Matthew Winter ’18 of New York City and Brendan Yucel ’18 of Boston lay down tape for a demonstration bike lane on Oxford Street in Lewiston on May 20. They’re students in an urban planning Short Term course taught by Mike Lydon ’04. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

“Anna, could you come snap?”

In response to her classmate, Anna Marr ’17 knelt down on a Lewiston street and pinched a red-chalk-coated string that two classmates held taut and low. She pulled the string up — and let it snap back onto the asphalt.

Marr, of Larchmont, N.Y., was snapping a chalk line — that is, executing the classic builders’ technique for making a straight, true mark on a long flat surface. The students used the powdery red line as a guide for strips of white reflective tape that, after careful measurement, they were laying to mark off a bike lane on Oxford Street, a canal-side byway in Little Canada.

Brendan Yucel ’18 of Boston listens on May 20 as instructor Mike Lydon ’04 talks strategy for a bike lane demonstration project on Oxford Street in Lewiston. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

It was the gray chilly morning of May 20, and the four �ֲ���ý students had taped maybe 50 feet of bike lane, with 750 feet to go.

There was some time pressure: The bike lane would be publicly presented the following day — to participants in a statewide urban development conference, no less — as part of a class project in the Short Term course “Practicum in Urban Planning.”

Teaching the course is Mike Lydon ’04, an internationally recognized urban planner, advocate for livable cities and co-author of the book Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change. Lydon is one of a new breed of �ֲ���ý teachers: so-called practitioners-in-residence, who are successful young adults — most of them �ֲ���ý alumni — in occupations ranging from social justice advocacy to music production.

As part of �ֲ���ý’ Purposeful Work initiative, Lydon’s 16 students and those in the other practitioner-taught courses during this Short Term are benefiting from the applied knowledge and skills — snapping chalk lines, you bet, but much more — that the practitioners have accrued during their careers.

During a break in the lane-taping, Lydon explained that the course is conveying students from a survey of the field of urban planning to a specific problem in a real city: The temporary bike lane that the students would present during a public festivity on May 21 was a component in the exploration of creating a walker-bicyclist trail connecting Lewiston’s Main Street with a park in Auburn.

The trail is an outcome in a project that Lydon’s firm, Street Plans Collaborative in Brooklyn, has undertaken with the Androscoggin Transportation Resource Center, a program of the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments.

Theresa Seel ’18 of Darmstadt, Germany, helps classmates put down lines for a demonstration bike lane on Oxford Street in Lewiston on May 20. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

The bike path reflects Street Plans’ gradual, iterative approach to getting buy-in on new approaches to public facilities. “To propose change all at once, with permanent infrastructure, is hard for people. And politically it becomes a big challenge,” Lydon said.

“So we’ve learned that we need to test things more and give people more of an understanding physically.”

Street Plans will base its recommendations for the next phase of the park connector, in part, on how visitors respond to a demonstration of the bike lane and other activities on May 21 — overall, a project organized by Lydon’s students. In addition to creating the bike lane and the street fair, the students collected, and will help evaluate, public feedback from the day.

“They’re getting a much more hands-on experience with urban planning, which is very different from how most of the profession works,” said Lydon. “Most of the profession is very much about designing on computer screens or by hand, and that’s really valuable, but it remains very abstract to the general public.”

The bike lane is “what this actually means on the ground.”

On that chilly May morning, more classmates were busy farther south on Oxford, at the entrance to Simard-Payne Memorial Park, where French Canadian immigrants once arrived by train over tracks still visible in the grass.

These students had already set up a big chalkboard by the park entrance. Now they were weaving letters in orange tape into the park’s chain-link enclosure: “Oxford Forward,” the name of the May 21 event.

The bike lane demonstration complete, a truck from the Lewiston Fire Department arrives on May 21 to test the space for fire response. (Josh Kucken/�ֲ���ý College)

Danielle Munoz ’15 of Bedford, N.H., was a member of this art team. “I think this experience has been invaluable for all of us,” she said. “We really get a greater understanding of a field that we wouldn’t have known very much of otherwise.”

The practitioner-taught courses afford “a really useful time to experiment and to learn about career paths that we might not have heard about before.”

For Munoz, urban planning was a welcome discovery. “I love how interdisciplinary it is,” she said.

“It takes into account so many different fields — not just art and design, but also social issues, economics, biology. As liberal arts majors, I think that’s really appealing to the majority of �ֲ���ý students.

“And a lot of us want to live in cities eventually, so the fact that we’re studying this is really interesting.”

