Jelani Saadiq is a senior at Piney Woods School in Mississippi. He participated in Champaign’s summer youth employment program this summer.
This summer I was bamboozled; I thought that the summer employment program would be a boring 9am-1 pm job, but I was totally lost in my own ignorance. Professor Ken Salo opened my eyes to the world of Urban and Regional Planning. As a group we turned what seemed to be simple employment into an academy. For seven weeks Professor Salo, my classmate and I dealt with many different aspects of planning. The ones that stood out to me were employment, housing, urban gardening, and transportation. Exploring these areas of Urban Planning sculpted my perception of the city I live in. We learned that the major factor that connects all of these areas is the people that inhabit a city.
Our program was broken up in seven different subject areas, one for each week, ending with the creation of a project and a presentation in front of people that our project directly affected. Week one consisted of getting a general idea of what Urban Planning is. Urban Planning is the study of how space in a city is used to control the behaviors of people in that area. My first thoughts about it were negative, but it’s not all bad. For example, Urban Planners help cities figure out where a school should be and they deal with zoning that determines who will go to the newly relocated school. There are also negative parts of Planning, such as putting together maps for companies that have no interest in helping the people of certain communities.
The first subject that stood out to me was the importance of employment. From a Planners perspective, employment really determines the lifespan of a city. The number of employed adults and youth in a city shows whether or not the city itself is self-sustainable. Major cities that thrive tend to have international investors, or they produce products, whether it’s human productivity (universities or military) or material products, factories. The other idea that we dealt with was youth and employment. When more youth are employed, they are doing more constructive things with their time and gaining work experience that will be useful later in life. One of the benefits of being in Champaign’s youth program was that it put us in different work areas around campus and gave us more career options.
With employment comes financial stability and the ability to meet basic human needs, like housing. Housing, or lack thereof, also affects one’s mental state. I found that one of the major issues intertwined with housing is security, therefore we dealt with the idea of being safe by examining people who live in gated communities versus people who don’t. We asked, “Who’s being protected from whom”? Mainstream media bombards us with images of what a criminal looks like so people move to gated communities to be disconnected from the general community and be away from where the “criminals” live, as if crime doesn’t happen in gated communities, even with ADT alarm systems. With more people of color moving to the urban areas planners and society will have to see the black experience as the urban experience.
People who live in urban areas will soon have an increased interest in this old but ever changing idea of Urban Gardening. Communities all over the country, even here in Champaign-Urbana, are creating community gardens where people can go and grow their own organic foods to feed their families. We took a couple trips to the community garden here in town on Randolph St. in order to have hands on experiences of growing our own food and seeing the fruits of our labor. Although we didn’t do a lot of gardening, just being there was great. Our conversations about gardening weren’t very in-depth but the thought that urban gardens will soon be in great demand as a way to save money and begin to have a healthier lifestyle was profound.
The last thing that stood out to me was transportation; we actually spent the most time on it. Transportation is very important when thinking about planning a city. We spent most of our time talking about alternate ways of transportation, like biking. This idea of biking as an alternative to way to travel has plenty pros and cons. In order to further look at this idea of biking we had to do some field work in order to really have concrete experience. The first thing we did was the Juneteenth Bike ride, which started at the Boys and Girls Club and ended at the Randolph St. community garden. The bike route was a total of 7 miles. I was extremely tired but it was truly an experience I wouldn’t mind doing again. The goal of our project was to show all the benefits of biking: the physical benefits, reconnecting to one’s community, and saving money. Our project targets the community in general but we wanted to put an emphasis on the youth to show them that this problem of transportation will soon be theirs, and if we don’t adapt a simple solution of alternative transportation it will do nothing but get worse. We presented our project to a group of youth of all ages and the idea was accepted by the majority in attendance.
As a whole I really enjoyed my summer with Professor Ken Salo. If I had to describe my summer work program in one word I was say diverse. In the seven weeks we hit so many subject areas I really felt like I was in a college course, but it was a good way to prepare my coworker and I for the next step in education, college. If I could change one thing about the program I would include an international trip in order to show how Urban Planning and urbanization works in other countries.
The Fruits of Our Labor: Champaign’s Summer Youth Jobs Program
By Jelani Saadiq
Jelani Saadiq is a senior (?) at Piney Woods School in Mississippi. He participated in Champaign’s summer youth employment program this summer.
