Orleans News

Getting everybody’s enter on Metropolis Park, our yard



Word: We, the undersigned authors, first printed this in April, as an open letter to the members of the New Orleans Metropolis Park Enchancment Affiliation and Metropolis Park Conservancy Boards. It was spurred partly by the tone-deaf suggestion of shifting GrowDat from Metropolis Park. Final month, within the wake of a public outcry in regards to the matter, the park postponed its fourth public enter assembly to permit extra time to collect neighborhood opinions, officers stated. As has been introduced, the park is now in conversations with GrowDat about its location, although no contract has but been supplied or signed. 

However the challenge of inadequate engagement stays and shall be vital to handle earlier than the subsequent enter assembly is held.


As New Orleans appears to be like to the long run, why is Metropolis Park so dedicated to repeating the previous?

Working a street by way of Develop Dat Youth Farm isn’t the one drawback with Metropolis Park’s new Grasp Plan, but it surely may be the one cause most New Orleanians know in regards to the planning course of in any respect.

Sadly, that’s common. Public engagement is difficult, individuals are busy, and satisfactory illustration is commonly a problem in public design and planning processes, even utilizing the perfect practices of equity-centered, community-engaged design. 

We all know it from our personal skilled experiences, and we will see an consciousness of that persistent drawback within the documentation of the Grasp Planning course of for Metropolis Park, the place the disparity between New Orleans’ majority black inhabitants and the members in each public assembly attendance and the net survey course of was raised repeatedly within the Grasp Plan public assembly in September 2023, and acknowledged on the CPIA Board assembly in October 2023, the place the presenter is on report as saying, “we’re working to develop a technique for partaking with low participation teams.”

Whereas a technique might certainly have been mentioned for “partaking with low participation teams,” as promised in each conferences, the extra 400 surveys collected between the September-October conferences and the survey’s shut in November didn’t stability the 4,600 collected prior. Nor might they  have, counting on passive signage and a web-based survey, which is why in each settings outreach to neighborhood teams, church buildings, and faculties have been supplied as methods to develop and diversify public enter. Curiously, our personal on-line survey appears to point that this outreach by no means occurred, definitely not in any complete method. 

In every class of outreach, fewer than 4 p.c of respondents might recall any point out of the Metropolis Park Grasp Plan course of. Just one respondent discovered in regards to the Grasp Plan from a public college. Just one respondent discovered in regards to the Grasp Plan from their church. Most strikingly, given the strong and energetic community of neighborhood associations throughout town and their engagement in New Orleans’ planning processes total, our e mail outreach to the Metropolis’s official Neighborhood Affiliation contacts discovered solely 9 respondents who heard in regards to the Metropolis Park grasp planning course of from their neighborhood affiliation. 

Whereas ours is just not an exhaustive examine, these outcomes counsel an egregious lack of great public engagement for a undertaking of this scale. That lack is underlined within the statistics supplied by the Grasp Plan survey report. In a metropolis the place 20 p.c of the inhabitants is beneath 18, solely 7 p.c of respondents have been beneath 24, which isn’t what you wish to see when the way forward for your largest city park! The report on the Metropolis Park survey doesn’t provide a breakdown of responses by race, class, or gender, in itself a placing omission. Nonetheless, the highest three zip codes within the Metropolis Park Grasp Plan’s phrase cloud underrepresent Black New Orleanians by about 20 p.c and underrepresent New Orleanians residing in poverty by 66 p.c.

The duty to intentionally and particularly interact Black, brown, younger, aged, and decrease earnings populations is a core competency of recent governance and concrete design, in New Orleans and throughout the nation. The idea is definitely not new to Metropolis Park management. Each Cara Lambright and Randy Odinet have been employed in senior-level positions at Memorial Park throughout Houston’s Bayou Greenways 2020 park planning course of and Rice College’s corrective which was lined nationally for its findings that accurately surveying minority neighborhoods radically modified the evaluation of priorities and desires for an equitable park system.

There appear to be some unsettling parallels. As a Bloomberg reporter wrote in regards to the Bayou Greenways course of, “When town’s parks and recreation division performed its Grasp Plan Parks Survey in 2014, the vast majority of respondents replied that they wished their neighborhoods and parks linked to biking and strolling paths. The issue with that survey is that about two-thirds of the respondents have been white with family incomes over $75,000. That is clearly not a very good place to begin for Houston, one of the racially various, (and closely segregated) cities within the nation.”

A decade later, we’re seeing an echo within the outreach for Metropolis Park’s Grasp Plan, which was not thorough sufficient to seize the complete vary of resident/consumer issues and priorities, leaving massive segments of the inhabitants out of or underrepresented within the course of. 


