URBAN PLACEMAKING AS AN ACT OF URBAN HEALING

by

Manel Sentouhi

©2020 Manel Sentouhi

A demonstration of professional competence

submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for
the degree of Master of Science in Urban Placemaking and Management
School of Architecture
Pratt Institute

May 2020
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Introduction​………………………………………....…………………………………….4
Issue Statement………………………..…………………………………………………………...4
Research Question…………………..……………………………………………………………...5
Goals………………………………………………………..……………………………………...6
Objective & Methodology……………………....…………………………………………………6

CHAPTER 2: Literature Review​………………………………..……………………………………….7

Understanding the Source of Urban Trauma…...………………………………………………….7
Urban Trauma & the “Eight Injuries”…………………………………………………..………….7
Therapeutic Planning………………………………………………………...…………………….9
The Role of Urban Placemakers & Planners as Healers………….………………………………11
Reparations & Restoration…………………………………………………….………………….12

CHAPTER 3: Case Studies​………………………………………………….………………………….12

Brook Park Community Garden…………………………....…………………………………….12
History of Mott Haven-Port Morris………..…………………………………………….12
Mott Haven-Port Morris Neighborhood Demographics…....……………………………14
Brook Park Community Garden Today……………....………………………………….15
Brook Park Community Garden’s Alternatives to Incarceration Program……....………16
Interview with Ray Figueroa………………………………………………....………….16
Analysis of Brook Park Community Garden & Healing………………...………………22
Oborne Plaza……………………………………………………………………………..……….24
History of Brownsville………………………………..………………………………….24
Brownsville Neighborhood Demographics……………………....………………………26
Osborne Plaza Today……………………………………....…………………………….28
Interview with James Brodick…………………..……………………………………….28
Analysis of Osborne Plaza & Healing………………………..………………………….34
Under the Elevated………………………………………………………………….…………….35
History of Elevated Transportation Structures in New York City……....……………….35
Under the Elevated Program and Projects………………………….……………………36
Interview with Susan Chin…………………………………………………....………….38
Analysis of Under the Elevated & Healing………………………………....……………40

CHAPTER 4: Recommendations​……………………………………………………………...……….42
Site Specific Recommendations…………………………………………………….…………….42
Overall Recommendations………………………………………………………….…………….43

CHAPTER 5: Conclusion​………………………………………...…………………………………….44
BIBLIOGRAPHY​………………………………………………………………....…………………….46

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Chapter 1 Introduction

Issue statement

Often planning projects lack to recognize community wounds from social injustices, specifically spatial
injustices; wounds which still require healing. Urban planning has created many beneficial aspects for our
communities, but we must acknowledge that it has also been destructive in many ways. The Federal Aid
Highway Act of 1956 funded highways, many of which were constructed in black neighborhoods
completely ripping apart these communities and displacing residents. The Housing Act of 1949 put
federal funds towards the creation of public housing, but also had the agenda of “slum” clearance through
urban renewal which entirely wiped out low-income communities of color, often replacing those areas
with high-end housing or public projects which were not catered for those that have lived there. Public
transportation planning often leads to less access for communities of color making access to job
opportunities and general mobility low. The use of planning tools such as rezoning and redlining, to
intentionally push low-income minorities away from certain areas has been seen throughout the years and
continues to happen to this day. These are only a few planning policies, programs, and tools which
exercised racism, discrimination, and opression, and ultimetly have created cities of inequity. Those who
have experienced displacement, the destruction of their neighborhoods, been placed in unkept and
dilapidating public housing, and experienced living in areas of intentional disinvestment, they have all
been through some level of trauma due to intentional planning decisions. There is hurt from these
wrongdoings, there is lack of trust when it comes to planners, city officials, and developers in these
communities and if not dealt with, cities are going to continue to be places that cause urban trauma to
marginalized communities.

Not enough attention is paid towards an inclusive process of creating public space and establishing deep
community engagement during the preliminary stages. This very process is the starting point of
addressing community concerns and can be a method of healing in itself. Historically, planning decisions
were imposed on communities where their say was given little value and few opportunities to surface. The
issue is, much effort was put into making cities orderly, separating and sorting groups apart whether it be
by race or income. This imposed order is a top down approach from officials who want to see spaces
organized in this way. This process removes the community members as decision makers. By letting
people play an active part in the creation of their spaces, this allows them to have agency in how their life
is lived and their surrounding and contributes to healing. How can we move forward, heal from the past

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planning injustices, and create just spaces in cities when people are not given the agency to provide input
and shape their surroundings?

Current planning processes put focus on the future of a space and lack to truly address past and current
injustices. Acknowledging wrongdoings, opening space for a discussion of past and current injustices, and
creating a map for the future is showing that one cares about the community’s hurt and seeks to not
replicate in current and future projects. Too often community engagement in planning focuses on
gathering information to move forward, but rarely seeks to truly investigate the ways in which people
have been hurt by planning and make sure there is healing from that and to ensure moving forward
communities are not further hurt in these ways. Meetings displaying futuristic renderings of projects and
displays of project models all trigger “this is what your community could look like” while the community
may still be wounded by previous projects and carry strong distrust. Often, emphasis is put on aesthetic
design, but aesthetic design will not fully solve injustices nor provide healing to those wounded by
injustes brought about through planning.

Research Question

This thesis aims to answer the following research question: ​in what ways can urban placemaking provide
both processes and spaces for community urban healing?

In order to answer this question, there must first be an understanding of some terminology. Urban healing
will be defined in this study as freeing an urban place or person from trauma caused by urban injuries.
Urban injuries can range from disinvestment to displacement, and a more elaborate explanation of these
injuries is later in this thesis. Urban healing can take on two major forms, one of which physical and the
other emotional. Urban healing in the physical sense relates to the restoring of a city’s urban fabric while
in the emotional sense relates to restoring the emotional and mental health of those living in cities that are
and/or were affected by various urban planning injustices.

Another term I would like to clarify is urban placemaking. Projects for Public Spaces defines urban
placemaking as “both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city,
or region, placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of
every community” (“What is Placemaking”).

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Goals

The goal of this thesis is to investigate if and how urban placemaking can act as a way of healing
communities, addressing social injustices, and ultimately through this process provide spaces which allow
for that healing. It is clear that there are communities that have been historically neglected, and even
abandoned,

Objectives & Methodology

There are three main objectives this thesis aims to achieve:

This first objective is to understand how urban placemaking provides community healing. In order to do
this, a literature review will be conducted looking at books, journals, and articles around the topic. The
literature review serves as an investigation of scholarly sources which cover healing in the urban
placemaking and urban planning field and professions, it will also delve into literature explaining the
sources of trauma, and investigates the role of urban planners and placemakers as healers.

The second objective is to use New York City case studies to understand how communities impacted by
various social injustices have incorporated healing through placemaking. The case study locations are:
Brook Park Community Garden in the Bronx, Osborne Plaza in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Under the
elevated project with sites across the five boroughs of New York City. Each of these case studies also
represents a different typology of public space; community garden, public plaza, and public space under
elevated transportation structure. Interviews with those that worked to create, operate and run these public
spaces will serve as a way of understanding

The third objective is to determine the importance of community urban healing in the placemaking
process and recommend best practices for incorporating healing into this practice. The case study research
and literature review will inform the recommendations and help determine the importance. The case
studies will serve as examples to see if and how the spaces provide healing and display what is successful
in these projects that can be applied to others. These projects can also shoe what is not successful and help
to show what not to do.

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

This thesis builds upon a small collection of texts that explore the notions of healing through the planning
process. With placemaking being recognized as its own profession and only recently being more widely
used as a term, literature specific to placemaking and healing is sparse. As such, looking at urban
planning , therapeutic planning, and reparations and reparations in planning are focused on in this
literature review.

Understanding the Source of Urban Trauma

Urban planning has created great aspects to our society, but it has also been destructive in many ways.
This destruction hurts not only our cities physically, but it hurts those living in these spaces causing
wounds, distrust, and even trauma in some cases. As Mindy Thompson Fullilove in her text ​Urban
Alchemy : Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities ​explains, one of the major sources of urban
trauma to cities is sorting. The “sorted-out city” suffers divisions by race, class, and age. The “sorted-out
city” is created with order in mind, but it leads to divisions and isolation which causes much trauma to
communities.

Urban Trauma & the “Eight Injuries”

Fullilove pinpoints eight injuries which occur to a city which is “sorted”: unequal investment, borders,
invisibilization, spatial homogeneity, exclusion from governance, draining spirit, serial displacement, and
social disintegration (Fullilove 105).

Redlining, the act of denying services to certain neighborhoods or areas, mainly those of minority
communities, is the mechanism by which unequal investment occurs. Services such as healthcare,
banking, insurance, and even types of retail can be directly or indirectly denied. Directly, by simply not
investing these services in that area and indirectly in ways such as the raising of prices or placing services
in locations hard to get to, producing the same results of redlining. A sorted city often leads to redlining
and planned shrinkage. This unequal investment then leads to a difference in the infrastructure of these
separated communities resulting in a difference of what relies on this infrastructure. The ways in which
unequal investment physically presents itself is when one neighborhood has a lot of building activity and
repairs are dealt with, while another is neglected and is in destruction.

