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Democracy, Civic & Global Engagement

Fostering Civic and Global Engagement

The goals, objectives, and principles of Campus Plan 2050 support Democracy, Civic and Global Engagement by focusing on the arts, humanities, and public realm that enhance collaboration, the campus experience, and connections to the Ann Arbor community.

Goal 1: Make art and humanities a central element of the campus experience.

Objectives

  • Incorporate art across key campus spaces.
  • Support interdisciplinary collaboration by infusing more flexible shared spaces.

Goal 2: Foster a vibrant environment that offers a variety of opportunities and diverse daily experiences.

Objectives

  • Expand campus performance and events spaces.
  • Invest in and make improvements to facilities for art production and exhibition.

Goal 3: Make programmatic connections across and beyond campus boundaries.

Objectives

  • Build art- and humanities-centered community partnerships by the creation of enabling spaces.
  • Expand spaces that promote public access and engagement.
  • Enhance living and learning spaces on campus to bring people together in shared built environments.

Goal 4: Reinforce U-M’s role as a welcoming place.

Objectives

  • Create campus gateways that strengthen a sense of arrival, place, brand, and identity.
  • Increase opportunities for the public to engage with a variety of on-campus activities.
  • Create new public spaces that promote interaction among individuals and cultivate a sense of community on campus.

Goal 5: Create a vibrant and active public realm network.

Objectives

  • Enliven street-level and ground floor use of existing and proposed buildings.
  • Activate campus to improve the user experience through increased density, amenities, and the arts.
  • Improve active transportation networks to promote walking and bicycling.
  • Renovate existing and develop new student life facilities as focal points for student connection.

Democracy, Civic and Global Engagement Principles

  • Integrate public art in campus interiors, exterior landscapes, the public realm, and in the campus transit network as reasonable.
  • Activate prominent open spaces and the ground floor plane with public art, temporary exhibitions, and places for interdisciplinary events and gathering, and invest in existing arts facilities to meet current needs.
  • Provide space for small-scale exhibition space with an emphasis on academic and student life buildings.
  • Co-locate places for art exhibition and production with interdisciplinary programs.
  • Enhance campus wayfinding to improve public access and visibility of campus museums, performance venues, and public spaces.
  • Improve streetscapes and significant pathways that both pass through and interconnect the campuses; coordinate with the landscape framework.
  • Create and support places for free speech, freedom of expression, and respectful discourse.
  • Enhance the user experience with lighting and landscape management. Ensure adequate lighting levels are provided along pathways and bicycle routes.
  • Incorporate trails through wooded areas as amenities, as applicable.
  • Design circulation routes as part of the open space and landscape structure of all campuses.
  • Enhance gateways to improve campus identity and sense of arrival and promote natural buffer zones adjacent to perimeter properties where appropriate.
  • Ensure that building entrances are positioned to reinforce context-specific arrival sequences and desire lines for all users.
  • Strategically place university-standard site furnishings to activate and support outdoor gathering and collaboration spaces.