Ideas We Should Steal: Turning Blight into Play Spaces

Feb. 05, 2019

For any Philly parent or kid who'south visited the Please Touch Museum, the Imagination Playground is a familiar destination. A carpeted space adjacent to the carousel where children apply oversized blue foam blocks and "noodles" to build any their brains dream upward—life-sized igloos, basketball hoops, robots—it invites the kind of play that harkens dorsum to a time earlier screens monopolized childhood.

Just for children in New Orleans' Cardinal Metropolis neighborhood, where—13-plus years post-Katrina—swaths of homes remain decimated and 46 percent of people alive in poverty, those edifice blocks represent more play: They signify an opportunity to transcend race, class and history.

Angela Kyle, founder of the New Orleans nonprofit PlayBuild, was taken aback the offset time she witnessed the transformative ability of the materials. She was prototyping an early version of the PlayBuild concept and had the the Imagination Playground blocks gear up at a farmers market for children to use, when she noticed a young African American boy, about 9 or 10, looking at her. She asked him if he wanted to play, and showed him pictures on her phone of another kids' creations. "He looked at me with skepticism," Kyle recalls. "'Did a white kid do that?' he asked.

The boy's cynicism—the fact that his human knee-wiggle reaction was to presume something special couldn't possibly be for him—could have cleaved Kyle's heart. Instead, information technology strengthened her commitment to PlayBuild, which since 2012 has sought to transform blighted urban spaces in New Orleans into sources of design-focused play and community gathering.

"I wanted my daughter to abound up loving New Orleans and understanding the culture, architecture, food and our manner of life—togetherness and family and neighbors. I actually wanted her to feel that in a diverse way. And PlayBuild answered that call," Dallman says.

"When this kid saw something that he perceived to be good and automatically associated it with something that he couldn't do or achieve—that was the moment that solidified the importance of our mission," says Kyle, who'd previously worked for New Orleans' Business Alliance. "Nosotros have to give these kids confidence that their ideas and the way that they bring those ideas to life, and the way they express those ideas, is valid and that they deserve to be listened to."

The mission of PlayBuild is to transform under-utilized urban spaces "to engage young people and empower them through design-related play: architecture, city-planning, sustainability." The goal isn't to plough out a generation of architects and engineers, Kyle says. It's to restore a sense of pride and stewardship in the city's young people—and the community around them—"to put them straight in touch with the transformation of the congenital environment then that they see the opportunity to be agents of that transformation and non only passive observers every bit whole blocks morph"—read: gentrify—"into something different."

Different organizations focused on building traditional playgrounds, PlayBuild's focus is on cultivating an awareness among children of the designed world around them—what makes information technology unique, the problems and potential that come up with it. The materials available to the kids who come to PlayBuild reflect that: There are the Imagination Playground blocks, too as tools like Magna-Tiles, Rigamajig (jumbo erector) sets, LEGO, and art supplies galore.

At PlayBuild'south 1 permanent space—which has a sheltered pavillion, permanent storage space, mini-kitchen for lunch and snack prep, and bathrooms—and at its 2-dozen annual pop-upwards events at other locations around the city, children ages four to 12 acquire well-nigh New Orleans landmarks and signature architecture, similar the ubiquitous shotgun houses and their ties to traditions in Africa and the Caribbean area. They learn about the touch of government-mandated highways that contributed to the reject of predominantly African American neighborhoods at that place and throughout the land. They learn about efforts to revitalize their city.

What academics have branded "design thinking" starts to come up naturally to the kids, every bit exemplified when, while drawing an idealized version of his neighborhood, one 8-year-old PlayBuilder added a designated wheelchair lane for a neighbor he'd noticed going in and out of his home near PlayBuild'southward master site.

