Stories People Tell -

If people are creatively engaged, they start to tell 
stories - at least that's what we've found. When given the chance to express  hopes of how their existing environment might change, they also tell stories that reflect who they are and what they value.

Above are photos of the Kelley's Corner intersection in Acton MA in early 2010; in many ways it is a typical American suburban intersection. There's a gas station at one corner, an empty McDonald's at the other, and lots of parking lots surrounding.

In our Open Neighborhood experiment we gave people the tools to tell us what they would rather see.  Some of these were simple craft tools, including a photocopied map mounted on foam core.  This post looks at 10 of the 51
'visions' created, and the stories told.

The board above, for example, was done by high school boys who explained they'd like to see a park, pond, and ice cream parlor; a fitting vision for this suburban intersection that's a third of a mile from the high school front door.  "We're looking for a place to hang out," they said.  Something away from the campus, yet easy to get to without a car.  They suggested the site could be something it's not today: serene - even a refuge. (click on the boards to enlarge)

The idea that this central town intersection should be a place that's fun and educational came up a lot, too. A junior high girl created the board on the right with the "Museum of Einstein" in the center, flanked by a zoo and across the street from a large movie theatre (in purple) plus smaller library and eatery. There would be plenty to do within walking distance at this intersection - including shopping at Macy's and taking in a 'mini' planetarium.

We found adults and particularly kids really like an exploration that lets them adjust things in the adult  world. 

One elementary schooler spent time designing a playground complete with hopscotch(third board down on right). And it had his other favorite things, pet store, ice cream store, 'Rain Forest Cafe' and pool (the Town doesn't have a community one.) 

Kids can also be quick to break the rules; this 'kit-building' was conceived as a 2D exercise - but they started building in 3D, making trees pop up with pipe cleaners and toothpicks; for us this was a sign the exercise was working better than we had hoped.  They were really getting 'into' the design.

On some boards they started using erasers we provided, not as erasers - of course - but as props, so one shaped like a soccer ball went on a field, and another like a cake on a bakery building (above). 

Interestingly, many kids and adults addressed the traffic situation (more than 30,000 cars go through this suburban intersection each day) and their fear of it.  This seems to be something that planners don't always acknowledge.

The fact is people instinctively fear cars going fast when they are not inside them and this showed in the public work. Many of the designs had bridges or underpasses over the intersection or the roadways leading to it, such as the board below with a pedestrian bridge going immediately from the school campus to an imagined fitness center.

                 

Some - but not all - of the adult designs were done from the vantage point of the automobile - as opposed to the pedestrian.

The most eloquent in that genre perhaps is below:

and the man who created it told the story about how he just moved into a new apartment near the intersection and struggles daily with rush hour traffic on the commute to and from work.  You can almost feel the pain here, and the idea expressed that a web of streets can reduce pressure on a congestion point is certainly sound.

Some residents, taking the other tack, willing cars away,  focused on the walking potential of the area in new ways. The green yarn on the board at right represents "day-lighted" streams, or underground streams now existing below parking lots for the most part, brought back to the surface.  The work here expresses the wish to turn what now is predominantly an impervious asphalt area into a more vernal place with walking trails, the original streams back in view as well as stores and other needed community amenities including both a senior/daycare center sketched in on the left corner opposite the K-12 public school campus.

The idea of "walk-ability" was something many adults focused on when designing their boards. They frequently created commercial shopping corridors - an obvious antidote for the current haphazard conditions where car accessibility is prioritized over pedestrian experience or viability.

The desire to create very coherent corridors with parking internalized within the block was perhaps best 'visualized' in the board to the right.  (The P with the circle around it represents parking.)

Here's a board (below) we created to easily compare existing conditions with proposed. It documents how things are today in Kelley's Corner  using the same art and craft materials. In the site today, building placement on site is very random from the pedestrian perspective making people outside cars, we would argue, feel  unwelcome and uncomfortable.

It's also interesting to compare this existing condition board with the one immediately below, which proved the most popular with residents.