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Borders, whether visible or invisible, emerge when neighborhoods or places start to appear progressively
different. This difference can appear in “sorted” areas because there are divisions between income, race,
age, and more, and further due to unequal investment based on this sorting, the neighborhoods physically
appear different because the infrastructure and infrastructure quality, the types of retail, the amount of
development, all varry. This creates an invisible border perceiving one area as separate from another, but
physical borders may also arise such as walls, fences, or highways which cut off one area from another
further enforcing that separation.

Those who are poor wonder about the lives of the rich and the rich have their ideas and assumptions of
those who are poor (Fullilove 106). Sorting creates borders and stark differences between places that
those of these differing places are avoided by either group and do not truly understand what happens and
what life is like in these neighborhoods. They become invisible to the differing group because people
have a tendency to not go into the unknown and certainly when it is both a place that they do not feel
welcome in and is hard to get to. Invisibilization is present when actions such as diversions occur to avoid
interacting with a community.

Spatial homogeneity occurs when people are sorted into communities and neighborhoods to live with
others that are only like themselves. This happens when poverty is concentrated in blocks upon blocks of
public housing towers. This also happens when realtors make it so that only people of a certain race or
background can buy property in certain areas. This prevents social mixing from happening and decreases
diversity within neighborhoods.

Those with more wealth tend to have more power and it is this very concentration of power which leads to
an exclusion from governance of those who are of low-income. Those with expertise in planning feel
empowered to make decisions which they feel are for the greater good and help bring order to a space,
thus excluding communities that appear to have less expertise occurs to keep efficiency and also to be
able to put in place an agenda created by government officials and agencies, which throughout history
tends to favor the rich and powerful over the poor.

Living in a “sorted city” and experiencing the negative effects of these various injuries leads to a deep
draining spirit, particularly of those of low-income minority groups who are excluded from governance,
living in areas of disinvestment. Living in an environment that is neglected and in despair creates low

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morale and continuously seeing nothing done to improve it makes one feel like change is not likely to
happen.

Investments in new areas will occur as people seek to increase their wealth. Those with wealth and power,
will be making these investments leading to a further increase of their wealth and power, while putting the
low-income minority groups with less ability to invest in a state of dispossession. Serial displacement
occurs in this dispossession, taking away land and property of those less, through various methods
including intentional rent increases, the selling of , purchasing of abandoned land . It is investments and
forced intentional changes in communities that lead to either intentional or unintentional serial
displacement of people. This displacement breaks social networks and ties, leaving people separated and
helpless.

When social ties are broken, this leads to social disintegration. Communities rely on bonds and social ties,
this is what keeps them strong and vibrant, but when there is a goal to reorganize communities, leading to
social disintegration, this pulls apart the community which once was in place. This leads to weaker
communities and people suffer the loss of ties they may have had for years.

Therapeutic Planning

There is little research on healing as it relates to planning, but recently there have been two recent
academics in the field of planning that touch on the emerging concept of therapeutic planning; Leonie
Sandercock and Aftab Erfan. Prior to this, therapeutic planning has only been mentioned once in the
planning field by Sherry Arnstein in her 1969 text covering the “ladder of citizen participation” where she
lists therapy at the bottom of the ladder and describes it as a form of manipulation, where as Sandercock
and Erfan describe is as a process of bringing people together and collectively working through trauma
caused by planning to move forward in a more understanding an cohesive way. Leonie Sanderock in
particular writes on therapeutic planning during her experience on a project in British Columbia with the
Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation indigineous group and investigates how therapeutic planning can heal this
community from a colonialist past in order to move forward in a planning process, and she specifically
investigates how film can do this. Aftab Erfan in her 2013 PhD dissertation also examines therapeutic
planning as it relates to the Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw First Nations group.

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Leonie Sandercock if a therapeutic planning intervention . Sandercock in her text ​From Municipal
Colonialist to Collaborative Governance? An Experiment in Therapeutic and Transformative Planning
recounts her experience on a five-year project starting in 2006 where she worked with a strongly divided
community in British Columbia, the small town of Burns Lake. In 1999 the town had a population of
5,000 people, an even split between non-Indigeounous and Indigeous, and a dispute between the Village
(municipality) and the Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation broke out over taxation, but more so about an 80-year
conflict over appropriated land. In 1915 the Village was established on land that the Carrier (Dakelh)
peoples, a subgroup of the Ts’il Kaz Koh, occupied. In 1914 the Ts’il Kaz Koh were forced on Reserve
land and the following year the land was surveyed for the planning of the Village, which then also took
over a third of the Reserve land. In 1999 when the taxation dispute happened, the national political regard
toward Indigenous/state relations started to slowly change giving more acknowledgement to Indigious
rights and title, but the local level was disinclined to acknowledge these advances and support Indigeous
want of self-determination and recognition. Due to the Village’s unacknowledgement of Ts’il Kaz Koh
rights, the Indigenous group took the Village to the Supreme Court of British Columbia and won the case.
The Village ignored the Supreme court ruling and turned off both sewer and water services to the Reserve
in February 2000. Peaceful protests conducted by those in the Ts’il Kaz Koh group occurred and this
made it to national news bringing to light just one example of many similar Indigenous/Non-Indigenous
conflicts occurring in other small towns across Canada. The story of Burns Lake is a reflection of a larger
national issue of continue discrimination of Indigenous people, historic wounds, and conflicts which
remain unresolved. This led Sancercock to question “is there a way forward? Is recognition and
reconciliation possible? How can we manage a better, more respectful and just co-existence in the shared
spaces of the nation, cities, and small towns? And is there a role for planning in finding a way forward?”
(391-392). Her findings indicate that there is a very needed role for therapeutic planning, and she claims
that film is an effective way of creating and opening up this therapeutic space.

Although Sandercock is grappling with healing as it relates to colonialism and planning, there are many
similarities between this and the types of urban injuries those living in cities would heal from: unequal
investment, borders, invisibilization, spatial homogeneity, exclusion from governance, draining spirit,
serial displacement, and social disintegration. These urban injuries are also experienced by the Ts’il Kaz
Koh indigenous group and we see that by their land being taken, borders created by the Reserve, the very
creation of the Reserve causing serial displacement, the Reserve creating invisibilization, spatial
homogeneity, and social disintegration, and the intentional exclusion of governance through discrimiation
of the Ts’il Kaz Koh indigenous group.

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The Role of Urban Placemakers & Planners as Healers

To what extent do Urban Placemakers and Planners need to incorporate healing into the work that they do
and their professions? Leonie Sandercock makes the point that planning has actively tried to remove
emotion from the planning process in order to make for rational decision making and because of this
planners are not equipped with the skills to deal with emotions that may arise in the process (Sandercock,
“Towards” 139). Although this rational basis may seem efficient, we see from Fullilove’s text that the
eight urban injuries resulted from the urge to create a “sorted” and orderly city, which comes from this
very principle of making rational decisions and removing emotion from planning. What happens when
emotion is removed, is we lose a level of care for people’s feelings that leads to trauma from these very
planning decisions. Leonie Sandercock in​ Towards a Planning Imagination for the 21st Century​ explains:

What has been missing from most of the collaborative planning/communicative action literature
is this recognition of the ​need for a language and a process of emotional involvement,​ of
embodiment. This means not only allowing the "whole person" to be present in negotiations and
deliberations, but being prepared to acknowledge and deal with the powerful emotions that
underpin many planning issues. To a profession that defines itself as concerned with rational
decision making over land use and resource management conflicts, it is not surprising that the
realm of the emotions has been perceived as troublesome territory. (Sandercock 139)

Urban Planning has traditionally been situated in management, engineering sciences, and administrative
departments, all of which focused on rational and ordered ideology. It is apparent that from this ideology
birthed an array of urban planning injustices and trauma. Communities and people can no longer be
treated as statistics or dots on maps, but as humans with opinions, varying needs and desires, histories,
and emotions. Today we live in an ever so changing, culturally diverse world with diverse people and the
Urban Planning profession ought to evolve to best interact in this environment to produce engaged,
understanding, and holistic planning. Erfan states in her thesis that the therapeutic planning work she did
with the Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw First Nations group, that it was not therapy in the psychological sense
and it is important to note that this is not tot take away from the psychology profession, but that the work
she did were steps towards a version of healing that planning can be a part of (Erfan 7). In order to
effectively do this, skills in diverse communication, interpreting body language, and storytelling, to name
a few, are needed to navigate this process.

