Participatory Design and Self-building in Shared Urban Open Spaces by Carolin Mees

Author:Carolin Mees
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

As the amount of public open land increased, the Department of Parks and Recreation was unable to maintain existing municipal open space resources. In 1978, Mayor Koch appointed Parks Commissioner Gordon J. Davis, who initiated the so-called “load-shedding” management policies, to improve maintenance in parks. This meant that many parks facilities were turned over to private concessionaires, who then operated and maintain these facilities by permit (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation 2016).

Starting in the late 1970s in low-income neighborhoods throughout New York City, residential buildings were rehabilitated and community gardens were created on vacated public land. Resident groups and local open space groups active in transforming public open-space into community gardens, were, at first, assisted by private organizations. Soon after, however, the municipality of New York developed programs to support the local groups in managing city-owned open spaces, but these programs were also aimed at controlling the community gardens movement and regulating the use of public land for community gardens (Sciorra 1996). This means that the City’s administration under Mayor Edward Koch started the municipal community gardens program, Operation GreenThumb, in 1978 as part of the Department of General Services. In addition, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Volunteers in Parks program, which addressed neighborhood groups who were interested in repairing and managing city parks, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development started the Site Improvement program. This program provided community development funds for the construction of parks that were maintained by local residents on land belonging to the Department of Housing and Preservation (Francis et al. 1984). Therefore, three municipal departments, the Department of General Services, the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, became involved in supporting residents in their maintenance of public land and property.

Since the majority of the public open-space before the 1970s used to be private land that had been occupied by apartment buildings that had then been demolished, most of it ended up under the jurisdiction of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. In 1978, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development began to build up again vacated properties and spend $3.6 million on the development of new housing on vacated lots in low-income neighborhoods. Some of these lots included community gardens (Schmelzkopf 1995). New tenants of residential buildings by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development that were situated next to these gardens were encouraged to maintain them. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development did not provide the tenants with any tools or other supplies to maintain the gardens, but rather pointed out the lack of maintenance and then hired staff to take care of its garden spaces (Francis et al. 1984). That means there was neither a participatory planning process nor cooperative development of these gardens in place, and soon they were abandoned due to a lack of interest among the tenants (Schmelzkopf 1995). In other words, over the years within New York City, the various community garden programs

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