After enjoying light refreshments and views of the New York harbor on BuroHappold Engineering's breezy rooftop terrace, over a hundred guests gathered together to learn more about the inner workings of our two-year Under the Elevated project. Each Fellow gave a short presentation about their particular role and work on the project, before Design Trust executive director Susan Chin opened it up to the room for questions. Right off the bat, the first question from the audience was how much involvement the community had in the project.
Chat Travieso, the Participatory Design Fellow on the project, highlighted the key principles of listening and collaboration for success. He pinned down the specific needs of each neighborhood through workshops with residents, as well as talking to community organizations, such as the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco), the Bronx Music Heritage Center (BMHC), the Southern Boulevard Merchant Association, and Chinatown Partnership. The result was the Boogie Down Booth and Division Street pop-up installations, testing various design strategies for revitalization in Southern Bronx and Chinatown.
Chat elaborated further on the collaborative process:
"One of the great things about speaking with multiple organizations was that they already had huge working knowledge. I was able to talk to many people who knew a lot about the issues and what things needed to be improved.
For example, there is a lot of community support for improving Southern Boulevard in Bronx, but I learned the mile long stretch from the Simpson Street stop to 174th Street is right outside of the business improvement district. So we strategically placed the Boogie Down Booth at the heart of that excluded zone.
Then we had these workshops, more for visioning, and also as ways to introduce the project to the local residents. It was a lot of talking with people, and really understanding the kinds of needs, and then coming up with a creative solution. We kept asking how we can both celebrate the specificity of the site and the people who live there, but at the same time deal with the real issues.
For the Chinatown location, we talked to the Chinatown Partnership, but we also just observed what was happening on the ground. I’m a strong believer in just talking to people on the ground to really understand a site. It’s important to acknowledge when things are already happening, and when people have already been doing a lot of work."
Neil Donnelly, Graphic Design Fellow, added:
"Many of the design ideas actually came directly from suggestions from the community. For example, the idea of using lighting in the Boogie Down Booth, and trying to illuminate that area. A lot of the merchants along Southern Boulevard told us that they had to close around 4:30 in the afternoon during the winter because there isn’t enough lighting under there. So that’s a lot of revenue lost from the businesses right in the prime time of shopping season."
Additional questions for the team were:
Q. Did you consider the angle of ownership and agency (Port Authority, MTA, etc.)?
Douglas Woodward, Policy Fellow: These structures are usually under multiple jurisdictions. For example, MTA will own the track above, and NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) has the columns coming down, and sometimes NYC Parks is involved.
Linda Pollak: It’s a huge point. There are so many places under thousands of structures that have multiple agencies. It’s really hard to get everything done when you have two or three different agencies because everybody stops at their line, and says it’s somebody else’s problem. So it’s really a civic problem that goes to our governments, which urban designers can’t fix, but it’s part of our responsibility to push them.
Q. Do you plan on, if and when there is a permanent installation, branding it as Under the Elevated?
Douglas Woodward, Policy Fellow: We’ve developed a program with DOT, so people will have an ongoing connection with the program, and we are calling it El-Space.
Q. As you were going through the process, were there any particularly big ideas that inspired you?
Susannah Drake, Urban Design Fellow: There’s 666 miles of these elevated spaces in NYC, but we did a GIS (geographic information system) analysis across the country, and there are over 7,000 miles of these kinds of spaces. So I think it was really the idea that you could think systematically about it and start to make change, and if you do these strategies on a really broad scale, it can make a really big difference.
Q. What would be your best advice for community groups trying to activate these spaces near them?
Douglas Woodward, Policy Fellow:There’s actually a process that's laid out by DOT that they’re trying to refine to accept community input for new spaces.
Neil Gagliardi, Director of Urban Design at DOT: The book launch galvanized a lot more interest in this, and we’ve gotten a lot of requests, so we're formulating a process of how to move community requests into development.
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Thanks to our Fellows for sharing their expertise, all the public space enthusiasts who attended, and to BuroHappold Engineering for being our generous host for the evening.
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