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.

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 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.