Green Space Connections is creating and activating community-designed open space at four NYCHA public housing developments with and for 14,000 residents in Brooklyn and the Bronx. To amplify the lessons of the project and empower a wider reach of New York public housing residents, Green Space Connections is creating a practical design and resources guide for non-profit organizations and resident leaders to navigate the process of bringing open space projects to their communities. Blake Roberts, Communications and Design Fellow, and Nicole Vlado Torres AIA, NOMA, Policy and Planning Fellow, share insights on bringing this resource to life:

Green Space Connections (GSC) is a collaborative initiative between the Design Trust for Public Space, the Public Housing Community Fund, and NYCHA, that celebrates our local and national embrace of resident-led and resident-engaged open space improvements in cities around the country. The program has proven its viability with projects in the GSC program currently underway at Roosevelt, Marlboro, Castle Hill, and Patterson Houses – which build upon the success of the pilot at Pomonok –  and we are working on a resource to support NYCHA residents and their future partners to encourage more open space upgrades following this model. 

We realize that the necessary steps to breaking ground on a new playground, a dog run, or even planting a tree might be opaque to the people and organizations that this resource is meant to engage. Our deliverable is being created as a guide to promote and make feasible resident-engaged open space upgrades on NYCHA campuses. While the process is robust and comes with a suite of necessary participants, we’ve worked to distill the information into five easy-to-follow steps to increase accessibility and motivate participation. We also recognize the proliferation of toolkits and how-to guides that have been made for and by the city. As such, ours is much more a directory connecting individuals to relevant resources in this existing library and supplementing these expertly drafted tools. 

As Design Trust fellows on the project, our approach has been one of listening and letting the community members and their partners — the experts! — be the voices of truth and direction. The entire ethos of this project is, after all, resident-led design.

Having met with all the project players: NYCHA, Center for Justice Innovation, Public Housing Community Fund, and 3x3, as well as leaders of parks and green space organizations around the city, we’re excited to begin workshopping our prototype with community members. We’ve attended lectures and workshops at the New School, Next City, and the Public Policy Lab to deepen our understanding of community engagement work. Arguably, the most important learning to date is: we move at the speed of trust. If we’re creating a resource whose purpose is to facilitate trust in a collaborative process, we have to engage with one another while developing this resource.

The project’s call to engage in meaningful collaboration extends to how we’ve approached our fellowship — we have worked as partners through all stages of our research and design. We are currently in the middle of a focused phase of writing and design of the guide. This includes regular co-working sessions, sharing inspiration (at all hours!) when we find it, and making sure our imaginations are being captured in the physical form of this thing. We’re reaching out to printers and getting quotes for production, timeline estimates, and material samples. And perhaps most exciting, we are starting to schedule the next round of workshops with our peers and stakeholders. Their thoughts and feedback will hone this draft into its final and most polished iteration.

Although there are only five steps to improving your NYCHA green spaces, our favorite step is the last step: ACTIVATE. What happens when the ribbon is cut and the shovels are put away? How do we encourage one another to make these fresh new green spaces a platform in the community for social interaction, relaxation, laughter, play, and more? We have hopes that the launch of our guide is but the first step in a larger ACTIVATION campaign. Once a project has been designed and built, how do we let it continue to support the joy of NYCHA residents, their partners, and neighbors? Most significantly, how do we inspire one another to continue enhancing our open spaces, and greening our cities?