By Annemarie Spitz | Photos by Renee Malloy

Several nights ago, I attended a neighborhood meeting for the Waters Avenue Revitalization Project. Like many of the community meetings before it, it was held at the Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church, on the corner of Waters and Henry. I sat behind my downstairs neighbors.

My initial introduction to the Waters Avenue community was through a Craigslist ad in the summer of 2011. I was still in St. Louis, far removed from the local meanings of street names on a google map. I moved into my apartment this past September, but it took four months and a chance arrangement of folding chairs in a church hall for me to realize that I was not just a graduate student engaged in an effort to support a revitalization effort, I was a member of the Waters Avenue community.

The Revitalization Area, as defined by the City of Savannah, officially ends half a block to my East. It includes sections of six neighborhoods: Baldwin Park, Benjamin Van Clark, East Side, Live Oak, and Midtown. But the geography of community is not simply expressed through straight lines and street names. It is instead drawn in relationships, places, and memory.

As my classmate and I developed the first draft of a Waters Avenue project proposal, we sought to facilitate a small but tangible impact on the corridor’s streetscape. We saw this often neglected public space as an opportunity to connect the six surrounding neighborhoods through a single project.

Our proposal, collectHERE, incorporated neighborhood creation sessions through which community members and local artists make functional public art for installation along Waters Avenue. These pieces would add vibrancy to the existing shared infrastructure of sidewalks, street lights, and bus stops. They would create places out of currently unnamed patches of grass and concrete. They would become new landmarks. They would be a reason to come together. They’d be a place to start. But most importantly, they’d be something to talk about.

So one day, when I tell people where I live, they may say “Over by that amazing sculptural bench?” And I could reply with pride, “Yes, my neighbors and I made that place- I’ll tell you the story.”

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Annemarie Spitz is an MA students in the Design for Sustainability program at SCAD.

Renee Malloy received her MFA in Graphic Design from SCAD in 2011.