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Reparation and Restoration

The wrongs of urban planning have harmed communities for decades, and restorative and transitional
justice theories suggest that in order to take steps forward to restore political communities, four actions
are required from public institutions. The first is to have civil remediation of the wrongs that have
happened against individuals, the second is to have group healing activities that incorporate seeking the
truth and public memory projects, and to have institutions publicly atone these wrongdoing as part of the
project. Third is to provide restitution or compensation to those who have experienced economic loss
because of this wrongdoing and harm. Lastly, fourth is to have institutional reform that is inline with the
values that the prior three actions reflect (Schweitzer 5). This is to show that inorder for restoration to
happen, healing alone is not sufficient, but rather all four of these actions can lead to a restored state.
Although, the importance of healing through truth seeking and public memory projects opens a level of
learning and understanding that the other actions lack to present, and this is what makes it vital.
Sandercock states that it is through this learning process the political space may be opened and may better
lead to political institutions transforming. It is through a therapeutic planning approach that goes from the
personal level to the public leaning level to eventually the political level which in turn can lead to political
transformation (Sandercock, “Towards” 139). Healing is essential to the reparations and restoration
process, and serves as an agent for stabilizing the relationships between the people and government
institutions that have harmed communities through planning projects.

Chapter 3 Case Studies

This study looks at three New York City public space case studies: Brook Park Community Garden in the
Bronx, Under the Elevated which spans, and Osborn Plaza in Brownsville, Brooklyn. These three case
studies represent different urban public space typologies: a community garden which once was an
abandoned lot, public space under elevated transportation highway, and a public plaza in a disinvested
community.

Brook Park Community Garden

History of Mott Haven-Port Morris

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Brook Park community garden is in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. The area called Mott
Haven today was where the Native American Lenape group lived. They controlled the land up until
colonization during the 1630s when the Dutch West Indian Company “purchased” not only Mott Haven
but also the areas around it. A series of European families settled on this land, first were the Broncks, then
the Morris family, then Jordan Mott in 1839 purchased land for his iron corporation. Mott Haven is
named after Jordan Mott (“History”).

Train service was introduced to this area in the 1880s and Mott Haven was one of the first stops when
going from Manhattan to the Bronx on the Third Avenue line making the area around 138th st develop
quickly. Brownstones were built for the upper class while the rest lived in tenement. In the early 20th
century Italians, Germans and Irish lived in Mott Haven with a small number of Black people living on
the west side of 3rd Avenue. In the 1940s Puerto Ricans started moving into the area and even more so in
the 1960s. The Patterson public housing projects were built in 1948 which brought many African
Americans to the area. During the 1950s-60s, most of the white people that were in Mott Haven left for
the suburbs incentivized by mortgage subsidies and pulled away through blockbusting, highway
construction, and redlining, in other words Mott Haven, just like much of the South Bronx and other areas
of NYC experienced “white flight” (“A Quick”).

The 1960s marks extreme poverty and decay in the South Bronx. The Cross Bronx Expressway, part of
the urban renewal planned for New York City by Robert Moses, was completed in 1963 and is considered
one of the major reasons for the urban decay of the Bronx (Caro 893-894) It displaced thousands of
residents and many small businesses, and went right through the South Bronx. As desegregation policies
came into place and the Civil Rights movement, this further pushed “white flight” as parents were weary
of sending their children to desegregated schools and preferred to move to the suburbs where white
communities still existed because of redlining. Property values continued to decrease as poverty persisted,
landlords did little upkeep of their buildings, and vacancies were on a rise.

In the 1970s much of the South Bronx went up in flames with arson. Buildings were left abandoned from
“white flight”, property values were at a low, and the economy was struggling. This led to many landlords
either letting their buildings stay abandoned or setting their building on fire for insurance money. Those
left in the neighborhood were low-income working class New Yorkers many of whom Black and
Hispanic. Street gangs were formed and drug dealing was prevalent as employment was at a high and
people sought to support themselves through any means. Many squatters came into the area to live in the

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abandoned properties. Between the 1970s-80s over 40% of the South Bronx was either abandoned or
burned .

After witnessing this decay, many residents during the 1970s and 80s reclaimed abandoned lots and
started to turn them into community gardens. Residents took it into their own hands to clean up and
beautify their neighborhoods. A network of community gardens sprung up in the South Bronx as people
sought to improve their neighborhoods. In 1979 Brook Park was acquired by the New York City Parks
Department under the South Bronx Neighborhood Open Space Development project which the South
Bronx Open Space Task Force created in 1978. The Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service, under
the United States Department of the Interior, funded the project. This was established by the Land and
Water Conservation Fund Act and it helped with the revitalization and development of 15 vacant lots
within the South Bronx and it held strong importance on community participation in design and
maintenance (“Brook Park”).

Mott Haven-Port Morris Neighborhood Demographics

From a neighborhood of destruction and despair, Mott Haven today is actually being gentrified. Although
even with this gentrification, Mott Haven remains a community of low-income minorities just as has it
from the time of urban renewal. And although a vibrant neighborhood with strong community ties, the
community still struggles with poverty and crime. With a population of 52, 413, of this population 72%
are Hispanic/Latino, 25% are Black/African American, 2% are White NonHispanic, and less than 1% are
Asian, Two or More Race, and Other. About 42% of the population has less than a High School degree
while in New York City overall that number is about 19%. About 9% of the population has a Bachelor’s
Degree or higher, while in New York City that number is about 37%. The percentage of households on
Food Stamps/SNAP benefits is 53.4% while for all of New York City it is 19.8%. The percentage of
households that get cash public assistance income is 11.5% while it is 4.4% in all of New York City. A
drastic 42% of families are below poverty level while in New York City it is 15.6%. This area also has a
high unemployment rate of 14.02% while in all of New York City it is 4.1% (“NYC Planning”).

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harvesting. It is a cultural institution in that people come to partake in activities of all kinds, to learn from
one another, and to make connections with others.

Brook Park’s Alternatives-to-Incarceration Program

Brook Park runs a youth Alternatives-to-Incarceration program for young people who have either been
formerly incarcerated, court adjudicated, or are currently adjudicated. The program started in 2010 after
witnessing a substantial number of young people in the South Bronx being a part of gang activities and
entering the criminal justice system. The Youth Farm at Brook Park is where a group of young people are
taught how to plant, cultivate, and harvest food. They grow food for the community, while earning
money to sustain themselves. Food insecurity is an issue some of these youth face and working on the
farm gives them some money to buy the food they need. Some of the youth in the
Alternatives-to-Incarceration program are invited to plant and grow peppers for the Bronx Hot Sauce
company as part of the program. These peppers are then used to make hot sauce which is sold at farmers’
markets around New York City.

Young people during their developmental stages are looking for ways to express themselves and doing so
at Brook Park Community Garden provides a positive outlet for this expression. Too often, these youth
are told and shown in various ways that they are not contributing members of society, whether it be at
school or with their families, and being part of the Alternative-to-Incarceration program at Brook Park
Community Garden allows these youth to heal from this hurt, gives them an activity to validate their
worth, and it makes them engaged in the community in a positive way. It has been shown that traditional
criminal justice system programs reduce recidivism of youth at a lower rate than community-based
Alternatives-to-Incarceration programs do and they do so at higher costs (“South Bronx”). This shows
how impactful and valuable Brook Park’s Alternatives-to-Incarceration is in lowering crime in the
neighborhood and fostering positive development in the youth in the program.

Interview with Ray Figueroa

Interviewing Ray Figueroa, the Director of Social-Ecological Community Development Projects at

Friends of Brook Park and the President of the New York City Community Garden Coalition, shed light
on how placemaking through Brook Park Community Garden has provided healing to the Mott Haven
community. Mr. Figueroa begins by stating the importance of history in any planning or placemaking

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project, explaining that what happens in communities today is actually an expression of a legacy that is
decades long and generational. Healing speaks to historical experiences and that these experiences in
some way have been traumatic and cries out for healing. Ray explains that the notions of healing lack to
be incorporated because often planning looks at a very short timeframe of history, for example it can even
be constrained to looking only 10-15 years back and neglecting a deep understanding of history. It is the
deep history where some of the root of this urban trauma exists.

Why is it that this trauma is often unaddressed by planners? Is it even seen as trauma? This is when
narrative comes into play. Mr. Figueroa explains that the intentions of planners is not to traumatize. He
explains that there is a rational basis for planners to do gentrification because it is seen as enhancing the
local economy, increasing property values, and making room for new, innovative projects. But what many
may call gentrification, is now coined as “rezoning for affordable housing” at the administrative level and
the narrative and terminology is shifted to show emphasis on this idea of the gentrification happening to
provide affordable housing. This further displays that gentrification is not seen as traumatizing by city
planners and agencies, when it is for so many low-income people or color because they are the ones to
experience the displacement and rapid changes to their community. There is a rational basis for this
motivation, but although the pure intention is not to traumatize, I argue that when gentrification happens it
is seen that the rational basis can occur at the expense of any trauma because that trauma is not
understood. That trauma is not felt, and possibly, that trauma is seen as unimportant.

Mr. Figueroa points out that today, gentrification is bringing up the same hurt and frustrated feeling that
planned shrinkage did. During planned shrinkage public services were cut to force low-income people of
color out of their neighborhoods and the results of gentrification, whether intentional or not, prices these
same groups of people out of their own neighborhoods. It is the same feeling of being pushed away, just
the planning method is different this time around and this resurfaces that same type of urban trauma.
What this displacement does, whether it was planned shrinkage or gentrification today, is destabilize the
community and this brings to people trauma.

