On Wednesday, students and staff boarded a bus to visit four of those neighborhoods: Fort Worth’s Garden of Eden and Mosier Valley, Irving’s Bear Creek and Dallas’ The Bottom.
Students will head to Elm Thicket and Joppa, a South Dallas community that earned national media attention for the impact of illegal industrial pollution on its residents, in the weeks to come. Faculty have partnered with community members and organizations, including the South Central Civic League in Joppa, to ensure their conclusions reflect input from residents.
Together, the class will brainstorm “design interventions” that could improve quality of life when it comes to green space, flooding prevention and more, Holliday said.
“The argument that we’re making is that you can’t do that without looking at the past because it fuels how we should think about decisions for the future,” Holliday said. “My argument as a historian is that in Dallas and Fort Worth, and Fort Worth in particular, we’ve done very, very little thinking about those past dynamics. Other cities have started more, but we have not to the same extent here.”