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Teens Collaborate Across Cities

 

NDC’s Johnny Macon assists a student in prototype design.

On Saturday June 9th, 2018, teens from Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore came together at Open Works to collaborate on a design intervention in the Greenmount West neighborhood. Convened by Neighborhood Design Center as part of the 2018 ACD Conference, this workshop was developed by Edrie Ortega and Jason Neal of J. Neal Design to challenge visiting teens and local children to create conceptual designs of neighborhood improvement ideas. The students had never met, but had each learned skills in the design field through their respective programs. Students from Philadelphia had expertise in both community design and fabrication as members of TinyWPA, an organization that works to empower community design leaders through “training in design, collaboration, leadership, fabrication, and entrepreneurship.” The National Building Museum’s teen program has taught students how to both work in a team and how to develop strong conceptual designs; skills that partner well with the applied fabrication knowledge of the teens at Open Works.

The day began with pizza at the proposed project site (Wonderground park at the corner of Lanvale and Barclay). Children ran and played, the teens got to know one another and explored the site, and leaders engaged in conversation. Soon enough lunch time was over and it was time to get to work. The goal of the project: to gain insight through collaboration and knowledge exchange while ideating improvements to the local park. Wonderground, the site identified for the project, is well known to the local neighborhood kids. These kids (with Noisy Tenants) became the project’s ‘clients’ and each pitched their ideas to the older teens, identifying the three focus categories of play, performance, and transportation.

The teens and children then moved to Open Works and broke into groups to create projects together exploring these issues. With the teens bringing their practical knowledge to help clarify and make real the children’s visions and the children bringing their local expert knowledge of the space, post-it notes, pens, sketch paper, and cardboard were flying in no time. Jason Neal facilitated the workshop, pushing the teams to populate a central board with ideas and to begin creating prototypes. By putting ideas on a rotatable central column, the work of each breakout group was easily shared with everyone.

Students work to build a cardboard prototype of a safe and playable bus stop.

The students’ output was strong: a playable bus stop to both improve safety and service and create a place for children, a stage design for local performances and movie nights, and a sculpture that could be used to sit, play, or bike on. Through this collaboration, each city was able to learn about similar work in other places and gain new insight into the design process. This final prototypes from this process will allow the kids from Noisy Tenants to better express their ideas to the local community association. In this way, the designs created become an asset to the local children and community, and may be further explored or actualized. Neighborhood Design Center was glad to partake in this inter-city collaboration, and hopes to continue and engage with these amazing groups. 

An interactive sculpture designed for play. (Image Courtesy J. Neal Design).

a multi-use stage to accommodate performance on site.

Playable features on a bus stop prototype.

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After the 2018 ACD Conference, Feeling the Reverberations

 

Dr. Sutton delivers her keynote address to a packed house and kicks off the 2018 ACD Conference.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a month since Reverberations: Roots and Relevance of Community Design. Here at NDC, we are still in awe of those few days: the new friendships and collaborations sparked, the radical ideas communicated, and a collective vision for the future of community design shared. More than 300 people from across the country came to Baltimore to be part of the weekend, attending over 60 sessions across 3 days, from our pre-conference environmental justice tour led by Destiny Watford, United Workers, and others to Antoinette Caroll’s closing keynote. Thanks to each and every one of you who joined us—we’re so moved by your presence and participation.

If you were there on the opening morning, you heard the brilliant, resounding words of Dr. Sharon E. Sutton. Dr. Sutton, the educator, musician, activist, and 12th African American woman to be an accredited architect, eloquently traced both the history of community design and Baltimore’s Neighborhood Design Center, highlighting the activist roots of both. But she also spoke bluntly about her concerns for the present moment: “Median black household wealth is less than 10% of median white household wealth—the average black family will never catch up without extraordinary remediation. Racial polarization due to years of segregation is tearing the country apart.” She implored the community design field to respond: “Today’s community planners and designers must help salvage the human community by nurturing compassion across difference; by infusing people with a sense of being able to write a new and inclusive story of the future.”

Throughout the course of the weekend, we heard the beginnings of this new, inclusive story. From poet Michelle Antoinette Nelson’s reimagining of Whitney M. Young’s groundbreaking 1968 AIA speech in which she challenged us to “design on the horizon,” to Designing the We’s April de Simone’s reminder that, as an industry and a country, “we have to heal, and we must build empathy,” words of hope resonated throughout the event. They were intercut with sharp reminders of the challenges we face: during the Racial Justice and Design panel, Justin Garrett Moore of the NYC Public Design Commission shared his long family history of work in urban design and the fact that “black and brown people’s and women’s history of building, designing and planning this country has been erased.” During the Design as Protest workshop, Bryan C. Lee cautioned, “For every injustice in this world, there is an architecture designed to facilitate and perpetuate it.”