What community healing means to Ray is first starting with the community’s sense of dignity and its
inherent wholeness, and any healing process should start from that. To build on that, healing is to accept
and make space for the various forms of pragmatic and cultural expression of those qualities of dignity
and inherent wholeness as they get expressed within the community. The community has a shared history,
sense of identity, language, and a shared sense of solidarity as a result of that shared experience. This is

17
what the community draws on when there is a crisis or challenge in their neighborhood. It is the means by
which the community is able to rebuild and realize resilience in response to challenges.

Ray speaks of the Alternatives to Incarceration Program he runs through the Youth Farm at Brook Park.
The program started around 2010 for young adults either formerly incarcerated or have their case running
through the courts. One of the things he picked up on very early on in the program is that a young person
who has already had negative experiences and experiences that are not nurturing of their own sense of
development, not being shown that they are accepted as contributing members of their family,
community, or school, leads to alienation from their relationship with others, specifically adults and
authority figures. These young people have repeated to them over and over that they are not productive
and that they are not appreciated - one cannot heal when one is looking at themselves in this way. What
will help an individual to heal is affirm their sense of being productive and being appreciated for being a
proactive individual. This is what the farm does. In addition to this, healing also comes from, addressing
and individuals day-to-day needs. Ray states that he always checks in with the young adults in the
programs to see if they have eaten that day and if they are doing okay. The Youth Farm facilities
opportunities where they can engage in a process that is productive. They can see the beginning of the
planting of a seed, to the process of cultivating the plant, to the end of harvesting, bringing food into the
community and to their families, and in the case of the Bronx Hot Sauce program, growing peppers for a
hot sauce company and earning extra money. This process of being productively engaged and affirmed
really does validate that person's sense of personal efficacy and sense of agency. All of this is further
validated and affirmed by the appreciation that they receive and the appreciation communicated to them
directly. Healing at Brook Park, and specifically for the Alternative to Incarceration Progrma, is a cycle of
nurturance. The space of the community garden and within it the Youth Farm providing a place for
nurturance physically and the young people in turn nurturing relationships with plants and other peer
youth as a team.

According to Ray, healing is a developmental process that happens in stages and there are phases of
healing. What Brook Park does with the Alternatives to Incarceration program is to help young adults be
stabilized from the harm and trauma they have experienced. By stabilizing, Ray specifies that it means
creating a routine that helps to reinforce their sense of agency and humanity for the good that they are
doing at the farm. This allows an individual over the course of time to begin to think about other things
besides the hurt, whether it be school or family. One of the major benchmarks for the program is for the
young people to graduate from high school because many incarcerated individuals are individuals who

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have not completed high school. In the course of stabilizing individuals through the work at the
community farm, this allows them to be engaged in more long term issues as it relates to their personal
growth and development.

Ray emphasizes that all human beings need to have opportunities for meaningful expression as they
define what that meaningfulness is and this is what placemaking does. People have a sense of human
dignity and they will seek to express it in any means and outlets that they have. At times that sense of
human dignity may have limited outlets of self expressions and as such may not be the most productive.
Nonetheless, people are always looking for outlets to express their human dignity in a way that preserves
and conserves their humanity. What happens with a space such as a vacant lot, a product of municipal
abandonment and that abandonment in concert with economic displacement, unemployment, urban
renewal, planning shrinkage, is that people were left with very little other than themselves. After
buildings were burnt down and demolished, what was left were people and their sense of community.
Their sense of community is their sense of dignity and wholeness, something tough to destroy. People
took those abandoned lots and reclaimed them into spaces of meaning. They started to create meaningful
places that allowed them to be productively engaged and in a way that is also an expression of their self
determination and honors their sense of human dignity. This is placemaking. A space is something that
exists and it can be turned into a place through meaning cultivated by community. Places like this become
cultural institutions making community gardens cultural institutions in this regard.

Placemaking speaks to affirming collective agency. This is a way in which the community has a sense of
ownership over the outcomes of its existence. And having this sense of ownership really is what makes a
place and what placemaking is. It reinforces that the places they live are not only where they exist but
where they live is expressive of their aspirations and responsive to their needs. At Brook Park, just like
many other community gardens, the garden serves as a commons where people with all types of interest,
needs and aspirations are able to come and find some way to express themselves in a way that is
meaningful. Brook Park started off with the intention of being responsive to addressing people's needs,
expressing their sense of aspirations, and becoming a cultural institution for the community. And it has
since become where others within the community have been coming over the years to engage in a number
of activities such as taking in the trees and the shade, looking at the flowers, listening to the bird, having
children come to run around, people who are developmentally disabled come to be productively engaged
in the garden, and ofcourse the alternatives to incarceration program. It is a venue for community
organizing and cultural celebrations, and all of this is being realized through the space that was converted

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into a meaningful place. It continues to be a meaningful place that is responsive to the community, as a
community garden could not have the word “community” in its name if it was not being responsive to the
community. This really makes it a cultural institution.

Speaking specifically to the Alternatives to Incarceration program, it was started in 2010 as a result of
some young people who were involved in the youth farm being killed due to gang related violence, and a
number of people at Brook Park and in the community said that they have to do something about this.
They agreed to see what could be done in terms of retrofitting what Brook Park Community Garden does
in a way to be responsive to this issue of violence in the community. As a result of that, research was
conducted on initiatives that could be possible and collaborations formed with other organizations that
deal with this issue, which resulted in funding to form the Alternatives to Incarceration program at Brook
Park. Brook Park has been able to facilitate the healing of individuals by virtue of acknowledging their
capacity to express productivity in a way that speaks to their sense of wholeness as a human being.
Healing is a function of an individual accepting a sense of wholeness within themselves. Many of the
young people in that program are affiliated with gangs or street organizations. Those that lead the
Alternative to Incarceration program would discretely invite leaders of street organizations to share food
and conversation in the process with the youth to gain better understanding and have been doing that for a
couple of years. One day the head of a local street gang came to Ray saying they needed to speak because
they had a problem with one of the youth in the program. It was a serious issue because one of the youth
went to the bodega and stole money from a collection can collecting money for the mother of a youth that
was killed in the community and was a part of the leader’s street gang. The leader was amenable to
speaking about the issue. Normally what would happen is the street gang would have gone directly to the
individual and snatched them out of the program, resulting in something violent, but in this case the leader
came to speak to Ray about the issue. When the leader came to talk, that was a huge harvest of peace
which took years of cultivation to come to. This speaks to what a community cultural institution, such as
the community garden, can do because it's about cultivating relationships and about valuing and allowing
everyone to be valued. They were able to negotiate an arrangement by which restitution could be paid by
the young person in the program to the family. Additionally, the members of the street gang said they
wanted to take him to the mother to apologize which they agreed to. The program had been able to work
through and ease over situations similar to this a couple of times, engaging youth in such a way that they
have been able to prevent youth from killing or from being killed. This speaks to how a community space
that is open and cultivated into a meaningful community place that is open to all, can be responsive to the
needs of the community. This could not have happened otherwise, via other authorities, this only

20
happened because the community had a sense of ownership over this issue and had a sense of ownership
over the place this issue could be mediated.

Planners have to galvanize engagement in a way that will be meaningful. Things like providing stipend
and food can create more expressions of engagement, particularly in communities that have been
historically marginalized and where community organizing and civic engagement can be challenging.
Community engagement is a process of healing. The way a planner or placemaker communicates, the way
they approach the project, all affects how responsive and healing the engagement piece can be. When
coming with an open mind and letting the community tell you what their needs are, this validates that they
are seen as valuable and capable players in this process. Paying people stipends for their contributions
also is another way to show that they are valuable. Additionally, at Brook Park the youth have stipends
because this helps stabilize the youth as it deteers them from having to go sell drugs to earn money to buy
food, thus reducing crime in the neighborhood. In other words, that economic initiative is a crime
reduction initiative. For city planners to take a project to the local community first, it would be a mark of
tremendous communication and political acumen to be able to approach the process by first asking the
community how do you see the needs of your community, what are your priorities, and what are your
issues. And from this, planners can speak to how the project is going to address these needs, priorities,
and issues. Doing this would reflect a positive evolution within the planning profession.

Since the creation of Brook Park, there have been numerous meetings about community land trusts as it
relates to public spaces and public property, which the government has purview over. Brook Park is a
member organization of the Community Land Trust called the Mott Haven - Port Morris Community
Land Stewards. They are looking at an abandoned municipal building, abandoned for decades, just up the
street from Brook Park. They seek to reclaim that space and turn it into a community center called the
HEART center, which stands for health, education, and the arts. Looking at other vacant and abandoned
spaces on behalf of the city and working as a community to reclaim them and turn them into meaningful
places for the community. They feel very strongly that all public land, all public property, should be
deferred to the local community to decide what those properties are to serve as.

