NESSBE2019

After 50 years of disinvestment in the the North Hartford Promise Zone, Community Solutions has broken ground on the Swift Factory, a brownfield site in the heart of the neighborhood. The historic factory was once the neighborhood’s largest employer, but has been vacant since 2005.  Soon it will resume its role as the neighborhood’s economic engine becoming a multi-tenant, food business hub.

Having been approached by local leaders in 2010, Community Solutions has been engaging the community, through a social equity lens to understand the needs, wants, and vision for the factory, and the neighborhood. The Swift Factory’s transformation is a key building block in creating greater stability and prosperity for residents of North Hartford. Outside the walls of the factory, community engagement continues in the development of resident leaders, building block clubs; and identifying and impacting systems that created the current landscape of blight, evictions and transiency.

Learning Objectives:

1. Discuss equitable community development in ethnically and economically diverse communities.
2. Define processes and procedures that public and private partners can partake in for successful equitable community development.
3. Advocate for tools and resources that support equitable development in community.
4. Illustrate community engagement methods that support civic dialogue from a diverse audience.

AIA Continuing Education Credit: 2 LU
Living Future Accreditation Credits: 1.5 HRS

In recent years, New York City has turned to the creation of plazas in areas understood as underutilized or abandoned. Many of these plazas incorporate regularly-scheduled activities such as farmers' markets and outdoor recreation and fitness classes, while simultaneously introducing green infrastructural elements such as horticultural installations, planters and rainwater recycling systems. On the surface, plazas seem to provide environmental amenities to communities with less access to large park areas while creating pedestrian-friendly public space. But the plaza program and its associated design elements have also displaced homeless people from spaces and areas that were critically important to maintaining some degree of safety and invisibility, and have often continued longstanding design and policing practices that exclude homeless New Yorkers from public space. Both of these tendencies within the plaza program compound an ongoing housing crisis. How can plazas, and other similar spaces featuring environmental design and green infrastructure, become more inclusive of homeless residents and other marginalized populations that are nevertheless crucial to the fabrics of community? This panel will explore this question from a variety of perspectives (critical urban geography, homeless activism, and environmental design) and will include an interactive component, where participants will have the opportunity to create guidelines for inclusive plazas and green infrastructure.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the history of design and homelessness through a combined presentation by homeless activists and academics who study the history of urban public space. Participants will learn the thorny history of public space and exclusion of homeless people, focusing on how this occurs through processes of design.
2. Demonstrate ability to apply design principles to housing justice. Participants will be asked to share their own design skills in an exercise that attempts to create a homeless-friendly public plaza.
3. Incorporate homeless ideas of positive public space into sample plaza design. Participants will learn and apply the perspective of homeless people into the plaza design exercise.  This will require momentarily unlearning many conventional design and architecture principles.
4. Learn how to discuss homelessness in a productive way with design colleagues. Participants will leave the workshop equipped to break stereotypes of homelessness in conversation with colleagues, and to appropriately push back against anti-homelessness in the design world.

AIA Continuing Education Credit: 2 HSW
Living Future Accreditation Credits: 1.5 HRS