On Saturday, October 11th, a group of students from Hunter College’s Master of Urban Planning that included Jeremiah Cox, Jocelyn Dupre, Dan Bianco, and myself traveled to Englewood, New Jersey to volunteer for a visioning session for Mackay Park. The visioning session serves as one of the National Consortium for Creative Placemaking’s (NCCP’s) first steps towards developing a plan for Mackay Park for the City of Englewood. The NCCP is an organization that specializes in building livable and sustainable communities by making them better places for the arts. By listening to the community’s stories about the park, the NCCP and the Nishuane Group, who is the NCCP’s partner in the project, hope to gain invaluable insight to the history and the perceptions of the park, which can serve a critical role in the project’s success.
Although many of the attendees appeared to have already known each other, the event started with brief introductions. Following the introductions, Leo Vazquez, the executive director of the NCCP and the facilitator of the visioning session, opened the floor to the community members by asking them to share their stories about Mackay Park. During this time, the community members talked about professional athletes who once practiced their respective sports on the grounds of Mackay Park, while other attendees made suggestions towards improving the park by, for example, hiring a maintenance staff for the park. To further elicit some of these creative ideas for the park, Mr. Vazquez asked the attendees to begin an “evaluative mapping” exercise, which is based off the work of Kevin Lynch. During this exercise, the Hunter students provided the attendees with maps of Mackay Park and asked them to write down their perceptions or ideas for different parts of the park. After passing out the maps, each student sat down at a table to assist the community members with expanding their ideas for the park and write down observational notes. At each table, the community members were engaging in spiriting discussions with each other and identifying the weaknesses and potentials of the park. By twelve o’clock, the community members were still engaged in-group discussions, but were unfortunately limited by time. In fact, after Mr. Vazquez thanked the community member for attending the meeting and sharing their thoughts about Mackay Park, the community members still continued their discussions about the park!
The next step of the planning process for Mackay Park is to organize and analyze the community input from this meeting. In the upcoming weeks, Mr. Vazquez plans to schedule a meeting with the students from Hunter to discuss their notes and observations from working at the table. This shows how urban planning students from Hunter are offering their knowledge and passion for the urban planning field to projects taking place throughout the tri-state area.
Written by Daniel Vieira.