Governance as it relates to space is part of healing. Ray notes that Brook Park operates like a commons. A
commons is not purely about the physical space but also very much about what people do within that
space. What goes on in community gardens is an expression of a commons even though there is the
attachment of the parks department. Placemaking can be seen as community development. At Brook Park

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they look to see how to expand the footprint of the places that are being made by the community, hoping
to use the social capital, the networks created by Brook Park, to reclaim the abandoned city building and
turn it into a community center. Placemaking becomes more than just a spatial amenity, but rather a
process to show communities what they are capable of and to push them to continue to look for
opportunities in their communities to create spaces of meaning. And this is all linked to healing because
people begin to feel a sense of agency and value in themselves to shape their surroundings. This addresses
the draining spirit of spirit from how planning has treated them in the past and instead uplifts their spirits
by showing they can push for power and express what they want in their communities.

See people as people. Focus less on the design and more on the people and how the people are treated
through the planning process from beginning and throughout the process. There is a bigger system at play.
From all the case studies, spaces are more successful and meaningful when its not just about the goal of
the designing the projects, but the process

Analysis of Brook Park Community Garden & Healing

The method of which these three case studies will be analyzed is by taking Mindy Fullilove’s eight
injuries and looking to see if and how each case study provides healing to those injuries through
placemaking.

Unequal Investment
The South Bronx has definitely suffered from unequal investment. During urban renewal in the 1970s
services were cut ranging from sanitation pick to fire safety and the South Bronx was left to burn. The
way Brook Park responds to this injury through placemaking in order to heal the community is that it
provides a space of community pride and with that gathers funding to create activities and programs for
the community to partake in. They invest in the youth through the Alternatives-to-Incarceration program
and the youth get paid for the work that they do. They invest in the community by supplying it with food
grown in the Youth Farm and by hosting events throughout the year.

Borders
The South Bronx was a place of abandonment and devastation. Those who were not living there saw it as
a place to never go creating this invisible border around it. Brook Park Community Garden breaks down
this border by making connections with community organizations bridging it to other places around New

22
York City. People from across the city see the great work that Brook Park Community Garden does and
come to visit the space.

Invisibilization
Communities in Mott Haven and the South Bronx have a history of neglect making them feel invisible.
Brook Park provides the community a space and a platform to celebrate themselves. To show that the
community is productive and the people in this community are proud contributing members of society.
With the success of Brook Park, people from across the city come to visit the space, which is a drastic
change from when the South Bronx was considered an unsafe and unpleasant place to be in considering
all the devastation and crime. Brook Park shines a positive light on the community and shows this image
to the rest of the communities.

Spatial Homogeneity
The population of the South Bronx after urban renewal was mostly low-income people of color, primarily
Hispanic and Black populations, making it a homogenous community. What Brook Park does is operate
like a commons welcoming people of all backgrounds to come to the space, partake in activities, host
events, and intermingle. This encourages people of all backgrounds to come to the space, but as Brook
Park is still situated in a neighborhood mostly of Hispanic and Black populations, this tends to be the
populations visiting Brook Park and Brook Park can do more to bring in even more diversity to the space
than it already does.

Exclusion from Governance

For so long, the South Bronx was excluded from many planning processes. The highways that cut through
the South Bronx were not what the community wanted and instead was imposed on them. The creation of
public housing, creating an area of concentrated poverty, was not a decision they were a part of. And even
today, the gentrification and luxury buildings going up in Mott Haven is not what the overall communities
want. The community is hardly given a say in the planning process and decision, and if they are a part of
the process they are inserted into an agenda that is already made rather than the community being the
driving force and decision makers of what they want to see in their communities. At Brook Park, they
operate the space as a commons where anyone can come express themselves, have an event at the garden,
and have a say in what happens there. Additionally, Brook Park is a part of the community land trust
called Mott Haven - Port Morris Community Land Stewards, and its aim is reclaim abandoned land and

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buildings, and have the community decide what goes in its place. These are all actions that push to make
sure the community is included in governance and the decision making.

Draining Spirit
The Alternatives-to-Incarceration program at Brook Park uplifts the spirits of the youth by showing them
that they are contributing members to society. They are appreciated for the work they do and that they
have positive alternative life choices other than being involved in street gangs. They start to plan for the
future, to . Going back to when Brook Park was created, the space certainly uplifted the spirits of the
community. The South Bronx was in destruction, piles of rubble for blocks, and buildings were
abandoned and burned, so a space like Brook Park that provides greeney, is cared for, and is nurturing, is
a space that uplifted the community’s spirit.

Serial Displacement
Brook Park is a part of a land trust that seeks for opportunities to reclaim abandoned city land . This helps
keep the community’s values and wants alive. Rather than having the city determine what should go there
and potentially have it turn into a luncury development further exacerbating the gentrification in the area
and displacing the community, this helps keep the community at the center of planning and keep them
there.

Social Disintegration
Brook Park aims to build relationships between people in the community. Brook Park was created
because the community came together to turn their space into something positive from the little they had
during a time the community was abandoned. This ethos continues to this day and Brook Park continues
to build a strong community with strong ties.

Osborn Plaza

History of Brownsville

In the 1700s the Dutch built homes and farms in Brownsville and used the area for manufacturing and
farming. Charles S. Brown purchased the land of Brownsville in 1866 when the land was auctioned off
after former owner William Suydam could no longer pay the mortgages on the 262 lots due to the area

24
being undesirable for people. Charles S. Brown purchased the land with development in mind, subdivided
the area, and started calling it Brownsville. He advertised the area to Jews living in the Lower East Side,
showing that it had more open space. By 1883, there were 250 houses in Brownsville and most of the
residents were Manhattan factory workers. The wealthy did not move to Brownsville because it was too
far from Manhattan, but the land was cheap and so tenements for the poor were built in this area (Walsh).

From the 1880s to the 1950s, the area of Brownsville was primarily Jewish, many of whom moved to
Brownsville from the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The population grew by the 1920s that it was one of
the densest Jewish neighborhoods in all of the United States at the time. Manufacturers built factories in
the neighborhood for furniture, food, and metal, and with these factories, accommodations for the workers
were also built. Three years after Charles S. Brown sold his first lot, 10,000 Jews were living in
Brownsville.

By 1900, most of the housing in Brownsville were two-story buildings intended for two families, but
many held up to eight families. These buildings lacked running water and the building was susceptible to
fires due to the frame being wood. In the early 1900s, buildings of brick and stone were constructed with
indoor plumbing. A majority of the housing in Brownsville were tenements and there was heavy
overcrowding. In the early 20th century, more than half of the population in Brownsville were
immigrants, mostly Russian Jews (Pritchett).

The area of Brownsville was successful around the mid-1900s with 372 stores and 8 banks. 1,000 people
were employed on Pitkin Avenue and that street generated around $90 million a year which is equivalent
to about $1,408,000,000 today (Bellafante).

Beginning in the 1930s, more African-Americans and Hispanics started to move into Brownsville
changing the demographics. Around this time as well, Brownsville became home to an organized crime
family called Murder Incorperated and this is when the notoreity of Brownsville being dangerous began.
A majority of the African-Americans moving into Brownsville were from the South, migrating after the
Jim Crow-era. Urban Planner Robert Moses pushed the city to replace the tenement housing in
Brownsville with blocks of public housing (Bellafante). There was segregation between the
African-American and Jewish residents, but overall there was solidarity between the groups. There were
socioeconomic differences between the two with black residents more economically disadvantaged than
the Jews because they arrived to work in factories that were declining and going out of business. In the

25
1950s, the city decided to build even more public housing developments in areas that were devastated in
Brownsville. This along with the increased crime and the want for more social mobility, led the Jewish
population to leave Brownsville almost all at once. More Black and Hispanic residents came to
Brownsville, specifically to live in the new public housing (Pritchett).

By the 1960s, Brownsville became an African-American majority neighborhood. At this time, the
unemployment rate of Brownsville was double that of the city overall, at 17%. In 1966, the Brownsville
Community Council was created by Black and Hispanic residents to attempt and work towards reducing
crime and poverty in the neighborhood. The Brownsville Community Council made many efforts such as
helping around 4,000 people get housing, welfare funding, and voting rights for those who newly
registered. Even with these efforts, crime still increased in Brownsville. Crime was so bad that city
officials recommended that people not take public transit to Brownville.

By 1970, 77% of the population of Brownsville was Black and 19% Puerto Rican. There was a reduction
in trash collection down to twice a week from what used to be six times a week. There were many riots in
the area due to reductions in many social services such as welfare funsa, drug prevention programs, and
Medicaid. Riots and looting of business continued, along with numerous burned buildings and empty lots,
turning Brownsville into one of New York City’s most dangerous and poor neighborhoods (Pritchett).

Many of the buildings in Brownsville were damaged with arson and after the 1970s, areas of Brownsville
were left destroyed. In the late 1970s, the city started to fix up a lot of the abandoned tenement buildings
into low-income housings. In the 1980s, the city continued to build more subsidized multi-unit
townhouses on vacant lots (Pritchett). In the early 2000s, more applications for development in
Brownville came in, but it was only for certain sections of Brownsville. The reason why Brownsville did
not experience such strong gentrification like other parts of Brooklyn, is because it is surrounded by other
poor, high-crime neighborhoods and has a large amount of public housing which doesn’t allow for easy
gentrification and makes it undesirable (Bellafante). Many community organizations were formed in
Brownsville to address poverty and crime, and although it is better than before, it still persists.