Michelle Antoinette delivers her interpretation of Whitney M. Young’s historic 1968 speech to the AIA.

Of course, as Creative Reaction Lab’s Antoinette Caroll reminded us, “If oppression, inequities, and inequalities are designed, they can be undesigned.” And to that end, we heard incredible ideas for undesigning inequity. On Friday, we heard from Davin Hong about design as activism and from members of Baltimore City’s i-Team about strategies for recruiting better police officers. We learned from community leaders about efforts to build community land trusts and, during the Complete the Streets panel, how policy changes can pave the way for more inclusive public spaces. On Saturday, Marisela Gomez and Lenora Knowles shared a vision for cooperative ownership in East Baltimore and efforts in Philadelphia to design communities in collaboration with immigrant populations. At Open Works, youth from Baltimore, DC, and Philly worked together to actively ideate, design, and prototype better public spaces. This is just a small selection of the rich content that emerged over the weekend. We hope you take some time to watch and read more about the conference.

Students collaborate on the design for a safe bus stop during the Wondergound Teen Workshop.

In her closing remarks, Antoinette Carol reminded us, as a community, to “align your impact with your intentions; think about the role that you’re playing and the team that you’re working with—because you can’t do it alone.” In the days since the conference ended, we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback, especially the stories you’ve shared of connections made. There’s so much good work to do, and we can’t do it alone. We hope after Reverberations that you feel, as we do at NDC, better prepared to join forces and design on the horizon.

Our volunteers made the weekend happen—we’re so grateful to each of them.

Special, warm thanks to our dedicated conference volunteers and to our generous sponsors: Surdna Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, Kaiser Permanente, ACD, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Morgan State University, MICA, Morris and Ritchie Associates, NDC Board, and the Aaron Straus and Lillie Straus Foundation.

— The Entire NDC Family

 

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Bostwick House Historic Preservation

NDC Volunteers Lili Mundroff  and William Cawood have been busy at historic Bostwick House in Bladensburg, Maryland. This volunteer project is hands-on, and has included crawling under the historic home’s porches and peeping the views of the Anacostia. Our team is developing recommendations to support historic preservation goals, to be implemented by Historicorps, a nonprofit that provides volunteers of all skill levels with a hands-on experience preserving historic structures on public lands across America.

NDC honored by ASLA Maryland

In April, NDC received the Spencer Ellis award from MD-ASLA in recognition of our 50 years of community design services. The award was given at the chapters annual gala, and was received by Programs Director Marita Roos.  We’re honored to have been selected for this honor, and grateful to ASLA for many decades of support by its members committed to excellence in community design work throughout the state of Maryland.  The event took place on the evening of 4/11 at Cylburn Arboretum in Baltimore.

Photo courtesy Christine Gillette

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NDC Travels to…. SxSW

NDC Travels to… SxSW

SxSW Cities

In March, NDC team membersJennifer Goold and Allie O’Neill were honored to join the first Cities Summit at SXSW in Austin. The Cities Summit at SXSW is an opportunity for civic leaders, creative citizens, and urbanists of all disciplines to learn, strategize, and form partnerships to create more equitable, resilient, and livable cities.

We got to connect with some of the rockstars joining us for Reverberations in June. Antionette Carroll of Creative Reaction Lab gave us some insights into her practice and Mike Ford (Hip Hop Architecture Camp) talked about the role music has played in the economies, growth, and branding of cities. It wasn’t all work, though. We found some time to rock out to some Baltimore favorites.

SxSW

 

Reimagining the Civic Commons

Antionette Carroll, Creative Reaction Labs

Wye Oak at SxSW

NDC Travels to…Colombia

NDC Project Coordinator Maria Isabel Garcia Diaz is back in the office after participating in the International Development Design Summit (IDDS): Construyendo Paz, Reconciliación desde la Co-Creación. IDDS is a program that runs from MIT’s D-Lab and serves to educate participants on co-design methods while engaging in place-based challenges of the summit’s host country. In partnership with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the IDDSCPaz, for short, was focused on how to construct peace, especially after the Colombian government signed a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to end their 53-year civil war. The summit ran from January 20 to February 4 in the ECTR Jaime Pardo Leal, a designated zone in the Guaviare region of Colombia, where ex-combatants have been placed as they reintegrate into civilian life.

