Bence Burton ’31 and Annabella Rozin ’29 explore Harrods Creek Park in Prospect, Kentucky, while hiking and interviewing the local resident who built it.
Morehead-Cain Scholar Annabella Rozin ’29 and her team spent the summer listening to a Kentucky community imagining its downtown and its future.
The interview was supposed to run an hour, maybe ninety minutes. Annabella Rozin ’29 and her teammates arrived at the park in their business clothes, notebooks ready.
Three hours and several miles later, they were still walking.
The man they’d come to interview, a town resident, had built a sprawling park through the forest and alongside the river, trail by trail, bridge by bridge. He walked them through it all, explaining every choice and every obstacle overcome.
“His accomplishment is just one of many examples of how intensely this community cares,” Annabella said. “They take to the city and build it themselves.”
It was June in Prospect, Kentucky, and Annabella was beginning to understand what her team had been recruited to help this community figure out.
A town at a turning point
For years, Prospect has been a place people drive through on their way somewhere else, Annabella said—a bedroom community outside Louisville, a name on a sign along the highway.
City leaders want to change that narrative. They’re participating in a downtown development project: a public-private partnership that would dramatically transform both the city and how people experience it. The development poses financial risk, has generated tension within and around the community, and raises environmental concerns. Yet enthusiastic leaders are pushing it forward, envisioning growth that sprawls far beyond this initial downtown space.
The city has a carefully crafted master plan for the physical development of the area, created with guidance from urban planners and architects. What it lacks is cohesion around the development’s broader goals: what the space should include, whom it should serve and attract, and how it should reflect the community’s vision for the future.
That’s where Annabella and her teammates (Bence Burton ’29, Chloe Cook ’29, Isabelle Simpson ’29, and Will Hardin ’29) came in. Working with Mayor Doug Farnsley ’73, a fellow Morehead-Cain alumnus, the five scholars spent their summer listening to Prospect residents and trying to understand what they wanted for their city’s future, through Civic Collaboration, the second summer of the Morehead-Cain Summer Enrichment Program.
From left: Hilary Fridholm Herbst ’89, Chloe Cook ’29, Bence Burton ’31, Annabella Rozin ’29, Isabelle Simpson ’29, Will Hardin ’29, and Pia O’Connor attend an Indiana Fever game in Indianapolis during a team site visit.
Listening before planning
The team interviewed more than thirty people invested in the city and its development. They visited comparable developments in other communities. They surveyed the population. They sat in meetings. They walked through neighborhoods.
“In every conversation, community members shared their concerns, questions, and hopes for the future of the space in their city,” Annabella said. “I learned that space dictates so much of the way we interact with our community, from how frequently to in what contexts you connect. This city exemplified that.”
The scholars researched the urban design principle guiding the development: new urbanism, which emphasizes walkability, mixed-use development, and human-scale design. They built a timeline of the project so the city could begin to track its growth, summarized their community findings to guide future decisions, and generated recommendations for the downtown development’s undecided spaces, aimed at meeting the unmet needs residents had expressed.
From left: Annabella Rozin ’29, Isabelle Simpson ’29, and Chloe Cook ’29 in front of Churchill Downs in Louisville after attending the races.
What surprised her
What surprised Annabella most wasn’t the complexity of urban planning or the tension around development. It was the people.
“In all of our interviews and interactions, community members consistently impressed me by their level of commitment to the city and the project,” she said. “This city is run almost entirely on volunteers who have built out almost every facet of the community and take action on every idea.”
Learning to listen
Annabella is a student of languages, and she came to this project interested in communication. She expected to learn about development and urban planning. She got that, but she got something else, too.
“I spent my summer thinking that I was learning about development and urban planning, when I was really just learning how to listen and how to be part of a community,” she said. “After this summer, I think about the relationship between space and community in a totally different way.”
From left: Will Hardin ’29, Annabella Rozin ’29, Isabelle Simpson ’29, Mayor Doug Farnsley ’73, Chloe Cook ’29, and Bence Burton ’31 in Prospect, Kentucky.