Brownsville Neighborhood Demographics

Brownsville continues to be a neighborhood of low-income people of color. With a population of 52, 174,
of this population 21% are Hispanic/Latino, 76% are Black/African American, 1% are White

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Osborn Plaza Today

The Center for Court Innovation runs the Brownsville Community Justice Center in Brownsville,
Brooklyn and this is the organization that created and runs Osborn Plaza. The Brownsville Community
Justice Center “works to reduce crime and incarceration, and strengthen community trust in justice in
central Brooklyn” (“Center for Court Innovation”). The ways in which they do this is by investing in local
youth to prevent crime and they also seek to improve the physical elements of the neighborhood. The
buckets of work they do include: Alternatives to Incarceration, Probation, Youth Development,
Reimagining Public Space, Learning Lab, and Community Service. It is unique to have a social justice
organization have an entire branch of the work they do focused on reimagining public space. The
Brownsville Community Center brings both local businesses and community residents together to
reimagine and redesign public spaces in the neighborhood. From this branch came the Belmont
Revitalization Project which aims to take one of the most distraught streets in Brooklyn, Belmont Avenue
and turn it into a flourishing business street and area where pedestrians feel safe, welcome, and .
Placemaking is the method in which the Brownsville Community Justice Center aims to achieve its
reimagining and redesigning of its public spaces. Placemaking is not only used for the physicality of the
space, but is it being used as a way to reduce crime and improve safety.

In 2015, the Belmont Revitalization Project sought to form a pedestrian plaza where a variety of public
activities can take place such as festivals, markets, and parties. “Our goal is to effect long-term change
through the creation of a permanent public plaza, and to nurture a sustainable environment that improves
public safety and encourages the establishment of more local businesses” stated Erica Mateo, Brownsville
Community Justice Center’s Director of Community Initiatives (“The Belmont Revitalization”). The way
they were able to get this to be a plaza was through the Department of Transportation’s Plaza Program.

Interview with James Brodick

James Brodick, the Director of Community Development & Crime Prevention at the Center for Court
Innovation, explains that the Center for Court Innovation and the Brownsville Community Justice Center
was trying to solve many different things, at the same time, but most specifically, they are a public safety
organization and they look at everything that they do through a lens of how to create a safer community.
For a long time, the focus on a lot of Alternatives to Incarceration programs is the individual. And the

28
goal is to connect the individual with social work and services, but have focused less on seeing the assets
that these young people bring to the table. The Center for Court Innovation aims to change the narrative
that these people are not just young adults in the program, but that they are the catalyst to change. What
they started to do with their young people is have them start to think about their communities from an
urban design perspective, from a city planning perspective, from a criminologist perspective. They give
them the challenge that if they were assigned or hired to solve some of the public safety and public health
concerns in their neighborhood, what would that look like to them. What makes the Osborne Plaza project
different from most other similar projects, is that “it’s not the what, it’s the who”. There are plenty of
public plazas in New York City and a lot of the time its business districts that are creating and running
them because they want to create increased revenue for a business corridor. This makes sense because
when people see that the space looks and feels nice they are more likely to shop there. This was actually
one of their motivations for Osborne Plaza, but the critical motivation was to have the young people start
engaging in their community in a positive way and make it a positive and meaningful safe place.

The space where Osborne Plaza is today is a cul de sac between two housing developments, Langston
Hughes Houses and Howard Houses. Belmont Avenue acted as this middle ground where a lot of
conflicts would happen. Both housing developments would have fights and sometimes shootings on
Belmont Avenue. Following, they would both go back to each of their housing developments. As a result,
all the businesses on Belmont Avenue were negatively affected. People felt unsafe, people stopped
shopping, and then little by little stores started to close, and even the ones that stayed open, they would
close between 5-7pm. This really impacted the economics of the community. Most young people, their
first job is in their neighborhood at a local grocery store or a place where they can work after school from
4-9pm, but because of the safety concerns of Belmont Ave, that was not a possibility. As the Center for
Court Innovation started to galvanize their young people and talk about Belmont Avenue, they looked at
the community board data, and started to come up with many strategies.

Communities like Brownsville really have this sense of “what can we do today”. This idea of instant
gratification while thinking about a long term plan. So from this they created the Be On Belmont
campaign and the idea was to think about how to get people excited again about coming to Belmont
Avenue. It's not just geared towards customers, but also business owners and social service providers.
Then the groups thought, they can’t ask people to do something if they aren’t delivering something first
and so some of their first early projects were as simple as street clean-ups and graffiti removal. The
Center for Court Innovation really engaged the local young people and because they were engaged with

29
the young people, who many considered the troublemakers, now they are looking at them as the problem
solvers. Following this the young people and the Center for Court Innovation started to say that Belmont
Avenue needs a safe space, that there needs to be an anchor to show people visually that something is
different. They started to investigate what other business corridors do that people wish to see in
Brownsville. One of the things that came up was the fact that some of the young people go to Fulton
Street in Brooklyn and they see nice chairs out, people play music, people playing chess, and people just
hanging out. This is when the conversation started between the Center for Court Innovation, Brownsville
Community Justice Center, the young people, the community board, and the Department of
Transportation about Osborn Plaza. The best part of this project according to James is not the end result
but its the process and who was leading it. What makes James so proud about the placemaking work done
in Brownsville is that it's been led by the young people.

The process the Center for Court Innovation uses for their placemaking projects including Osborn Plaza is
to galvanize people who would be least likely to ever be engaged, so high risk young people, they look at
a lot of data and community surveying and go out and talk to people, and ultimately they start to come up
with some problem solving approaches. This process is unlike a lot of times when city planners and urban
designers come out to communities and they already have a plan in place and they just want the
community to do a check-off. James states that a lot of planners go to the community board meeting and
they consider this community engagement, but often the people that are affected by those projects are not
at community board meetings. You have to talk to the people you are hoping the project is going to make
a positive impact on. Not that they have all the answers, but they definitely know the challenges. Each
person has their expertise. The community knows their neighborhood, while urban designers, planners,
and people in public safety organizations know what they know. We need to collaborate and bring all of
that information together to make the best decisions. Going into a process with a predetermined outcome
and just going through the motions, the resulting projects do not have the same level of longevity and
sustainability, and ultimately trust is broken because people start to realize they are being used.

The stakeholders when doing the Osborn Plaza project were the young people navigating the street which
a good portion were part of street gangs, the business owners on Belmont Avenue, and then the
customers. They also took feedback from the Pitkin Avenue BID nearby to learn from their experience
doing a business corridor. They talked to the community board and as they started to grow, connected
with more city organizations and agencies such as the Department of Transportation, the Mayor's Office
of Technology and Innovation, and the Department of Sanitation. What was really illuminating about

30
doing the Be on Belmont campaign, was seeing how the government has failed and being the bridge to
say that aspects like clean streets and having the appropriate garbage cans are the responsibility of
sanitation and demanding those things be addressed. Reaching out to the Mayor's Office of Technology
and Innovation and seeing if we can get technology on site for the plaza was something they did and they
became the first in the city with a smart corner with smart garbage cans, free internet, solar powered
benches. The reason this all happened is because they started to engage with government agencies who
could also be problem solvers. The Center for Court Innovation had the trust of the government and they
also had the trust of the community, so they were able to bridge those two things together to be collective
problem solvers.

According to James, healing starts when people start to feel better about themselves and about the places
that they are navigating. The biggest part of the healing was when young people were at the table and
folks were asking them about their thoughts and opinions and that in itself is a healing piece because
usually these are people that were talked down to, in the criminal justice system, and disrespected. That
was starting a healing process. The healing continued not only throughout the process of developing the
plaza but how they have assigned the community with activating the space. The space is activated for
every holiday, people see that plaza as a place where they can come and convene on a sunny day to just
hang out or a place where there are really cool things happening for people in need during the holidays.
The space and the way it is activated has also turned into a healing space. There is less violence
happening on Belmont Avenue and businesses are opening. As a result of the plaza, the city has allowed
the Center for Court Innovation to work on a lighting project where at night they have a projector that
shines off of their buildings and projects positive messaging about the community. All of the projections
are created by the young people and this project was a way of solving the lighting issue by increasing
lighting in the area. This is an example of how a plaza has facilitated a lot of the things they were already
working with the city to solve on Belmont Avenue.

Every young person that is part of the program is assigned a social worker and these young people also
get paid. The Center for Court Innovation demanded that any funder or city agency that worked with them
understand that the Center for Court Innovation is not asking the community to devote their time to these
projects as volunteer work, but that community members are experts and experts deserve to be paid. As a
result, anybody on their team was being paid. The Center for Court Innovation does not just see the
people they serve as clients, but people who can actually solve problems. They create a pathway to show
the young people the value of work. They show them what it is an urban designer does and what an

31
architect does and once people start realizing the skill sets that they have, all of a sudden they start to see
how solving some of their more immediate needs becomes even more of a trigger for them the young
people to begin to think of other life goals they want to achieve. They start to think that maybe they
should sign up for a certain educational program or apply to a certain job. Addressing the entire person as
a whole is vital which is why each young person has a social worker to help them with this, but the most
critical reason why the Be On Belmont campaign and Osborne Plaza were successful was that everyone
got paid from the community to participate.