Here are three lessons Maria brought back after co-designing with fellow professionals, university students, ex-combatants, and local residents:

Three Lessons from Colombia by Maria Isabel Garcia Diaz

  • Building confidence…literally: To get us comfortable with building items from scratch, we did different DIY challenges, like building a water pump. a wooden tool to turn plastic bottles into thread, and a table to use in our group projects. It made me excited to come back and finally put my Station North Tool Library membership into good use.
  • Forgiveness through action and interaction: This was a professional development opportunity for me, but the topic hit on a personal level. When I left Colombia with my parents violence was at an all time high and the FARC were seen at the forefront of it. By being in teams with ex-combatants, we focused our energy on working together to design interventions to build peace in our country. We discussed past experiences and laughed quite a lot as we worked until the hours of the night to finish our projects.  
  • Sustainability can be accessible: At IDDSCPaz, we were always thinking about innovative ways of caring for the earth, but in a practical and accessible way. We did it for two reasons: one, the FARC ex-combatants take pride in caring for the earth, especially after spending decades living with the jungle ecosystems. The second reason: basic resources, like water, were always scarce. As participants we learned to be conscious for the earth as we went through our packed schedules for each day.  

This experience was unforgettable in many ways—I met some incredible people through IDDS, and I brought back many lessons to integrate in my work at NDC. However, the thing I miss the most is seeing the sunrises and sunsets in Guaviare.

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Community Art for Darley Park Stage

 

The Neighborhood Design Center has been partnering with the Darley Park community since 2015 to create a public space on the corner of Harford Road and Normal Avenue. Originally a vacant dirt lot, this neighborhood gateway park has become a multi-generational, multi-use gathering place through the hard work of the community and partnering organizations. In the past two years the community has secured a playground, mural, and performance stage at the park.

A long term plan for Darley Park with concept for the sun sails over the stage.

In the design for the stage, an overhead structure was planned as a sun shade made out of sail material (see photo above). This project, funded in part by BOPA’s Transformative Arts Prize, has evolved into a community arts project, a collaboration between artist Whitney Frazier and the women’s senior group of the neighborhood. Inspired loosely by the quilts of the black women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the artists have been developing abstract quilt designs to be sewn into shade sails.

A cutout design by community member Sandy Wilks.

Another quilt-inspired design for the stage shade sails by Ada Cathcart.

NDC welcomes all to see the unveiling of this art piece at the Light City event at Darley Park on April 13th at 6pm. The event will feature projected artworks by Baltimore’s own Kyle Yearwood, music by TT the Artist, and much more.

The arts group meets every week to design and create the stage sails at the local community center. Contact Whitney Frazier if you are interested in getting involved in the project, and check back for updates as the project moves forward!

A community member creating a design cut-out.

Whitney Frazier with several collaborators discussing color options.

NDC Travels to…Banff

NDC Deputy Director Briony Hynson attended the Active Living Research Conference at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity this month, presenting research entitled “Activating Public Spaces for Play: Opportunities for the Built Environment as a therapeutic tool in Neighborhoods Exposed to High Levels of Community Violence.” The research was conducted in partnership with Gwen Brown (BUILD), Colin Lyman, (The 6th Branch) and Dr. Carol Vidal (Johns Hopkins University), and supported in part by grants from the Urban Health Institute and the Robert W Deutsch Foundation. 

With the Canadian Rockies as an inspiring backdrop, temps down to -12degrees F kept conference attendees mainly indoors and focused at the 4-day convening. Practitioners and researchers from the fields of public health and planning explored a wide range of content. Here are Hynson’s top 5 picks from the conference:

Active Living Research Conference: Top 5 Sessions

  1. LA DOT General Manager Seleta Reynolds’ keynote on the future-proofing transportation (hint; it takes self driving cars AND road ‘buffets’ AND arts and creativity.
  2.  Simon O’Byrne of City of Edmonton’s approach to become a top WINTER city, using design.  And iceskates.
  3.  Poster Sessions!  So many smarts in one room.  
  4.  Salud America’s campaign to encourage shared use agreements, so that communities can access public land at schools outside of school time.
  5. Measuring Inclusion in Place with Gehl Institute’s Jennifer Gardner and Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, and Baltimore’s own Prof. Keisha Pollock

All in all, a great gathering of researchers, planners and public health experts. One last takeaway; every single round of applause at the Active Living Conference was a standing ovation, because (as research shows), sitting kills.