May 21 was a sunnier day. Municipal officials, developers, urban planners and other participants in the Build Maine conference, taking place in a nearby mill building (Lydon was a conference presenter), were happy to sit in Simard-Payne, listen to the jazzy funk of a band from Augusta, and eat barbecue and poutine from the food trucks.

A few hundred feet away, four �ֲ���ý students struck yoga poses in the grass. A few visitors followed the old Lewiston & Auburn Railroad rails to the footbridge that links Simard-Payne with Auburn’s popular Rodney Bonney Memorial Park.

Lydon’s students were observing the throng, taking pictures and engaging with passers-by at the park entrance, encouraging them to record on the chalkboard their thoughts about Oxford Street, the bike route and the park. (Sample comments: “No more chain link fence.” “Open canals to H2O sports.” “Dog park,” with the annotation “Yes!” And, “More Vanessa.”)

Every so often a cyclist would zoom through the bike lane, looking a bit out of place on this normally sleepy street used mainly by rush-hour commuters cutting around the busy intersection at Lincoln and Cedar streets.

Eventually, city vehicles arrived to test clearances on the driving lane, which was considerably narrowed by the bike lane and some cars parked beside it as a test. The two fire trucks, including one equipped with a water cannon, got through OK and proceeded to send a celebratory stream of water into the canal.

But the city snowplow couldn’t squeeze through. Perhaps not a problem, as snow and bikes don’t happen simultaneously that much. But still.

“Build, measure, and learn,” Lydon laughed, looking at the plow. “And that’s what we learned.”

Students enrolled in “Study of the City” visit Boston’s Big Dig, stopping for a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the newly constructed Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“When you visit a place that’s really interesting, where you want to spend more time — well, how did that come to be? Interesting places don’t happen just by luck,” says town planner Theo Holtwijk. Instead, he says, in many communities those special places have resulted from a painstaking planning and design process.

Students in a seminar this fall are learning about such processes from Holtwijk, one of Maine’s best-known community planners. Director of planning and development for the town of Brunswick, an award-winning landscape architect and co-editor of a well-received history of Portland’s parks, Holtwijk is teaching “Introduction to the Study of the City” for the college’s program.

The course has included two events open to the public. Documenting the City: The New American Ghetto Revisited, a lecture by sociologist-photographer Camilo José Vergara, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 17, in the Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Avenue.

On Sept. 10, Melissa Paly’s video Livable Landscapes: By Chance or by Choice? was shown.

A 300-level seminar, “Introduction to the Study of the City” will involve among other things a visit to Boston’s “Big Dig” highway project, professional conferences and extensive field work in Lewiston. The last includes the creation of a “neighborhood portrait,” comprising maps, resident interviews, photography and a panel presentation.

“It’s an attempt to have the students experience the place in as many facets as we can conjure up,” says Holtwijk. “I want them to experience it first-hand, because it doesn’t happen enough that people do that and then try to communicate their ideas about it. It’s as much about communicating the reality that they experience in their own way.”

Dutch by birth, Holtwijk has lived in the United States since 1983. He was town planner for Sanford before going to Brunswick in 1997. Named Portland’s Citizen of the Month in 1992, Holtwijk has won various honors for his work including two awards for the book Bold Vision: The Development of the Parks of Portland, Maine, co-edited with Maine historic preservation director Earle Shettleworth (Phoenix Publishing, 1999).

How does an urban studies course figure in an environmental studies program? “In many ways we try to get our students to think about the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ — that the two exist in a tight interrelationship with each other, and they’re joined on a continuum, not separated by a sharp divide,” says program chair Jane Costlow, professor of Russian. “And cities — Lewiston as much as any place — are great examples of that,” she says. “What we need is clear thinking and clear planning about how to have urban experiences that are healthy, sustainable and vital.”

An ethnographer as well as a photographer, Camilo José Vergara has spent more than 20 years recording the physical transformations of low-income communities in the nation’s major cities. His books include The New American Ghetto (Rutgers University Press, 1997) and Twin Towers Remembered (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001).

With public attention focused like never before on community planning and land-use issues, particularly sprawl, the timing couldn’t be better to introduce students to the field, says Holtwijk.

“The technical skill of planning is becoming less important than the skill of building consensus,” he points out. “You have to be really smart in how you seek input — the process of seeking input from people is as important as the product that results from it,” because if the process is mishandled, residents may not accept the results whatever their potential, he says.

“Introduction to the Study of the City” is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.