This summer I was bamboozled; I thought that the summer employment program would be a boring 9am-1 pm job, but I was totally lost in my own ignorance. Professor Ken Salo opened my eyes to the world of Urban and Regional Planning. As a group we turned what seemed to be simple employment into an academy. For seven weeks Professor Salo, my classmate and I dealt with many different aspects of planning. The ones that stood out to me were employment, housing, urban gardening, and transportation. Exploring these areas of Urban Planning sculpted my perception of the city I live in. We learned that the major factor that connects all of these areas is the people that inhabit a city.
Our program was broken up in seven different subject areas, one for each week, ending with the creation of a project and a presentation in front of people that our project directly affected. Week one consisted of getting a general idea of what Urban Planning is. Urban Planning is the study of how space in a city is used to control the behaviors of people in that area. My first thoughts about it were negative, but it’s not all bad. For example, Urban Planners help cities figure out where a school should be and they deal with zoning that determines who will go to the newly relocated school. There are also negative parts of Planning, such as putting together maps for companies that have no interest in helping the people of certain communities.
The first subject that stood out to me was the importance of employment. From a Planners perspective, employment really determines the lifespan of a city. The number of employed adults and youth in a city shows whether or not the city itself is self-sustainable. Major cities that thrive tend to have international investors, or they produce products, whether it’s human productivity (universities or military) or material products, factories. The other idea that we dealt with was youth and employment. When more youth are employed, they are doing more constructive things with their time and gaining work experience that will be useful later in life. One of the benefits of being in Champaign’s youth program was that it put us in different work areas around campus and gave us more career options.
With employment comes financial stability and the ability to meet basic human needs, like housing. Housing, or lack thereof, also affects one’s mental state. I found that one of the major issues intertwined with housing is security, therefore we dealt with the idea of being safe by examining people who live in gated communities versus people who don’t. We asked, “Who’s being protected from whom”? Mainstream media bombards us with images of what a criminal looks like so people move to gated communities to be disconnected from the general community and be away from where the “criminals” live, as if crime doesn’t happen in gated communities, even with ADT alarm systems. With more people of color moving to the urban areas planners and society will have to see the black experience as the urban experience.
People who live in urban areas will soon have an increased interest in this old but ever changing idea of Urban Gardening. Communities all over the country, even here in Champaign-Urbana, are creating community gardens where people can go and grow their own organic foods to feed their families. We took a couple trips to the community garden here in town on Randolph St. in order to have hands on experiences of growing our own food and seeing the fruits of our labor. Although we didn’t do a lot of gardening, just being there was great. Our conversations about gardening weren’t very in-depth but the thought that urban gardens will soon be in great demand as a way to save money and begin to have a healthier lifestyle was profound.
The last thing that stood out to me was transportation; we actually spent the most time on it. Transportation is very important when thinking about planning a city. We spent most of our time talking about alternate ways of transportation, like biking. This idea of biking as an alternative to way to travel has plenty pros and cons. In order to further look at this idea of biking we had to do some field work in order to really have concrete experience. The first thing we did was the Juneteenth Bike ride, which started at the Boys and Girls Club and ended at the Randolph St. community garden. The bike route was a total of 7 miles. I was extremely tired but it was truly an experience I wouldn’t mind doing again. On Bike Ride, we rode from Douglass Park to Rantoul to learn the untold story of the Tuskegee airmen, black pilots who fought in World War II. The goal of our project was to show all the benefits of biking: the physical benefits, reconnecting to one’s community, and saving money. Our project targets the community in general but we wanted to put an emphasis on the youth, to show them that this problem of transportation will soon be theirs, and if we don’t adapt a simple solution of alternative transportation it will do nothing but get worse. We presented our project to a group of youth of all ages and the idea was accepted by the majority in attendance.
As a whole I really enjoyed my summer with Professor Ken Salo. If I had to describe my summer work program in one word I was say diverse. In the seven weeks we hit so many subject areas I really felt like I was in a college course, but it was a good way to prepare my coworker and I for the next step in education, college. If I could change one thing about the program I would include an international trip in order to show how Urban Planning and urbanization works in other countries.