The #whyfargo project was created as a way to engage the community and find out more about those who also call Fargo, ND 'home'.

In April 2013 North Dakota State University's Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture was fortunate enough to have Candy Chang come speak at our annual Beaux Arts gala. Beaux Arts is a night to celebrate the allied arts of architecture, landscape architecture and interior design here are North Dakota State University. Candy was wonderful to have, she spoke of simple ways we can work to find out more about our community and the people around us, about how we can use simple information to make our communities and our cities better.  This inspired my classmates and I to find our own way to connect with the Fargo community and learn from those around us.

This is how the #whyfargo project was born. Inspired by the work of Candy Chang, our studio professor gave us the option to do out own "Urban Chang"  project with the last three weeks of class. ​So, with this project presented to us, myself and four classmates created the #whyfargo project. We pondered for a few days on just what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. The questions we had for the Fargo community dealt with wanting to know why they lived in Fargo and what brought them here. Fargo tends to get a bad reputation sometimes for its freezing (and this year never ending) winters, constant wind and middle of no where location. While all of these are true about Fargo there are some really great things about this city as well and while each of us had our own reasons, we wanted to see what other people's reasons were. So we boiled down the prompt to simply whyfargo in hopes of getting all types of responses from people in their interpretation of the question.