A great, usually wasted resource

Is all the student work conducted in and around Washington, DC. Granted some of it is facile, in many cases the students don't know enough to address the issues deeply. And they pay too much fealty to planning offices, which can overly constrain and limit scopes of work for the project in ways that significantly diminish the likelihood of breakthrough ideas. But students usually come up with some interesting insights and ideas, which if not definitive, help shed new light on issues and places.

If I ever get the Citizens Planning Coalition truly relaunched (and it looks more likely), one of the things I'd like to do is publish an annual journal of papers and final presentations by all the various student groups at area universities.

I get a lot of queries from students, and I am usually happy to oblige their interests, except that many students don't in turn send a copy of the final product to me, which pisses me off (it's not as easy as you think to whip off a Richard Layman exegesis on various topics, take the time out for tours, etc.) and I think is disrespectful. Some students/groups do send their final products on to me, which I appreciate.

(I was also contacted by three of the students groups working on a case study of Florida Market. Georgetown students won, although I haven't read through their work yet.)

The best written so far was a report on H Street by a group of graduate students at Georgetown in a class taught by Alice Rivlin, although generally the student design studios at Catholic University are great, and when they can scrape up the money, they are published as final reports -- reports on H Street -- taught by Terry Williams, and Brookland -- taught by Iris Miller, stick out for me. And a GWU graduate tourism class (they had one UMD student on their team) did a great project on Brookland in 2004 also.

But it's hard to find this work in one place, and most of the schools don't have it handily available in one place.

The University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Historic Preservation is an exception, check out their webpage on Student Work, which links to final projects and collateral materials for each of the departments for at least the past 4 or 5 years.