A quiet setting from the park contrasts with Metropolis Park’s planning course of, which explicitly requires the creation of a central roadway to extend entry for suburban residents of St. Tammany and Jefferson parishes. (Picture by La’Shance Perry / The Lens)

This raises the bigger query of what the meant aim of participation is and needs to be. At finest, and that is beneficiant, the net survey was designed to collect some primary info on park use and participant pursuits. The conferences have been designed to tell members of Metropolis Park management targets (enhancing circulation and growing entry to Wooded Island) and solicit small-scale suggestions on their plans to fulfill these targets. The place was the chance to find out the targets, priorities, and course of the planning course of? 

Metropolis Park leaders and MVVA nonetheless have a chance to answer issues expressed all through the method and extra absolutely interact folks in a means that influences the planning course of and way forward for Metropolis Park. In the event that they don’t, then it is going to be clear that participation was meant to be an illusory checking of the bins. 

The Metropolis of New Orleans’ parks grasp plan, The Massive Inexperienced Simple, developed by Design Workshop, definitely took significant engagement to coronary heart; assessing each neighborhood and vacation spot parks to plan for a decade of equity-driven reinvestment in a park system that bears the scars of segregation and racialized neglect. 

The distinction with Metropolis Park’s course of couldn’t be extra stark. Whereas our civic planning course of envisions making use of our tax {dollars} to make sure the well-being of New Orleans residents, the Metropolis Park planning course of explicitly requires the creation of a central roadway to extend entry for suburban residents of St. Tammany and Jefferson parishes. It’s a strikingly acquainted sample to most planners and concrete designers, to not point out generations of New Orleanians who can level to Claiborne Avenue as essentially the most notable native instance.

The proposed street for Metropolis Park would additionally divide the largely white upriver neighborhoods and largely black downriver neighborhoods, destroying a beloved youth program that cultivates an deliberately various neighborhood provides insult to acquainted damage. 

Throughout america planners, designers, panorama architects, and civil engineers are making appreciable efforts to restore the lasting harms of previous land-use insurance policies in our cities and suburbs, an rising consensus that finest practices require reckoning with histories of inequity and injustice within the constructed atmosphere. 

Metropolis Park, with its origins in plantations and historical past of segregation in residing reminiscence, is a first-rate web site for such a reckoning, and this is a chance for the Metropolis Park Conservancy to implement an really inclusive planning course of towards its mission of selling “inclusivity, defending pure sources and providing various park programming.”  

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc. has been among the many companies whose work alongside these strains has been inspirational in different cities. Tulsa’s Gathering Place, St Louis’s CityArchRiver Undertaking, and New York’s Brooklyn Bridge park all share a visual ethos of inclusion together with said targets of fairness and restore evident of their design. Every additionally works to mitigate the impacts of roadways that divide the park websites internally or from their surrounding communities. Two of those achieve this by way of land bridges, a major design transfer in addition to a significant monetary funding. 

This, too, is an space the place Metropolis Park’s management has expertise; of their former roles at Memorial Park, they oversaw the $80 Million effort to construct a landbridge and prairie “therapeutic the divide created by Memorial Drive half a century in the past,” based on CEO Shellye Arnold. 

If the principal movers of Metropolis Park’s Grasp Plan have been immediately concerned in repairing this sort of lasting harm in different cities, why are they recreating the very circumstances that required restore in our metropolis? At a second when federal help is lastly serving to communities to restore the highways used to create racial divides, why is New Orleans shifting in the wrong way?


Metropolis Park’s Massive Lake, one of many locations the place folks come to blow off steam — bike and wake and pedal boats. New Orleans already leads the nation in bicycle fatalities, with per capita deaths of 9.9 per 1 million residents, tragically rising 11 p.c from 2015 to 2022. “The biggest park in our metropolis shouldn’t be a contributor to these numbers,” the authors write. “However not less than 4 occasions previously 4 years, it has been.” (Picture by La’Shance Perry for The Lens.)

Metropolis Park’s proposed street is duplicative of North-South connectivity already offered by Marconi and Wisner. The January 2024 MVVA report acknowledges these roads are over-designed and may very well be carrying considerably extra site visitors than they’re at the moment. 

The removing of Marconi between Harrison and the tennis middle will be sure that site visitors reroutes to the proposed inside street, making it a through-way quite than a sluggish, inside park street, exactly the critique the designers provide of their have a look at Roosevelt Ave in their very own report. 

If we wish slower-trafficked, true park roads the place pedestrians and cyclists can safely use the area, an inside model of Marconi or Wisner works in opposition to that desired security. If we wish to honor the highest priorities from the first Grasp Plan public assembly, the place members proposed multimodal transit to make the north finish of the park extra accessible, including an prolonged straight throughway is, at finest, counterproductive. 