Perhaps this is because it successfully articulates and combines the many hopes and values from many of the other submissions.  It is strongly organized and suggests a real hierarchy with the center more important than the edge.

Our work suggests people like suburban and urban conditions where there is that strong sense of order and some places have more significance than others. 

In this "winner" plan, the red line represents a bike trail + the pink are the sidewalks; there's even a walking or biking bridge over the busy roadway. 

There's a strong edge of businesses that create clear commercial corridors, internalized parking and both recreational (a community center in blue at the center) and well articulated park space (with a fountain).  The intense development of this corner also makes sense because it is at the first stoplight off the highway exit ramp entering the town (Acton) from the city (Boston).

For us, this experiment in 'public design' suggests the creativity of local residents may be an overlooked resource in  a community's future. Indeed, in a world struggling over access to finite natural resources, the time might be ripe to seriously consider mining it for the future.

Without providing the public access to tools to express themselves first, in a visual way as well as with words, one can't be sure the regulations and zoning governing land use truly fit the neighborhood.

-Ann Sussman

A Place for Great Ideas

When you create a place and ample time for the public to develop their own ideas for future development, amazing things happen.  To the right is the poster we put up around town in the fall showing an aerial view of part of the commercial intersection residents were invited to re-visualize. It gives the web address where people could explore the area 'virtually' using Second Life as well as a date for an all-day Community Forum at Town Hall. 

And below are 51 'visions' people came up with! We found people liked working hands-on when it came to elaborating their vision- rather than on the computer (which was also an option) to develop their own thoughts. People spent more time on this and were more interested than any of us expected. In keeping with Open-Neighborhood philosophy that the public has much to teach, we didn't give much instruction, just handed out 11" x 17" boards showing roads alone, an aerial map of the area, and easy-to-cut colored craft material.  The great thing about an exercise like this is that it engages people age 4 to 80.

                                                            

Here's the winning board, BTW:

In the spring we invited everyone to see all these results up at Town Hall (we learned that people will show up to see their work on display) and to vote on their favorite board.  The winning entry above has ample sidewalks (in pink), buildings close to the street (not the way most are now) and a bike path (in red) to connect with a  proposed rail trail. At a glance it shows hierarchy and order, which current conditions lack, and suggests a new zoning approach for the future.

Separately the Tufts team, lead by Prof. Hollander, created a rubric to analyze all the public work and found this board expresses values common to many.  A central one was the public's desire to make this car-centric area truly pedestrian friendly and focused.  A final report with all the Tufts findings may be seen here.

We'll look at more of the public work in a future post, and show how story-telling and narrative appears to figure in many of them.

Welcome to Open-Neighborhood

Welcome to the OpenNeighborhood journal, where we explore creative approaches to planning and encouraging more sustainable development.

In this first post we will show results from our recent outreach efforts where we used Second Life, a virtual reality program, to model an existing older commercial intersection in a suburban town. The idea was that if we approached planning more like a game, could we attract more constituents to visualize a new future for the area?

The answer is we found using Second Life was a great way to raise the profile of a project. When people see a version of their town in a game, they get excited about it.(Third photo from the top shows high school students testing it out for the first time. The top two photos are screen shots from our Second Life program.)

We also found that having a program people could use, for free, from their home or office computer increased project visibility. More than 450 people went to the site of the town in a two week period last fall. (many during the work day!)

Since we see our mission, as exploring community creativity, we built a virtual "Village Design Center" within the program (fourth photo from top.) Here residents could explore some local history, and then proceed to lay out a plan of their own visions for the town's future. And for those who did not use the computer, there were 'Visioning Boards', essentially the same map backed on a foam board, for them to work on using art materials.

We'll explore some of the remarkable results from this outreach in our next post. Engaging an entire Town takes a lot of effort. We should note that this work took place in the Town of Acton, MA with the active support of the local Planning Department, local citizens and educational institutions including The Discovery Museums, The Acton-Boxborough Parent Involvement Project, and the Acton-Boxborough Cultural Council.