During the program, the first thing they do with the young people is go through the community board
district report and look at data. And this is the first time that these people have had to sit down and talk
about data. And they start to say “wait a second, when they talk about disconnected youth, they’re talking
about me aren't they? And when they’re talking about unemployment, this is about how it's impacting
me” and when we tell people how others are seeing the very situation they young people are in and how
the data represents their neighborhood, it sparks this emotion of being really annoyed. People move
because of emotion. And once this emotion is triggered and there is a sense of agency, and then on top of
it they will get paid to help think through the community’s issues, that all starts to make the young people
think, “I want to do something, I’m being valued, and lets really look at this.” What the Center for Court
Innovation does in this program is present the data and say, that the goal is to create a safer more vibrant
community and poses the question of how to get there. And more importantly, how to get there while
supporting the individual young people, by supporting the infrastructure of our community and by
supporting other residents. The plaza was one part of many placemaking projects that the Center for Court
Innovation did in Brownsville. And everyone one of them started with the same concept, that there is a
public safety challenge and that they see the community as a resource and an ally to solving it, even
though many times they were the ones also creating some of the public safety challenges as some of
young people were part of the gangs. In the past, most of the crime was driven by drugs and it really was
driven by money, but now that is not what is driving the violence. What is driving it is the idea of respect,
it's the idea that it's one housing development versus the other, but they are all scared too. They are not
excited to be part of this activity. James says that the young people in the program would not admit this
initially, but in their minds they start to think, a safer community can make everyone's life a lot better.
There is an untapped amount of skills in these communities that nobody has really pulled out of them and
this is what the program does at the Center for Court Innovation.

32
James explains that placemaking at the Center for Court Innovation involves looking at crime maps,
shooting maps, public health maps, and asking why certain places have a lot of harm happening and how
can that be interfered by doing something more positive. Who are the people activating those spaces now
and how can we see if they would be willing to activate those spaces differently? They ask people, if as a
community based organization they are able to bring the resources, the community’s expertise and the
government to solve this, what would that look like? It doesn’t feel real for the community until you bring
all these things together. The Center for Court Innovation asks them what they would like to do and that
they would bring the people with the expertise to help the community achieve that. With this method, they
let the community decide what they need and they show people that anything is possible and that the
Center for Court Innovation is there to support them in getting there. Coming to the community with a
premade plan means that they have to fall in line. And when there is a plan, the person that made it starts
to own that plan and says it can’t fail. What the Center for Court Innovation does is create the plan with
the community and make room for changes when they need to happen. James states that what makes
placemaking valuable is that there is no failing, its about learning and getting better everyday. Where
people fail is when they are not willing to change the plan from the beginning. What ends up happening is
that there is a final product that somebody feels good about but the neighborhood is alienated through that
process.

James indicates that here has to be a recognition that these communities have been harmed and once
people are able to talk about that, then the healing process can start, but many times there is a big
reluctance to talk about the harm. He states that yes there are systems in place that have created a lot of
harm, but there are also things the community has done that has fed into this too, so addressing both is
important. Healing is at the forefront of what the Center for Court Innovation does and the Brownsville
team is a combination of people who are social workers, job developers, and educators, and they are all
coming at this problem from different directions and in each expertise there is a level of healing. The
reason they are in this community is because the community members have been dealing with so much
harm over the course of their lives and they seek to address this. As a result of all the work that was put
into the plaza and its creation, the Center for Court Innovation’s Brownsville Community Justice Center
relocated next door to the plaza, a culinary school opened up down the street, and Made in Brownsville, a
non-profit organization that teaches youth skills in STEAM, opened up across the street as well and it has
become a service hub for the neighborhood of Brownsville. The Be on Belmont campaign and Osborne
plaza have really served to revitalize the community of Brownsville.

33
Analysis of Osborne Plaza & Healing

The method of which these three case studies will be analyzed is by taking Mindy Fullilove’s eight
injuries and looking to see if and how each case study provides healing to those injuries through
placemaking.

Unequal Investment
Through the creation and continued activation of Osborn Plaza, they have been able to request and receive
city investment through the Department of Transportation Plaza program, the Mayor’s Office of
Technology and Innovation, and various other agencies. The Center for Court Innovation itself invested in
the community by coordinating service projects such as graffiti removal and street clean-ups to beautify
the community. By beautifying the space and making it more safe through a planning project which
incorporated more lighting into the area and engaged community members, they were able to get more
businesses and shoppers on Belmont Avenue which created more investment in the neighborhood.

Borders
Osborn Plaza acts as a positive bridge between the two housing projects, Langston Hughes and Howard
NYCHA projects. Prior to the plaza being there, Belmont Avenue was really a dividing line between the
two NYCHA projects and it was the location of a lot of fights between gangs of each development. It
made Belmont Ave an unsafe location and a dividing line. Now with more revitalization, the beautifying
of the space and Osborn Plaza, the space is no longer a border but a gathering space. To neighborhoods
outside of Belmont, Osborn Plaza hosts events which bring people to the space slowly removing the
unsafe image which isolated Brownsville.

Invisibilization
Through the Be On Belmont campaign and the work to create Osborn Plaza, the young people and the
community’s ideas were not only being heard but were being asked for and given importance. For a
community that has been made invisible, unheard, and disinvested in for so long, this really does a lot to
bring the community to the forefront. Additionally, Osborn plaza showcases the positivity of the
community.

Spatial Homogeneity

34
Osborn Plaza encourages diversity and diverse users. Brownsville still remains heavily Black and
Hispanic in population, and more efforts can be done to increase diversity. The Center for Court
Innovation does this by introducing new ideas. Homogeneity does not only have to do with race, but with
ideas and how people think. The Center for Court Innovations shows the community that anything is
possible and pushes them to imagine different things for themselves and their communities.

Exclusion from Governance

Through community outreach, Osborn Plaza gives community members a say in how their space looks,
how it is used, and the possibilities of its future. This community

Draining Spirit
Osborn Plaza allows the community to be imaginative of space and gives them hope. By beautifying the
neighborhood, it uplifts the community’s spirit and gives them pride in the place they live.

Serial Displacement
The creation of Osborne Plaza, and also the Be on Belmont campaign encouraged local businesses to stay
in Brownsville on Belmont Avenue, thus fighting against displacement. The Center for Court Innovation
also makes every effort to cater events and activities to the population living there and encourage their
involvement in the community.

Social Disintegration
Osborne Plaza helps to provide a space that fosters ties between community members, shop owners, and
residents; this strengthens community ties.

Under the Elevated

History of Elevated Transportation Structures in New York City

The history of highways and freeways in New York City starts with Robert Moses when he constructed a
majority of New York City's expressways, tunnels, bridges in the early to mid 20th century. Robert Moses
is responsible for turning New York City into a city of mass transit. Much of these elevated highways and
subway tracks divided and completely demolished pre existing communities. In 1916, a system of federal

35
funding was put in place for road projects through the Federal Aid Road, which New York used for
highway construction. In 1924, the Bronx River Parkway was completed, the city’s first modern parkway.
10 years later in 1934, the East River Drive was completed connecting the Battery to the Triborough
Bridge. The construction of the Major Deegan Expressway from the Bronx to upstate New York started in
1935 and the following year the Belt Parkway in Brookly and Queens opened. In 1948, the contraction of
the Cross-Bronx Expressway began displacing 1,530 families. The Federal Interstate Highway Act in
1956 provided funding for the construction of 41,000 miles of highways which funded the completion of
the Cross-Bronx Expressway (“A Brief History”). During the early to mid 20th century much of the
highways and expressways standing today in New York City were constructed resulting in much of the
neglected underneath space below these structures being present.

The history of elevated trains lines in New York City starts on February 14, 1870 when the city was
introduced to its first elevated railway service called the El which started off as running along Greenwich
Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, but later was expanded to other areas in New York City (“New
York City Transit”). In September 1883 trains started to go over the Brooklyn Bridge and two years later
the Lexington Avenue Line, the first El operated in Brookly from Fulton Ferry all the way to East New
York (“A Brief History”). A section of this line, the oldest El rail in New York City, is still being used
today in East New York. Much of these elevated rails were taken down and turned into underground train
lines, but some in the outer boroughs remain in their original form, just rebuilt and upgraded.

Under the Elevated Program & Projects

With 700 miles of elevated transportation structure in New York City, Under the Elevated seeks to study
and repurpose these spaces throughout New York City into meaningful places. The method in which this
does this is the pop-up>pilot>permanent framework. The idea is to start with a pop-up project using
community input, as people are more willing to experiment with temporary projects, then create a pilot
project to further test these ideas, and then finally through press and collaboration with city agencies and
community groups, work to make these permanent projects (​Under the Elevated​ 42) . Examples of two
projects are the Boogie Down Booth in the Bronx and the This involved Three of these projects include:

36
Interview with Susan Chin

Susan Chin, the former Executive Director of the Design Trust for Public Space explains that the Under
the Elevated projects aim to solve a variety of issues such as stormwater recapture, solving some of the
issues with asthma, increase lighting, and using materials such as charcoal that absorb pollutants and heal
the community. The projects seek to see how public space can be multipurpose while addressing many of
the challenges that we have today. In this process, bringing the bottom up together with top down, giving
a voice to the community, which is not monolithic, and also understanding the challenges from the
government side are vital.