It’s also a harmful alternative. New Orleans leads the nation in bicycle fatalities, with per capita deaths of 9.9 per 1 million residents, tragically rising 11 p.c from 2015 to 2022. Our site visitors deaths are 51 p.c larger than the nationwide common and our pedestrian deaths, already excessive, greater than tripled from 2020-22. 

The biggest park in our metropolis shouldn’t be a contributor to these numbers, however not less than 4 occasions previously 4 years, it has been. Dashing drivers on Marconi and Wisner, unclear sightlines and an absence of wayfinding throughout the park, and horrible entryways at Harrison and Filmore, which the designers rightly acknowledge, all contribute to an unsafe atmosphere wherever automobiles and park goers intersect. Shifting extra site visitors to the park inside will solely exacerbate the issue.

Right here too, New Orleans could be shifting in the wrong way of nationwide tendencies. New York’s Central Park closed their inside roads to automobiles in 2018 and has by no means seemed again. Neither did Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, or Rock Creek Park in Washington DC, amongst many others. These parks perceive what Metropolis Park would do properly to recollect: that public parks are for the general public. 

New Orleanians know this. For this reason hundreds of us volunteered to mow Metropolis Park after Hurricane Katrina. For this reason Better New Orleans Iris Society members volunteer at Metropolis Park’s iris nursery. For this reason lots of of New Orleans residents volunteer, formally and informally, to clear the lagoons of invasive progress, restore playground gear, and choose up trash. 

At its finest, Metropolis Park is our shared yard. It’s the place we come collectively to maintain ourselves, to maintain one another, and to maintain our park. 

We deserve a grasp plan that honors New Orleanians’ relationship to our park. We deserve a grasp plan that promotes security over velocity, a grasp plan that strikes us in the direction of a extra inclusive and equitable future, not a grasp plan that repeats the errors of the previous.

Sincerely,

Sue Mobley, urbanist and former New Orleans Metropolis Planning Commissioner

Nick Jenisch, AICP

Chris Daemmrich, Assoc. AIA, NOMA

Ann Yoachim

Emilie Taylor Welty, AIA

Judith Kinnard, FAIA professor Tulane College

Maggie Hansen, The College of Texas at Austin

Yuki Kato, Ph.D., Division of Sociology, Georgetown College 

Casius Pealer

Colin Ash, AICP
Zachary Lamb, Ph.D, Division of Metropolis and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

Hannah Berryhill, College | Tulane College of Structure 

Renia Ehrenfeucht, MUP, PhD, College of Structure and Planning, College of New Mexico

John Ludlam 

Alexandra Miller, AICP

Allison Schiller

Colleen McHugh

James Catalano

Madeline Foster-Martinez, PhD, Earth and Env. 

Science/Civil and Env Eng. UNO

Eli Feinstein, PE Investor, Father of a Develop Dat child.

Jonathan Tate, OJT 

Matthew Raybon

Zach Braaten

Johanna Gilligan, Loeb Fellow and Develop Dat Founder

Cassidy Rosen, Assoc. AIA, NOMA

Tiffany Lin, AIA, Tulane Design Program Director

Becca Greaney, Nightshade Farms

Lexi Tengco, AIA

Patrick Franke, RA

Elaine Damico

Jennifer Zurik, MZ. Structure

John Coyle, Youth Rebuilding New Orleans 

Kayliegh Bruentrup NCIDQ, Campo Structure + Inside Design 

Kenneth Schwartz FAIA, professor Tulane College

Seth Welty, Colectivo

Bobbie Hill, Concordia

Elizabeth Chen, Concordia

Bahareh Javadi, Concordia

Liz Camuti, ASLA, Tulane College 

Mayu Takeda

Julia Lang, Professor, Heart for Social Innovation and Design Considering, Tulane College 

Lindsey Mayer, Harvard GSD

Graham Hill, RA, NCARB

Ray Fontaine, Bywater Branding Companies 

Ethan Ellestad, Govt Director, Music and Tradition Coalition of New Orleans (MaCCNO)

Bonnie Kate Walker, ASLA, ETH College

Bailey Bullock, MURP, College of New Orleans

Ben Notkin, Metropolis Resilience Program

Sophie Chien, Harvard GSD

Heidi Schmalbach

Billy Fleming, Wilks Household Director of the Ian L. McHarg Heart, College of Pennsylvania College of Design

Max Krochmal, Czech Republic Professor of Comparative City Planning and Director of Justice Research,, College of New Orleans

