Anchorage Design Week
Get Involved!
Community residents are invited to participate in team building, workshops, networking, and neighborhood projects to make Fairview a safer, more connected, and vibrant neighborhood.
Anchorage Design Week: Feb 19-23, 2025
Organized by the Anchorage Museum with numerous community partners, Anchorage Design Week is an annual gathering of creative minds to promote and inspire place-based design and imagine the future of our city and the lifeways of Northern regions. Some highlights of our week are shared below.
Community Bus & Walking Tour
Thanks to People Mover, this bus-walk tour was hosted in partnership with Arup for our Reconnecting Fairview Corridor Plan. Please add to our collection of data for your experience in Fairview by submitting your feedback on this online survey and mapping tool.
Here are some Quick Tips to fill out to the survey while in Fairview:
- When you find something of interest, take a photo or short video (under 10 seconds).
- Scan or refresh the code to the Survey123 tool.
- Use this survey map to select your location, use 2 fingers to zoom in or adjust, tap with 1 finger to mark your location.
- Answer the questions.
- Hit submit, then refresh to start again at a new location!
Reconnecting Fairview Symposium
We engaged in a creative forum to consider the interface of reconnection, culture, and community in the Reconnecting Fairview plan. First, we laid the context with the Reconnecting Fairview Corridor Plan (presentation here) and success stories presented by Arup.
Next, the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) engaged in its four 4th-year studios within the School of Architecture presented thesis projects focused on Fairview. You can read more about UTA’s recap on their website here!
Finally, special guest Kia Weatherspoon led an immersive collaborative workshop exploring the deep connections between history, community, and design. Together, the group created a guiding statement:
The Resilient Scars Healed through Vibrant Stewardship
Community Events
We engaged in a creative forums to explore more about the community through a number of events.
In partnership with the Anchorage Assembly, City Nerd Night explored the theme, “Won’t you be my neighbor.” Watch the stories here! Topics included: Take One Step – how to make a difference in your community; Mutual Aid Makes a Difference – lessons from a tiny food pantry; andUnlocking Potential at Eklutna – welcoming new neighbors to Dena’ina lands.
Hosted by the Alaska Design Form and the Alaska BookMobile, we screened the outdoor film “The Human Scale” at the Fairview Recreation Center. This cinematic urban design documentary observes human behavior and development patterns throughout the globe with key insights for viewers to consider while investing in our Northern neighborhood and city environments.
Hosted by NeighborWorks Alaska and Fairview Community Council, David Reamer (@ANC_Historian) presented on the History of Fairview: Anchorage’s Inconvenient and Controversial Island of a Neighborhood, highlighting the evolution and goings-on in one of Anchorage’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Missed it? Tune in to these conversations with David Reamer to learn more about the history of Fairview: The Empty Office Podcast (2025) and The Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Forum Podcast (2023).
Anchorage Design Week: Feb 21-25, 2024
Each year, the Anchorage Museum works with community partners to gather creative minds to promote and inspire place-based design and imagine the future of our city and the life-ways of Northern Regions. This year, we consider how sustainable materials and practices foster inclusivity, safety and community within Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood. Fairview recently was awarded a Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program Grant funding efforts to reconnect communities impacted by challenging transportation infrastructure.
Some highlights from our successful week:
Community Walking Tour
This walk audit was hosted by AARP Alaska and Anchorage Park Foundation, with a special thank you to Greater Friendship Baptist Church for hosting and participating in the event!
The starting point for our walk was the parking lot of the Greater Friendship Baptist Church. We headed west on E. 13th Ave crossing Ingra St., Hyder St. then Gambell St. to the parking lot of the Carr’s grocery store. The return walk took us on E. 14th Ave. headed east crossing the same 3 streets.
Here are our Fairview Walk Audit reports:
- AARP Alaska & Anchorage Design Week – Fairview Winter Walk Audit (February 2024)
- AARP Alaska – Anchorage Pilot Walk Audit (August 2022) for reference
Reconnecting Fairview Symposium
We engaged in creative exercises led by local design experts Peter Briggs (Corvus Design) and Lee Post (Postmarks Graphics) to guide folks to share and articulate ideas for how open space and the built environment can support the residents of Fairview and greater Anchorage.
The results of this creative symposium are intended to represent ideas describing greenway connections and economic development targets to advance the East Downtown and the Fairview neighborhood while focusing on a core area of the proposed highway connection project – Gambell Main Street and Fairview Greenway (Hyder or Ingra streets).
We created tourist maps, isometric maps, and map cards. Check out our maps here!
Here is our Reconnecting Fairview Symposium Summary, detailing the Lego cross sections for Gambell Street and themes from each map project!
Check out this 20 second video recap of a Gambell Main Street:
Fairview Interventions
Shapes of Fairview: Sign Project
As part of Anchorage Design Week 2024, “Shapes of Fairview: Sign Project,” was created by Thomas Zimmerman and Shinsaku Iwatachi using the “Voices of Fairview” videos as inspiration.
The concept is that Fairview has been divided by roads meant to make daily life convenient, but they instead divide the neighborhood into unique shapes like puzzle pieces.
They have created signs with these unique shapes that include quotes from your videos, hoping to inspire positive conversations about Fairview.
Visit this site on your phone!
https://adw-fff.com/
Fairview Wishing Well
This urban intervention elevating the voices of Fairview is a project of Anchorage Design Week, in partnership with the Anchorage Museum and NeighborWorks Alaska. The Fairview Wishing Well intends to catalyze interactions between neighbors through this interactive installation. In closely connected communities, neighbors depend on each other for support of their needs and dreams.
Fairviewers write their wishes onto wish panels and place them in the well. They are encouraged to make tangible wishes that someone from the community could fulfill. These can be immediate needs or things they have always dreamed of doing. They will have the opportunity to put their contact so that a fulfiller can contact them.
What's in a Name
Craig Updegrove, longtime Anchorage designer and creative community advocate, prepared t-shirts with designs that debuted at the ANC Design Week Fairview Interventions event at the Kosinski Fields during the Fur Rondy Snowshoe Softball.
Craig shared his research and creative process in generating the designs for screen-printing.
Craig’s designs are inspired by the Fairview neighborhood of Anchorage and were generated as prospective advocacy tools that celebrate the community and serve as conversation starters for the Fairness for Fairview project, an initiative of design week partner NeighborWorks Alaska.
Messages in Fairview
As you navigate through the city and see words placed in prominent places, one after another, they begin to seem interconnected and create a narrative. These words and phrases were created from the Voices of Fairview video series.
We thank artist @HOTXTEA for visiting our community and sharing his art.
Photos provided by the Anchorage Museum and Nathalie Bunton.
2024 & 2025 Collaborators
2024 & 2025 Anchorage Design Week was hosted in collaboration with the Anchorage Museum, Fairview Community Council, and NeighborWorks Alaska. To learn more about Anchorage Design Week, please visit www.anchoragedesignweek.org.
