Alices Garden

The two acre site was originally occupied housing and then demoed and was planned to be set up as a highway. These plans feel through however and the land was left vacant. The project was conceived six years ago and the developers of Alice’s Garden see this as a landscape of healing. First through reclaiming land that was left vacant, second by providing neighbors a place to gather, third by providing a space for community organizations to host their programs, and finally through education on food quality and nutrition. By not limiting the space to a single use the site has been embraced by city officials and the community.

The labyrinth

Some of the programs that are organized in Alice’s Garden are yoga, a learning labyrinth, lessons on composting and where food comes from, and a recently tilled is a mock slave’s garden. A few of the plots are dedicated to local businesses and two plots are dedicated to selling vegetables to corner stores.

The idea behind the corner store plots is that the food grown here is sold in the corner stores. The area is considered a food desert and although the Fond Du Lac Food Market is right around the corner, there was interest from local businesses and neighbors to see healthy food be sold in the community corner shops. One interesting and unexpected outcome was that one store placed the food in the front display while the other decided to place the crop near the back with the rest of the food items. What came out of this was that the store with the produce in the front sold out right away while the store with produce in the back did not sell any. One other lesson that came out of this was that some of the customers hesitated to buy certain produce that they weren’t familiar with such as tomatillos. One component that will be added on to the display next year are index cards describing the flavor and how best to prepare the food. Also on display were pesto’s and salsa’s that the garden produces themselves in hopes of achieving self sufficiency.

This site is adjacent to a school that at one time closed down but has since re-opened. The school is planning a redesign of the play yard that is currently an asphalt blacktop. The redesign is hoping to add some tree canopy, outdoor classrooms, and a more formal way of entering the Alice Garden. Already the school and garden have collaborated by organizing lessons held out in the garden.

One of the three tool sheds 

There was one thing that took me by surprise as I entered the site were the sheer amount of amenities inside of the site. An arbor, barbecue pits, benches, brightly colored garbage cans, picnic tables and a trellis. These are features that are not normally found in community gardens. As I found out later the trellis was reclaimed from a restaurant. The site also hosted three tool sheds so residents would not have to bring there own tools. I am not knocking these amenities it really added a nice touch and shows that if community gardens were given any consideration and not done on such a shoe string the visually impact it can have. They are hoping, soon, to allocate funding for a bee keeping permit which Milwaukee recently okayed for residents of the city to keep on their property.
More information on Alice's Garden can be found here. 

Insight to policy creation

Last week the neighborhood development departments across nine different neighborhoods sat down to flesh out, in the coordinators words, Strategies and Activities regarding how grant money will be distributed in the next fiscal year. There were two other meeting before this one that developed a mission statement and a set of Indicators. The organization describes the four Indicators as categories that the nine neighborhoods want to focus the grant money on. The strategies are areas under the indicators that can be measured using an activity.

To pose this as a landscape architecture example the Indicator is to promote healthy life style choices, the Strategy (one of many) would be having people become conscious of where there food comes from, finally an activity would be to coordinate with a farmers market to distribute information regarding food miles.

Developing the strategies and activities took a day each and while it went alright on the first session it seemed to have fallen apart on the second day. I personally felt that if the sessions were held a week apart then everyone could have had a moment to breathe and reflect. However I still found this whole process really fascinating because throughout school I had read one case study after another- and as I would read through the documents it never occurred to me to think about how the policies that cities neighborhoods and communities follow are created.