Kofi Boone, FASLA 

Phoebe Dunn, NANO Structure + Interiors

Josie Sexton AIA NCARB, ERDMAN 

Bob Murrell

Jess Zimbabwe, AIA, AICP, Environmental Works Group Design Heart and the College of Washington Division of City Design and Planning

Vineet Diwadkar, AICP IAM LEED AP, Affiliate Vice President, AECOM

Angelica Quicksey, New_ Public

Zoe Swartz

Brian Litt, Resilient Building

Dr. Laura Franklin

Gabby Black

Annelise Haskell, STUDIOS Structure

Jeffrey Goodman, AICP 

Mia Sanchas 

Kaede Polkinghorne, AICP

Dylan Roth

Sara Jensen Carr, ASLA, Affiliate Director, Northeastern College of College of Structure

Joanna Farley

Sydney Shivers, MPA

Cheyenne V. Ellis 

Janna A. Zinzi

Arianne Larimer

Shanasia Sylman, PhD Pupil, Metropolis and Regional Planning, Cornell College (MUP ‘18)

Hannah Kenyon, Affiliate AIA

Steve Ritten, Goodwyn Mills Cawood

Joseph A. Colón, previously New Orleans Metropolis Planning Fee

Kyle Ofori

Amy F. Stelly, Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio

Maxwell Ciardullo

Errol Barron  FAIA- Professor Of Structure Emeritus, Tulane College College of Structure

Marilyn Feldmeier

Taylor Galyean

Julia Clark 

Armando Sullivan, Harvard GSD

David Merlin, AIA

Laruschka Joubert, MADE

Dyani Robarge, CICADA

Sophie Riedel, PLA

Cassie Nichols, PLA, ASLA

Sydney Lister

Matt DeCotiis, CICADA

Megan Spoor

Shelby Mills Lynn, RA, NCARB

Elizabeth Steeby, College of New Orleans 

Eric Lynn, Workhaus

Lynn Cai, College of New Orleans 

Tara Tolford, AICP, GIP

Alexandra Weir, MURP, UNO

Allison Haertling, AICP

Beth Jacob, AIA

Daniel Brook

Clara Lyle, College of Pennsylvania, MUP, former Develop Dat workers

Cathi Ho Schar, FAIA 

Katie Fronek, Civic Studio

Jody Towers, citizen, tax payer, park consumer

Daniel Maldonado Jiménez

Jacqui Gibson-Clark

Sarah Fouts, UMBC

Natalie Rendleman

Valentina Mancera

James Wheeler, Assoc AIA, ACD

Liz Ogbu, Founder + Principal, Studio O

Caroline Bean, Harvard GSD ‘18

Joseph O. Evans III, LEED AP,  Evans + Lighter Panorama Structure

Sean Clark

Angel Chung Cutno, 24 Carrot Backyard

Adin Becker, Harvard GSD ‘26

Alice Hintermann

Anandi A. Premlall 

Ama Rogan, A Studio within the Woods

Katherine Segarra, PhD in Marine Sciences & New Orleans Resident

Thomas Beller, Affiliate Professor and Director of Inventive Writing, Tulane College

Rev. Kalie Dutra, MDiv, MA in Historical past, PhD Candidate on the College of New Orleans

Anthony Watley, Grasp’s of Panorama Structure ‘24 – The College of Texas at Austin & New Orleans Resident 

Sarah Smyth, Harvard GSD ‘21

Lucy Satzewich, Tulane M.Arch ‘20. Workplace of Jonathan Tate (OJT.) 

Andrea Roberts, founder The Texas Freedom Colonies Undertaking

Bertrand Mpigabahizi, Harvard GSD ‘23

Caryn Blair, MUP, Mid-Metropolis Resident

Natalie Boverman, Harvard GSD, College of Texas at Austin

Jonathan Marcantel NCARB, Albert Structure

Samuel Buckley, AICP, Coverage Director, Journey New Orleans

Jazmin Castillo, SOUL

Giuliana Vaccarino Gearty, Tulane M.Arch ‘23, OJT

Adam B Davis, OJT

Jose Cotto, Tulane M.Arch ‘14

Daniel Krall, Founder and President, Downtown FabWorks

Sarah Trimble, PhD (Texas A&M, Geography, 2017), New Orleans Resident

Kelsie Donovan, Tulane B.Arch ‘22

Andrew Liles, AIA, Tulane College, A M Liles Architect

Matt Bernstine, Affiliate Director, Workplace for Socially Engaged Apply, WashU

Tracey Armitage, SMM

Fred Neal Jr., AICP

Liz Kramer, Public Design Bureau

Marla Nelson, PhD, AICP

Alifa Putri, Harvard GSD

One signatory’s office was faraway from this doc, to clarify that the individual is talking as a person, not on behalf of the office.


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