Role: Lead Graduate Assistant
Pratt Institute
Community engagement is critical to any public space initiative because the people that live in, work in, and use a space are often closest to the reality of what the space is and can become. Here a stakeholder looks at and votes on feedback taken from breakout sessions aimed at building consensus and creating programming recommendations for a project within Brooklyn Bridge Park.
After many years of developing and transforming the waterfront along the East River, Brooklyn Bridge Park had one remaining capital project left, at the foot of the bridge, on the Brooklyn side. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation and their Community Advisory Council approached Pratt Institute’s Urban Placemaking and Management (UPM) department to conduct a community engagement workshop and create a vision plan to help determine what this space would become. Professors in the UPM department had decades worth of experience in community engagement, city planning and urban design having worked for and been involved with different agencies and organizations like Project for Public Spaces, the NYC Planning Commission, and the Municipal Arts Society of New York.
Having come out of a job where I gained years of project management experience, I was chosen as UPM’s Lead Graduate Assistant to coordinate different aspects of the project including scheduling client meetings, mediating communication, helping conduct 30 stakeholder interviews, collaborating on the community engagement workshop activities and logistics, and distilling all the stakeholder interview and workshop feedback into a vision plan that was presented to the clients.
The site is located under the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO, along Water Street. This area creates a pivotal link between the north and south sides of the park with visitors pouring in at the ferry landing, from the bus route along Water Street, and the nearby A/C subway line.
An expansive site, it had different constraints, like bridge security, that needed to be accounted for and solved during the planning process. The first site meeting (above) gathered the clients and team members from Pratt to look at the site at consider its opportunities. Everyone agreed that the iconic location should be celebrated, although opinions differed on how that would look.
During the length of the project one of my responsibilities was to coordinate logistics for the community engagement workshop. The workshop, held at a school a 5 minute walk from the site, was attended by 80 stakeholders that ranged from residents, to business owners, and property developers, and even council member representatives.
Upon their return participants were broken into different break out groups that focused on how the area could be programmed during different seasons and at different times of day. As a session facilitator (above), I made sure everyone had a chance to speak and be heard by the group while mediating conflicts and recording feedback.
After all the stakeholder interviews were completed and the workshop feedback was collected sorted and analyzed, we then set out to write and publish a vision plan with recommendations for the space, including a section on governance to help the clients better collectively manage the space.
In the end, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Plaza was finally opened. Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the plaza contains active and passive spaces where a number of programming opportunities can take place.
After taking a leading role in the project and gaining invaluable lessons and experiences from my professors and the clients, I was once again selected to present the project at the Venice Biennale (above), to other students working in public spaces around the world. This project has enabled me to confidently engage in community engagement and I have taken that experience into every role and job since.
The Brooklyn Bridge Park Plaza can be found on Water Street, in the heart of DUMBO, situated between the River Café and St. Anne’s Warehouse.