Abstract
In 1995, when I was news editor at Progressive Architecture, the magazine published “The Placemaker,” a story about a determined man who had spent most of his adult life building up a neighborhood in Starkville, Mississippi, that he called the Cotton District. Marilyn Avery, the article’s author, observed that the Cotton District “appears to be a historic neighborhood with its combination of traditional architecture and finely grained urbanism—the kind of neighborhood where wealthy families tend to reside over many generations.” She pointed out, however, that the district’s buildings were in fact largely “designed and built by one person: Dan Camp, a former shop teacher with a personal interest in architecture and urban design.”
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Notes
- 1.
Marilyn Avery, “The Placemaker,” Progressive Architecture, June 1995, p. 106, http://www.cottondistrictms.com/progressive-architecture/.
- 2.
Quote about “unwise location” is from Dan Camp, “History of the Cotton District,” posted on the Cotton District website, http://www.cottondistrictms.com/history-of-cd/, and accessed Oct. 4, 2016.
- 3.
Avery, “The Placemaker,” p. 108.
- 4.
Victor Dover, “Dan Camp’s Cotton District,” Council Report III, Congress for New Urbanism, 2003, p. 8, https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/Council%20Report%20III%20and%20IV_HR.pdf. In Council Report III, see also Dan Camp, “A Renewal of a Mississippi Neighborhood,” p. 6; Kevin Klinkenberg, “Dan Camp and the Cotton District,” p. 9; and Brian Herrmann, “Psychosociology of the Cotton District,” pp. 9, 38.
- 5.
Dover, “Dan Camp’s Cotton District.”
- 6.
Carl Smith, “Form-Based Codes Guiding Numerous Urban Developments,” Commercial Dispatch, Nov. 3, 2015, http://www.cdispatch.com/news/article.asp?aid=45975.
- 7.
As long ago as 1994, Brad German, in “Dateline Mississippi—Dan Camp’s Slum Renewal Project in Starkville, Mississippi” (Builder, May 1994), asserted that it was “hard to see how Camp could survive in a heavily regulated market”; see http://www.cottondistrictms.com/dateline-mississippi/.
- 8.
The Project for Lean Urbanism is managed by the Center for Applied Transect Studies and has received financial support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Kresge Foundation. See http://leanurbanism.org/about/.
- 9.
See Anthony Flint, “Why Andres Duany Is So Focused on Making ‘Lean Urbanism’ a Thing,” CityLab, Mar. 14, 2014, http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/03/why-andres-duany-so-focused-making-lean-urbanism-thing/8635/.
- 10.
Flint, “Why Andres Duany Is So Focused.”
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© 2017 Philip Langdon
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Langdon, P. (2017). Patient Placemaking: The Cotton District, Starkville, Mississippi. In: Within Walking Distance. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-773-5_7
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