northeast Ohio!

This article talks about how with community and university leaders working together, they went from having a strained town gown relationship (I remember as a kid when all there really was in DT was Ray's, Hungry Howie's and Nightclubs), to having one of the most pleasant college towns in the region through collaboration and mutual buy in.

It's clear now the charms that are pleasant, with older residential and business districts showing off their charm. I believe that recent projects include extension of the Portage Hike and Bike Trail (though I could be wrong), an incredible asset for students, the Crooked River adventures company which I don't know whether they were there when I was a kid, a bunch of new charming restaurants and shops to give it a college town vibe, including a natural foods co-op which I don't think exists everywhere, and mainly just using the space more efficiently to create a connection between the city and town. Strikes me as a college town that would be super fun to spend a weekend in, maybe not to the degree of Burlington or Charlottesville, but one that has many of the same charms (active opportunities, live music and stage theater, mom/pop restaurants and bistros, national park 15 minutes away, an awesome downtown area 40 minutes away). The quality of life for a Kent State student now is quite high.

My original paper definitely isn't my best work as it is only a skeleton outline at 12 pages, but I think I may at some point contact people from both the City of Kent and KSU, as "Town and Gown" is one of my main research interests. I tend to think that the Cleveland area in general is somewhat of a gold mine for me on that then, because I at least tend to think that Case Western, Cleveland State, and Oberlin have among the more unique town-gown relationships historically and recently also.

[SquareBetterThanAll]

Should co-post in Akron-Canton forum. Kent has done well with their recent project Downtown, wish Akron (and Canton, but they don't have that University connection) could do the same.

[theurbanfiles]

Good idea, I will have to do that in the next couple days. And yeah, I agree, I think it would take a tremendous amount of growth on the part of Akron to have DT connected to the Campus like that. However, I do think that as of now DT Akron is quite pleasant and UAkron campus could certainly be worse with recent improvements. I'm not sure about land space that is vacant in Akron but it wouldn't be terrible on their part if it was to give some of that land to the university. I mean I can't imagine Case has always had as big a campus space as it does now and I have to imagine that has gone a long way as a revitalization tool for the UC area.