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July 2024 Meeting Summary

Hi all,

Thanks for a great July meeting of the Syracuse Urbanism Collective!

We’re officially a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization! Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen! The largest benefit of this will be our increased ability to raise money and utilize funds.

Formerly the Syracuse Urbanism Club, we’ll now be known as the Syracuse Urbanism Collective. We’re changing our name to make this group sound more professional without making it sound exclusive. There’s a lot of work for us to do to make this change: our emails, website, social media, documents, and more. This will take time and won’t all be simultaneous. Sorry for any potential confusion during that process. Here’s the first change, our new logo:

URB CLUB LOGO5.png

At this month’s meeting, we had several fantastic presentations from our members:

Jason Luscier – Urban Wildlife Research in Syracuse – A presentation focusing on the importance of urban wildlife and impacts of urban systems on ecosystems.
Kanischa Miller – Wasted Imagination Tour – A guided walking tour in Ithaca focusing on deconstruction and salvaging building parts rather than wasteful demolition.
Sarah Thompson – Pro-Housing Communities – How municipalities in our region can sign up to join a statewide program designed to reduce housing shortages and why they should.
Christian Freeman – Creekwalk Reroute – How we can reroute the Onondaga Creekwalk along the creek rather than its current path on West Street.

We also shared some upcoming events, all also available on our website at syracuseurbanism.org/calendar.

This month, we had plenty of exciting project updates!

  • The Creekwalk Wayfinding Project has tentatively selected Sunday August 24th for our volunteer effort to create signage along the creek. Stay tuned for confirmation.
  • The M. Lemp Park Project will host a movie night in the park on Wednesday August 28th. We’ll announce the movie soon.
  • The Mini Meadows team plans to canvass the neighborhood around Loguen Park to get input to help shape plans for meadow installations and public art.
  • The Bike / Pedestrian infrastructure team is looking to identify areas that need bike parking with plans to secure bike parking for those areas. We continue to participate in the city’s Vision Zero committee as well.
  • The Smart Growth in CNY conference will take place at the McCarthy Mercantile on Friday November 15, with a pre-conference walking tour on the previous night. More details will be publicly available soon.
  • The Green Space Audit project has identified 34 parks to assess and will begin the assessment process of the current conditions of these spaces to create a useful dataset for parks investments.
  • The I-81 Viaduct Project Recommendations project continues to work with the city’s Community Grid Cooperative committee and communicate with NYSDOT to further our goals.

If you’d like to join any of these projects, visit the project pages at syracuseurbanism.org/our-projects. Each project page has instructions for how to reach out and get involved!

As always, you can reach us at syracuseurbanismclub@gmail.com. Soon, we’ll be rolling out a new email, but the old one will still forward there.

Regards,

Baxter Hankin

President of the Syracuse Urbanism Collective

https://syracuseurbanism.org/

URB CLUB LOGO5.png