That site, a previously-neglected 30- by ninety-human foot package located between ii housing projects where the average annual household income is below $20,000, is now a vibrant outdoor classroom full of possibility, where volunteers from within the community and from Tulane University run later-school programs, summertime camps, and weekend activities. Other community groups—from artist collectives to Tulane professors—are invited to host community events too. PlayBuild also regularly operates pop-upward programs, equally when they fix play spaces along New Orleans' signature "neutral ground," the strip of state between opposite lanes of local traffic that for and then long served as fundamental gathering places for neighbors.

Debra Dallman is a New Orleans native who left the urban center for 25 years earlier returning five years ago with her husband and two kids. "When I came dorsum, people warned me against living here. 'Stay away from the whole Superdome downtown area,' they said." Merely when Dallman drove by PlayBuild's site and saw how the customs was working to restore it, she felt right at abode. PlayBuild, she says, has played a critical part in her homecoming—and in her 9-year-sometime daughter's upbringing.

"PlayBuild gives children the opportunity to experience and comprehend the urban center that we New Orleaneans dearest and near lost [in Katrina]. I wanted my girl Franki to grow upwards loving New Orleans and understanding the culture, architecture, food and our way of life—togetherness and family and neighbors. I actually wanted her to feel that in a diverse way. And PlayBuild answered that call," she says.

What academics have branded "design thinking" starts to come naturally to the kids. I 8-year-onetime added a designated wheelchair lane for a neighbor he'd noticed going in and out of his dwelling about PlayBuild's primary site.

Right at present, PlayBuild operates on a shoestring $50,000 per year upkeep, one that Kyle would similar to grow, in large part to help scale the performance to other cities. She also hopes to behave some quantitative analyses of PlayBuild's touch on, ideally partnering with the schools PlayBuilders nourish to assess diverse metrics in and out of the classroom. (Currently, PlayBuild measures its success anecdotally, in the kind of feedback they get from parents, volunteers, and community members—as well as in the demand for more events.)

What made PlayBuild take off in New Orleans, says Kyle, was largely the cheap cost of country—PlayBuild purchased their lot for less than $15,000—simply also the proximity to so many schools and schoolhouse-aged children, likewise as the buy-in of local residents who recognized the dearth of green spaces, playgrounds, and kid-friendly outdoor areas in the community and longed for change.

Those are all central factors that, according to Owen Franklin, the Pennsylvania Land Director of The Trust for Public Land, are critical to any public infinite comeback projection. "When you lot have direct involvement from the community, you're going to have a public space improvement that addresses the unique priorities and character of that community, you're going to have people who are taking ownership of that investment, and y'all're going to take people connecting to ane some other in new ways," Franklin says.

Matt Rader, president of Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), concurs. Of the approximately 40,000 empty lots in Philly, PHS currently oversees and operates 12,000 parcels of land around (and with funding from) the metropolis—land that they've cleaned, leveled, and on which they've planted turf and trees and in some cases installed fences—in the spirit of transforming vacant country from "being a source of feet, ugliness, and safety concerns" into something that "aids and supports quality community life."

Rader says that PHS could be a proficient partner for a program like PlayBuild, merely two things would take to be in identify. First, the community and its leaders would have to want it. "Our belief is that any activation really should respond to community aspiration," Rader explains. The second is making sure at that place'southward funding in place—"non only to create the amenity, just to sustain it for a menstruation of fourth dimension."

Every bit in New Orleans, there are opportunities for existent change in Philly. "There's a lot of vacant land in Philadelphia, but the amount of it is failing each year with development. So there are two different kinds of thinking nosotros demand to be doing right now," Rader explains. "One is asking what are the temporary changes we tin can brand to vacant land to make it a community asset. The other is thinking virtually what of this vacant land we want to preserve in perpetuity, as parks and customs gardens. And I think at that place'south important thinking that has to happen almost what do we demand to add to the basic building blocks of neighborhood infrastructure to make sure that this urban center is livable for the long-term?"

For that latter question, PlayBuild only may be the answer.

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/ideas-we-should-steal-turning-blight-into-play-spaces/

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