My session, entitled Facilitating Community-Driven Improvements in Public Parks, focused on lessons learned during The World’s Park community design school. I highlighted how organizers and artists can work together to create visual materials that help community members make decisions and propose projects for public spaces.

Held every summer in Detroit, the Allied Media Conference is a collaboratively-created event that brings together artists, organizers, youth, filmmakers, musicians, technologists, and other practitioners who address social and environmental issues with their work. 

The four day convergence creates an open-minded space of trust and intimacy for the exploration of a wide variety of issues, bringing together radical librarians, DREAMers, Black Lives Matter activists, coders, and cooperatives. A variety of workshops, tours, open mics, and screenings are offered focusing on issues local to Detroit and national campaigns.

In this session, I detailed the collaborative process by which the Design Trust, the Queens Museum, and NYC Parks helped to frame a community design studio, and the ways Community Advisors have extended this framework to further develop their park improvement projects and to take learning from the process back to their own communities. 

Participants in the session hailed from across the country and were particularly interested in ways to creatively harness wayfinding, build inter-agency collaborations, and break down physical barriers that separate communities from green spaces. The 90 minute conversation yielded suggestions for how to channel community momentum and make design decisions that reflect the needs of multiple user groups.

See the recent exhibition of Community Advisors' ideas for Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

Learn more about The World's Park project.