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Kevin McCambley likes to start from the ground up. If you don’t think he has a knack for building you’re not looking in the right place.
There is a shelf in his home that is a nostalgic look at the past in addition to being a window into his future.
“My whole life, I’ve liked building and designing,” said Kevin, who entered his first year in the Community and Regional Planning (CRP) program this fall. “When I was a kid, I’d take K’NEX building sets and finish them off in a day. Erector sets, 3-D puzzles, models — they’re still on the shelf…a little dusty, but still there.”
Oddly enough, Legos and Lincoln Logs are not well represented. Maybe it’s a city thing.
“I love Philadelphia. Center City is great,” said the 19-year-old from Horsham. “But there are many poverty stricken places that I know there must be something we can do about. I want to develop a plan to help out.”
Enter the Community and Regional Planning undergraduate program, which itself is only a little over two years old, into Kevin’s plan for the future.
“Initially, I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I liked what I saw about the program and went for it,” Kevin said. “From what I’ve learned so far, urban renewal is what I’m most interested in. There are parts of cities that I would like to try to fix.”
Initially, Kevin came to college with a plan to build cityscapes, not cure urban blight. In his first year at Temple, he entered the Architecture program, but the abstract nature of the initial courses didn’t quite fit what he was looking for.
“There was one assignment that I really liked. We had to take a building site, determine what was wrong with it and find ways to correct the problems,” he said. “I think that’s why CRP was the right move for me; it’s exactly what I want to do and there are so many fields I could pursue. You could find something of interest when just starting out and then find something else later in the program and there’s nothing to prevent you from exploring both — there are a lot of possibilities.”
Kevin’s first semester at Ambler includes a diverse group of courses, from an introduction to the concepts of community and regional planning to a study of microeconomics.
“I’ve found that Introduction to Communty and Regional Planning goes hand-in-hand with the History of Community and Regional Planning,” he said. “What I learn in one is often something we talk about in the other — how major cities and planning initially got their start.”
In the introduction course, Kevin said, students have been working on a “love/hate project” — pick something you love or hate within your community and explain why. Kevin opted for a look at the growth taking place in Horsham Township.
“They recently started road construction on Dresher Road which is one instance of growth. When my parents moved here 18 years ago, it was a small community,” he said. “Now they are widening the road and more businesses are coming into Horsham. I personally like that not all of the growth is centralized to the cities — it brings more people and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
Of course as a future planner, Kevin can see the downside — construction tie-ups, traffic problems, pollution, urban sprawl.
“In our CRP history class, we’ve been talking about the (1893) Chicago World’s Fair, which presented the first idea of major city planning. It was the first instance of a drawn plan of how everything should look in the city,” he said. “It was the first time planning codes and ordinances were explored. It changed everything.”
From changes in planning to changes in history. Modern European History is taking a close look at the French and American Revolutions in a way that Kevin prefers — the ground level.
“In the book we are using, each chapter includes complete historical documents from the time. What I like are the little things — a letter from a farmer in post-industrialized Europe when many farmers began working in factories for very little pay just to survive,” he said. “It’s a firsthand view of history instead of just reading about facts and dates.”
Like any good planner, Kevin sees the connections between all of his coursework.
Over in Microeconomics, the focus has been on market systems, a core class that looks at various types of markets, such as the difference between the U.S. market and the markets of Europe or Third World countries, a concept which can drive local building needs and designs.
In Natural and the Built Environment, a class comprised of mostly Horticulture and Landscape Architecture students, Kevin is exploring how the present affects the future.
“I think this is a background you need as a planner,” he said. “Anything that we can do to sustain the environment is good for planning.”
And that kind of forward thinking is essential.
“Planning has existed as a profession for less than a century. Before planning it was really a case of anything goes — chaos,” Kevin said. “In order to understand planning you have to understand how the pieces go together. Public water will bring additional housing, which will require more schools, which will need more teachers — it’s cause and effect.”
Looks like all of that time with erector sets and puzzles is paying off.
This is the first part of an “A Year in the Life” series featuring Kevin McCambley. Kevin, who lives in Horsham, began his first year in the Community and Regional Planning program at Temple University Ambler in 2005.
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