Essentially I left on a jet plane

So it has been a while since my last post but I decided on adding more content to the blog in weekly installments. Since it is the top of the week and Labor day I figured it would be a good time to fill you in on what type of content this page will host.
With my freshly stamped college degree in hand I signed up with the Americorps as a member of the Vista sect. For those that do not know what the Americorps are, it is a United States volunteer based program working with the goal to fight poverty in communities. It is a really great program where you get to view what organizations are looking for and submit an application based on how qualified you think you are with the idea in mind that you have a one year contract.
I submitted my application to the Agape Community Center located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Here I am working under an urban planner and with one other Vista member to develop relationships with two separate communities, host community brainstorming workshops, and help carry out programs the community finds is a right fit for their neighborhood.
So with that said I started work last Monday, while there was a period of being filled in on office protocol we were also assigned the neighborhoods that we would begin to foster a relationship with. The other Vista member, Brianna, is to focus on Fairfield a primarily commercial area while I am to focus on Old North Milwaukee which is primarily residential. By no means are these solo efforts it is always important to know that there is a team, no matter how big or small, behind you.
I would rather not make this unnecessarily long given that I do not have any pictures to break up the monotony of a solid block of text, so I will leave it at this till the next time.

mini synthesis.

 

As studio wraps up all of the components that I worked on since spring break will soon be finalized. In the meantime here is one component that is in the finalization stage, meaning that my professor has yet to critique this product.
A brief synopsis about the video is that I interpreted data from the book "Four Hundred Years of Agricultural Change in the Empire State" authored by Robert Bitz. It represents New York States' gain and loss of agricultural land from 1865-2007.
Looking at each model from the black to white gradation you can see that NYS has reached its peak land production the light gray and since that time it has decreased in agricultural land productivity.

kennedy square.

The Kennedy Square apartment complex in proximity to downtown Syracuse was a project that featured community development initiatives. The client, a bio-research center bought the defunct apartment block and wanted the surrounding area to be the spark for urban renewal.

The concept for my design was based on a modular form- Johnson Solid 21, which is most visible in the shape of the proposed community center. This conceptual form also generated the mixed use housing as well as the areas many open spaces. I had felt at the time that using a modular form would be a way for urban renewal to be replicated through out an area. Since the completion of the project, I now know that this is not the best way of going about a redesign of a community such as this example. A better way of thinking about it is through understanding how a community has grown over time.

Sketch of the touch and sensory garden

Regardless this is the design that I had gone with...so lets talk about it. The above section perspective shows, from left to right, the community center, sensory garden, and dog park. The community center and associated lawn area was dedicated to Emmanuel Breland a resident of the Kennedy Square apartments and the first African American in Syracuse to win a sports scholarship to Syracuse University. The touch and sensory garden featured two types of enclosures to maximize sensory awareness. Finally the dog park was to give an outlet to another type of potential user, at the time when I had suggested this amenity no one in studio could show me where a dog park in Syracuse could be found.

Section through the parking garage

Going further in to the picture to the left is a single story parking garage with roof top access. I had proposed that the parking structure have a green roof so that there could be the option for community gardening activities. Within the parking garage infrastructure would be cisterns that could collect gray water. The red brick buildings at the end of the sports field are mixed use structures; where the first floor is store front, the second is office space, and the third story is studio apartments. One feature of the store fronts is the inclusion of a zip car hub.

The picture to the left represents a section through the corner of Crouse and Water street this is the location of the Connective Corridor bus line. The plantings were to represent a successive growth pattern building up to the Crouse main street district. Pictured below is a section of the gray brick buildings which are for single families.

bear with me.

While school might be winding down the work load is ramping up. I am organizing my time so that a new posts or two will show up this weekend.

focusing on the regional food shed.

 When studio resumed after spring break our group goal for the intermittent review was to have a set of four interviews from farmers that was feasible for us to cover as main components of a food shed; agricultural production and dairy processing/distribution. 

(Image to be produced)

While there are many more components to a food shed we chose these because this is where previous semesters work within the studio has been heading towards. To clarify this remark other graduate and under graduate students from previous semesters have completed work on food sheds with topics such as production/distribution for local and imported apples and apple based products, milk production and distribution and general food shed delineation.

Our group arranged interviews with four farms that have dug deep roots into the Central New York community. Bob Evans- the yogurt and milk creator, Guy Vasta- the muck/onion farmer, Pete Holmes- the dairy cattle farmer, and Tony Emmi the crop farmer.

While I attended three of the four meetings when it came down to it I had decided to tackle Tony Emmi's farms' narrative.