Visioning Exercise for Mackay Park in Englewood, New Jersey

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.

Volunteering at Highland Park Children’s Garden

r9w96xxJSelGkUDUTsI3F3snQ1saxFJmktItVr5Tsrg
On September 20, both planning and affairs students came together to volunteer at the Highland Park Children’s Garden in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn.  Aside from being a functional community garden with its own compost, the garden’s rich history of being one of the oldest urban community gardens in New York City made this an appropriate location for GUAPA’s first volunteer event of the year.
Since it was a small group, it was a great opportunity for new and old, planning and affairs students to get to know each other better. We helped prepare the garden for the fall by cleaning up plots that were consumed by weeds and by trimming overgrown trees and bushes.  However, the highlight of our day was when we all collectively helped to hang up artwork that was done by the local public school children.  The gardeners had been waiting quite some time for the artwork to be re-installed and they were ecstatic that we were able to help them display the creations once again.
Hjx0nwiHYcJUqpJh2vZmVlnas-hnUz4lZHLqL4Kup3s
15307

A 1936 photo of the garden from the NYC Parks Archives: http://on.nyc.gov/1yraQiz

FCuv0zufRGKJML6OTwo8zm0azCokCHi964HwdvQlQpg
0Ukx3yD8iBh6t8r6onD6e3NtPs_p3V8N8jkHKmQ3p84
Written by Melissa Alke. Photos by Jeremiah Cox.

Park(ing) Day on Lexington Avenue

-2XObOQpdbTkllk3k4wuLd9KiD7CiCep_ZpH12DpU4YHunter GUAPA observed the 9th annual Park(ing) Day on September 19, 2014. This consisted of spending the day, from 10:00am to 6:00pm, on Lexington Avenue, by taking over a parking space outside Hunter East, and turning it into a tiny .004 acre park.

The goal was to show how the space of a single parking space could be alternatively used for seating and public recreation. Park(ing) day began in San Francisco in 2005 when Rebar, an art and design firm realized that as long as you paid the meter you could do whatever you want in a parking space — not just park a private car. Traditionally, this accomplished stealthily by simply pulling into an empty metered parking space and paying the meter to park people instead of cars, but today, with Muni-meters all over New York City, a parking permit is obtained by the NYPD (organized by Transportation Alternatives) for a permit for a single parking space to be “turned into a public space to be used for something other than a motor vehicle.” We even stopped by the precinct around the corner, and got someone to move a police car that was taking up one of our possible spaces before we moved in.

cggzSPbYEpfCXtdscm6aq9_6UQGF4XSci4HxRTGQy9g

In our space, we took some fake grass – this and our caution tape to mark off the enclosure were the only purchased items – and from various classmates, we borrowed an inflatable couch, some camping chairs, and a camping table. A tent was also pitched to fully take-up the entire space. Throughout the day we had a variety of visitors ranging from young to old to Hunter College’s President Raab. Most drivers who passed also supported the space giving us various ‘thumbs-up.’ There was just one auto passenger, clearly unnerved by a parking space being taken up by something other than a private automobile, who opened his window to yell “What the hell are you doing in a parking space!” As planners, it was an important and interesting way to reflect on how much space we allocate for cars by spending a day directly perched on the side of Lexington Avenue.

Written by Jeremiah Cox. 

Photos by Jeremiah Cox and Mia Moffett.

 

XrLVpvFNR09ENOSgl-uFq1zwb3qr2vCYc1_RSo6v9XQ XJ7-LWRZ3cdJOFXrlUqFyNk2O-xVFZqV_bkLNJuUI-I

ZejJpWFMbNkCaXfYMzFJpyCAU9zf4oRrp0FPOmwNf6E

Hello, urban world!

Welcome to the new blog of the Graduate Urban Affairs and Planning Association (GUAPA) at Hunter College. We are excited to share content with you about what our fellow students and alumni are studying, working on, and exploring.

First, here are some pictures from a tour we took this past August of the Freshkills Park in Staten Island. This park, as you may know, is situated on a former landfill, and is not fully open to the public yet, as it is undergoing a long-term environmental remediation and planning effort. Special thanks to the Parks Department for this great tour and to our fellow planning student, Jeremiah Cox, for supplying these excellent photos.

What an amazing view of Lower Manhattan!

fresk_kills1 fresk_kills18fresk_kills28 fresk_kills30 fresk_kills16

 

Tagged , , ,
Skip to toolbar