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Jones Falls Valley Visions

The Neighborhood Design Center was pleased to join the Central Baltimore Partnership and more than twelve other partners in planning and implementing the Jones Falls Visioning Workshop last month at the Motor House.  At this event, stakeholders and community members came together to discuss existing projects, shared interests, and future visions for the Jones Falls Valley with the ultimate goal of developing a strategic plan with actionable recreational, environmental and transit recommendations for enhancing the corridor.

The Jones Falls runs through Baltimore from where it is impounded to create Lake Roland all the way down to the Inner Harbor. The valley of this stream falls directly below Interstate 83 and shares borders with a variety of neighborhoods. The Jones Falls is a unique asset; with better access it could be used by thousands of city residents.

The workshop was attended by over 75 residents, artists, business owners, and city agencies and consisted of project leaders in seven topic areas giving a brief overview of their vision, then leading small breakout groups with interested participants. The topic areas discussed ranged from arts and performance to environmental projects to the development and/or repurposing of existing assets. All of the above mentioned groups were facilitated by Neighborhood Design Center volunteers and/or board members (listed below)!

An important outcome of the workshop was the establishment of the “Friends of Jones Falls” group and the Central Baltimore Partnership has organized the Friends of Jones Falls kick-off celebration at Union Craft Brewing on March 8th from 6pm-8pm.

If you are interested in receiving the post-workshop report or getting involved with the work along the Jones Falls, please contact Aaron Kaufman, the Central Baltimore Partnership Community Projects Manager, at akaufman@centralbaltimore.org

For reference, the presenters and their topics can be found below:

Arts and Performance Along the Jones Falls

Presented by Richard Best (Section 1)

Facilitated by LaShauna Jones

Development and Land Use Along the Jones Falls

Presented by Al Barry (AB Associates), Andrew Cook (Baltimore City Office of Sustainability/Made in Baltimore), and Reni Lawal (Baltimore City Department of Planning)

Facilitated by Nariman El Said

Creating a “Friends of the Jones Falls” group

Presented by Sandy Sparks (Friends of Stony Run) and Molly Gallant (Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks)

Facilitated by Ryan Patterson

Joint User Group Greenway Visioning

Presented by Jed Weeks (Bikemore)

Facilitated by Ren Southard and Teddy Krolik

New Life for Existing Assets: Roundhouse Alternative Uses

Presented by Doug Bothner (Ziger/Snead Architects)

Facilitated by Gerald Neily

Beautifying Access Points

Presented by Zoe Clarkwest and Amanda Cunningham (Baltimore City Forestry Board)

Facilitated by Rachel McNamara

Ecological Resilience and Usable Green Spaces

Presented by Laura Connelly (Parks and People Foundation) and Ashley Traut (Blue Water Baltimore)

Facilitated by Kelly Danz

 

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Dreaming Big for Hyatt Park

The City of Hyattsville, Maryland  is looking to enhance Hyatt Park, one of the many open space amenities in the city.  NDC is leading the community design process to gather resident’s insights and ideas and translate them into a conceptual plan. Currently Hyatt Park is home to a small playground and a community garden, but after a community visioning session on January 9th, we learned that many participants have larger visions for the space.

Residents and elected officials braced the cold to participate in a set of activities designed to foster creative and collaborative dialogue…. and get to know their neighbors in the process.

In a former bank building, directly across the street from the park that is soon to be the new headquarters for the City of Hyattsville Police Department, residents brainstormed and weighed options, considered materials, amenities and activities that were most important.

Around the old teller box in the room, flip charts prompted responses to some real world and ‘wacky’ scenarios such as:

“What would Hyatt Park look like… 

• if Dr. Seuss was the Director of Parks and Recreation?

• if it was a great place to picnic?

• if Yayoi Kusama designed the park?

• if your kid wanted to throw his birthday there?

• during the best ever Summer Jam? (a series of concerts hosted by the city)

• if WALL-E took over the world?”

Soon, post-it notes littered the pages, suggestions ranging from the more inspired ‘rainbow path/crosswalk’ and ‘concert stage,’  to the more practical ‘shade trees’, ‘bathroom facilities’ and more.

This activity was designed to prompt participants to think both realistically as well as ‘outside the box and help the NDC design team understand the big ideas that people have for Hyatt Park. The next order of business is to dive into the many responses received, draw out themes and priorities, and create a conceptual plan that captures the creative visions that so many have for the space.The public was also encouraged to submit input for the park design via Speak Up HVL, the City of Hyattsville’s innovative online community engagement portal.  See the ‘Hyatt Park Wishlist’ here. 

Thank you to everyone who joyfully and intentionally participated!  Keep track of NDC’s social media feeds to see when we release a set of conceptual plans for feedback!

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