The Board of Trustees hashed out what the future has in store for City College regarding Program Location and Land Use Master Plan today, Oct. 9.

PLLUMP establishes a long-term layout for the next 15 years to utilize City College’s facilities and programs with the approved partnership alongside Anderson Brule Architects during the development process of PLLUMP.

“Those of us in the solution business will sometimes have solutions before we even find out what the problem is,” Anderson Brule Architects Principal Pamela Anderson-Brule explains.  “Here we can practice participatory government in a model the firm has practiced for over thirty-years.”

The collaboration of City College and ABA was approved during the Board of Trustees meeting August 14.

The union is striving toward aligning the educational master plan with PLLUMP. They aim toward finding what experience students actually want or need in terms of the educational master plan to appropriate the three City College campuses applications.

Student success is the center of the plan and all initiatives taken hold student interest as the primary impetus. The firm holds the core concept that services combined with environment will define the experience.

ABA completed all of the necessary research on our campuses to ensure the best possible relationship. They’ve invested in understanding the college as a whole through transparency and trust developed by listening and building rapport.

According to Anderson-Brule, what derails processes is lack of trust and changed minds during the project; people may simply change their minds about specific aspects of the plan.

“We’ve read anything we can get our hands on about you and we made it our business to learn because we’re coming into your ecosystem,” said Anderson-Brule.

PLLUMP meetings take place until May with all dates listed on City College’s website. The importance of student involvement demonstrates impact of all of those tied to the college, from the bottom up.

In the short time ABA has been here, they’ve been able to dismantle the “default settings” of City College to open up a new horizon of possibilities.

“Pam is able to break down complex concepts in a visual way,” City College President Lori Gaskin explains.  She continued by demanding that the importance of this skill is to capture a single college of three campuses in order to function in synergy.

Dr. Gaskin exclaimed that the work of ABA enabled it so now PLLUMP can be visualized when coming to fruition through the architecture firm’s collective perspective.

“You have a lot of legacy and history in this community of committed and involved people, so I think that the transparency will be very important,” said Anderson-Brule.