Susan sees community engagement as coalition building and states that in placemaking you are coalition
building at every stage. The Boogie Down Booth pilot project was only there for three months but they
used it as a press opportunity to show this pop up and what its potential was. They brought music there
and it gave the community a place to come together. The community even saw it being built. They held
workshops with the community asking them what they wanted under the elevated structure and
questioned people on the street as well. Many local organizations were involved such as the Southern
Boulevard Merchants Association. It was unsafe and many of the store owners had to close at 4pm. They
were building coalitions through the project, asking people what they wanted and needed. With the
relationships formed with community organization and then bringing the media there, this convinced the
commissioner of the Department of Transportation that this was a viable project. The police even liked it
because they saw it as generating positive hanging out. People saw it as different things even though at its
core it was a community asset.

According to Susan, we need to develop more empathy towards each other so we develop trusting
relationships that allows us to create meaningful places together. She questions what institutions are there
anymore to do this? Mentioning that people used to meet at school or the library and similar public places,
pointing out just how important it is to have public places to develop these trusting relationships. In terms
of community healing, Susan believes it happens through trust and building relationships that are
meaningful to the bonds of the community. Additionally, if places are cared for it lifts people’s spirits and
it gives them a sense of community pride. It shows people that they are respected by the level of care.

Because the community was involved in the Under the Elevated projects, they really took ownership of
the places and that's what gave it the strength of maintaining and sustaining it. You are giving them a way

38
to have a voice in their destiny, in their neighborhood, they understood the tools and developed a
relationship with the agencies so that they could reach out to these agencies when they needed to demant
something be done in their communities. Showing the community who their city council person is and
how to reach them helped the community understand how to get change to happen. It gave them different
ways of taking ownership of this place and their lives. These projects are about amplifying the voices of
the community.

In the workshops which brought together a variety of members from the community, they taught them
about the history of the space. The people in some workshops brought pictures of what the place used to
look like. The people running Under the Elevated asked people what would be the feeling the community
would like to have in this new configuration of the place. Many of which responded with feeling safer.
Under the Elevated also held a lot of workshops teaching people the basic process of design, how the city
budget process works and who you talk to. They had the community come up with ideas and then they got
to see that some of their ideas are actually implemented, and that is really fulfilling.

Susan questions, how do we get to know people better and are there opportunities for linking to local
knowledge? What one person sees as loitering may not be seen as loitering to another. One person may
see kids gathering on the street as negative and doing negative things just because they look to be a loud
group of teenagers of color, while the community sees them with pride. When trying to solve social
injustice, Susan states that she may not know what the ills of the community are besides having it be dark,
noisy, polluted, neglected, and the urban planning theories, but she says you want to identify the top
priorities for the community. Darkness was a big issue for the community. For DOT this was a huge
concern because of their vision zero program. Health issues coming from the highways and transit lines
was another concern due to the pollution. There was pollution. Train wheels generate a lot of dust
because. Birds and pigeons gather on this infrastructure which also produces dropping and waste. The
peeling of lead based paint is another issue. The physical division of the community and the instructure as
a barrier was a huge social issue. Noise is also a big concern and Susan wishes they addressed this more
because it was truly disturbing for schools near the rails; they had to stop class almost every 10 minutes
when trains went by making it very difficult to learn.

Susan states that a lot of people get used to these things, they accept the conditions. Under the Elevated
did not deal much with the original merchants who remember the structure when it was not there, so it is
more about how to make it brighter, more colorful, cleaner, and how we can use this space. The goal is

39
making it into a positive thing. Bringing new activities, you may not physically change the space but
clean it up and provide programs. You can test and see if there's an appetite for anything in specific. A
critical piece of placemaking is maybe you do not change the infrastructure, and instead you are bringing
positive activities that the community really sees as being interested in having and this improves their
quality of life. The idea is to help people make their places better and see it through their eyes. The job of
planner, designer, architects is really listening to those voices and using your expertise and resources
available to help the community make its vision.

Susan states, must put places together, together. Creating vehicles in terms of the placemaking to heal,
vehicles to communicate with each other and build those trust relationships. We tend to look at the
success and never the failures, reflecting on the failures or shortcomings is important. We must learn from
everything. Placemaking is a learning opportunity and not a plan with an agenda, so to embrace the
learning is what makes it successful.

Analysis

The method of which these three case studies will be analyzed is by taking Mindy Fullilove’s eight
injuries and looking to see if and how each case study provides healing to those injuries through
placemaking.

Unequal Investment
The areas underneath elevated transportation structures are often unsafe and dirty. Under the Elevated
projects makes these spaces more safe by adding lighting, greenery, and seating, therefore making the
space more welcoming for merchants and people that may be adjacent to these spaces. By making the
areas safe, this encourages more activity and ultimately more money and investment into the area. One
pilot project, after it was removed, actually resulted in the Department of Transportation repainting the
train track structure and this made the city invest more in that space due to that project.

Borders
It is apparent that elevated transportation structures such as highways and train lines divide communities
creating borders. Under the Elevated seeks to bring communities on either side the elevated structures
together and to bridge the divide of the separated spaces.

40
Invisibilization
Areas underneath elevated transportation structures tend to be neglected because they are dark and dreary
spaces, but Under the Elevated projects put these spaces back on the map as destinations.

Spatial Homogeneity
Under the Elevated encouraged diverse uses and brings for new ideas of space. It encourages people to
think differently about space and the workshops hosted teaches individuals on how to make change in
their communities. It opens the community up to thinking of different possibilities for the spaces they
interact with.

Exclusion from Governance

Under the Elevated projects seek to gather community feedback and participate during the pilot programs
to learn from what the community wants and needs. The workshops hosted by Under the Elevated teached
people who their city council person is, how the design process works, and who to reach out to if they
want to request certain things in their communities. These sessions empower the community.

Draining Spirit
Under the Elevated projects beautifies often dark spaces under these structures uplifting the spirits of
community members. It shows a level of care for the community and it makes them feel better about the
space and community they live in.

Serial Displacement
More work can be done to ensure that these projects do not lead to gentrification and displacement.

Social Disintegration
Through coalitions building with the city, community organizations, residents, and businesses, Under the
Elevated is strengthening these ties to make for strong social connection. The projects themselves, such as
the pop-up in Chinatown involve an information board so people can see what events are going on in the
community thus creating opportunities for connection among people.

41
Mindy Fulilove’s eight injuries help to highlight the common sources of community wounds. When urban
placemaking and planning projects aim to address these eight injuries, they seek to remedy the hurt
communities suffer as a result of the sorting of a city. Addressing these injuries in the work that
placemaking does will build to heal the wound poor urban planning has created throughout history and
seek ways to not have that hurt happen again. To keep these injuries in mind will help ensure the future
injuries like this are not caused again.

Create Spaces that Foster Community Expression and Dignity

Placemaking mimics what we all aim to see in a just community, engagement of all people and all
perspectives and having all voices heard. As human beings, we seek to express ourselves and our ideas..
Public space is where we express as a community, as a society, and to not have spaces like this impedes
the communities ability to have a space to express itself. We see from the case studies that placemaking
works in tandem with social justice work, making these spaces crucial for community expression and
wellness. Public space where human expression is to be made. Expression of rights such as free speech,
they all take place in the public realm, and placemaking is to foster this. Fostering community is at the
root of placemaking, and creating spaces that foster community expression and dignity not only heals
from the past, but sets a stage for the community’s future.

Chapter 5 Conclusion

Healing does not happen overnight and neither does placemaking. Through this research, it is seen that
urban placemaking does indeed create both process and spaces for community healing but it is important
to note that healing is a process and it is never a formula. It is a journey of healing that placemaking ought
to embrace and take on. Urban placemaking deals with histories, it deals with communities, and within
those communities are people; people with feelings and emotions. Placemaking, with its focus on people,
incorporates healing and regard toward emotion naturally into its profession, whereas urban planning is
not so embedded with the same regard to the same extent. There are lingering traditional ideas in planning
of being rational and an avoidance of difficult emotional, whereas urban placemaking is about getting into
the process, the people, the stories, and getting into the emotions even if it may be messy because it is part
of what makes a place.

44
Once individuals begin to heal within, it starts to radiate within the community. People are reluctant to be
involved in a planning or placemaking process when they themselves are not being seen as valuable and
so it is important to remember to address one’s whole self in a planning process. Avoiding human needs
and focusing on the planning project purley will not be effective. Healing is very necessary now after
decades of injuries from planning and injustices, but prevention of pain is just as important. Planning
historically has intentionally pushed emotions out of the planning process, and what this makes the
community feel as if their feelings are unimportant. Now it is ever so important to bring emotion into the
process and open up the process and spaces for healing to occur in order for us all to create meaningful
places together.

45
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