Selection of the charrette city began by having Knight Fellows living and working in Knight communities initiate inquiries with local officials and research potential sites. Interest was expressed in a half-dozen communities, with three eventually making formal proposals. After a series of interviews were conducted with three Knight communities (Philadelphia, St. Paul, and Macon) that had expressed interest in hosting the Knight Program charrette, the Beall’s Hill neighborhood in Macon was identified as the situation where the Community Building Program could have the greatest positive impact, bringing in resources and expertise that might not otherwise have been available to the community.

Macon is the home community of Knight Fellow Peter Brown, who acted as the community liaison and played an instrumental role in organizing local support and participation before, during and after the event. Preparations for the charrette began in June 2001, and three site visits were made to meet with community leaders, collect background data and conduct site analysis, and carry out a stakeholder analysis. All pre-charrette work was carried out by the Knight Fellows, with Dhiru Thadani taking the lead role on planning and design, Rick Hall on transportation issues, and CC Holloman and Jennifer Hurley on stakeholder analysis.

The Beall’s Hill Charrette itself was by far the most ambitious and the most engaging event of the year for everyone involved including the Fellows, the Scholars, the School of Architecture faculty and students who took part, and the community. The charrette represented a major undertaking for the Program, and involved assembling a team that included the twelve Knight Fellows, three faculty members (including the Knight Program Director and the School of Architecture Dean), fourteen students (representing the entire class of the Suburb and Town Design Program), two consultants, and three landscape architecture students from the University of Georgia at Athens for the seven day event.

From a pedagogical viewpoint, the neighborhood presented all of the difficult conditions typically associated with inner-city neighborhoods including: a cycle of flight to the suburbs and chronic disinvestment; concentrations of poverty; crime and drug abuse; and the physical decay of the homes, shops and parks of a once proud neighborhood. Other impediments to community building efforts included: decades of town-and-gown issues that had created physical and psychological barriers between the neighborhood and the adjacent university campus; a highway expansion with a proposed route that would cut through the very heart of the neighborhood; previous efforts that had resulted in gentrification in nearby neighborhoods; a failed effort to rehabilitate three shotgun homes that stigmatized this vernacular housing type; and a line of institutional uses that was expanding and threatening to wall off the neighborhood. A 1940s-era public housing project located in the heart of the neighborhood had also been identified by numerous studies as the major obstacle to revitalizing the neighborhood. The housing project was transformed into a major redevelopment opportunity through the award of a HOPE VI grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development just prior to the charrette, and the design was revisited through this initiative.

The community building effort embodied in the charrette involved a multi-faceted process that combined facilitated stakeholder meetings, “town hall” style meetings for open forums, and planning and urban design work involving transportation, civic institutions, parks, residential and commercial development, and the social, economic and cultural issues distinctive to Beall’s Hill. The public process itself was a major product of the charrette, as a variety of plans, reports and designs for buildings, roadways, churches, the university, the HOPE VI project, and other documents simultaneously presented to the public for review and comment, most for the first time.

Information on the charrette was communicated before the event, through a pre-charrette newspaper about the process and the players, with articles by several Knight Fellows. This was distributed as an insert in Macon’s local Knight-Ridder newspaper. A web site (www.BeallsHill.net) was also established to document the event, and the Fellows produced written summaries of each stakeholder meeting which were presented to the public on the third day of the event.

The charrette produced a list of sixty strategic actions, language for an overlay code, and a master plan to guide the ongoing redevelopment of the neighborhood. Key elements of the plan advanced a variety of strategies for infill housing and reweaving the urban fabric to reconnect the neighborhood with the surrounding city. This was a classic infill initiative that responded to the neighborhood’s historic 19th-century character and included a grid pattern of streets and carriage lanes, short walkable blocks, and predominantly pre-1950 buildings.

The design advanced: infill housing types based on historic precedents; the preservation of historic homes and institutions; the restoration of a formal square and introduction of pocket parks and a greenway; the reconnection of severed streets and pathways; the introduction of on-street parking and positioning of parking to the side and rear of buildings; and code revisions that require new development to adopt the historic disposition of buildings close to the street, with porches and stoops in front and parking to the rear; the reconnection of Mercer University and the neighborhood; sites and strategies for concentrating small pockets of retail and services; and alternative approaches for the planned expansion of a charter elementary school.

The strategic actions generated by the charrette addressed issues that went well beyond the physical redevelopment of the neighborhood. These issues included: safety (community policing, park design, police kiosk); parking (shared parking between neighborhood churches, schools, and businesses); affordable housing and controlling gentrification pressures (affordable housing types, the creation of a co-housing block, identification of programs to help finance rehabilitation, construction, and first time home buyers, land banking and tax breaks for existing homeowners); transit (a trolley connection to downtown); community events (Farmers Market in the square; a Parade of Homes); and involving local financial institutions (who began acquiring land in the neighborhood following the charrette) in the redevelopment process under the Community Reinvestment Act.

The effort was also distinguished by the extraordinary team that carried out the project and the nonprofit nature of the initiative, which enabled a true partnership to form between the Knight Program, the City, and Mercer University. The combined talents, expertise and commitment of the Fellows, faculty, and students were in evidence throughout the advance meetings with community leaders, the charrette itself, and follow-up work. The team included architects and specialists from housing, real estate, planning, community development, faith-based collaboratives, economic development, web design, journalism, governance, public policy, and dispute resolution. These professionals were able to organize and implement extensive stakeholder meetings and behind-the-scenes consultations that addressed the concerns of specialized groups within the community. One major result of these sessions was the signing of a Cooperation Agreement between the congregational leaders of the seventeen churches located in the neighborhood.

The public process of the charrette was also widely hailed as a watershed event for the neighborhood, with residents, city and county officials, property owners, business people, church leaders, and university administrators openly discussing issues, problems and opportunities for revitalizing the neighborhood. Many citizens and community leaders remarked that the audience that attended the final presentation held in City Hall was the most diverse and inclusive representation of the community assembled there in recent memory.

In January 2002, the Dean, the Director, and Knight Fellow Dhiru Thadani returned to Macon at the invitation of the Mayor to take part in a two-day workshop with consultants who had worked on prior plans and reports for the City and the University, in order to produce a consolidated planning document. The strategic actions, overlay code, and master plan produced through the charrette were incorporated into this document, which was presented to the City Council for approval in April 2002.