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Dispatch One: Collaboration with Youth Spurs Vacant Lot Project

Last Wednesday, January 22nd, the Harrisburg Collaborative Studio spent a day in the South Allison Hill neighborhood of inner-city Harrisburg. Our purpose was to get a general "feel" for the area in which we will be working this semester and to meet leaders of the current youth programs within the community. The day was packed. We met members of the Community Action Commission, leaders of the SHOC (Students Helping Our Community) program within Communities That Care, program directors of the CARE After School Program at a local church, and leaders of the Pride of the Neighborhood childcare facility. We also stopped in at Danzante, an arts-based outreach program rooted in the Latina and African-American cultures, where we watched a play written and performed by local high school students about HIV/AIDS. Ellyn Schuette, Chemistry Major/Schreyer Honors College

Dispatch Two: What Makes a Good Neighborhood? After visiting the South Allison Hill community in Harrisburg, I felt there are so many opportunities and resources to work with. On the surface, the neighborhood is not very appealing with condemned buildings and some unkept areas. In talking with community leaders and residents, a brighter side of the neighborhood comes through. We understood that a neighborhood characterized by crime and unpleasant physical surroundings does not equate to lack of hope. Instead, a sense of being able to help to make a difference with the community members excites us. I think everyone in the class is excited to put this project or projects together. -- David Chao, Landscape Architecture major

(Monday, Feb. 3) Today our class of five decided on an agenda for our first day with our youth groups. We are meeting for four consecutive weeks in Harrisburg with three different youth organizations. The organizations that we are working with are SHOC, Pride of the Community, and the Derry Street Methodist after school program. We have only one hour every Monday with them, so today, we organized our thoughts and agendas to correspond with our time. On this first day we are asking the question, "What makes a good neighborhood?" We hope to also receive some neighborhood issues and concerns that the kids have through our planned activities. We are going to have the 62 kids from the three groups place their fingerprint on a neighborhood map to show their address. This will be in the introductory icebreaker as well as an introduction of us and our reason for being there. We then have a collage activity planned to visually display what makes a good neighborhood. In this activity we will have them list at random, all the words that they can think of and that they tried to show in the collage that describe the composition of a good neighborhood. We hope to get obvious as well as not so obvious words from this activity so that we know what the esteem is towards their community. A sense of accomplishment will be had from these participatory exercises and a visual display will be produced. Perhaps we will have them work on an interview or a drawing for our next meeting. -- Lindsay Burleigh, Landscape Architecture major

Dispatch 3: Youth Help to Map the Future

We have finished our fourth and final workshop in Harrisburg with our three
youth groups: PRIDE of the Neighborhood, SHOC, and CARE. In our final
workshop we did a mapping/planning activity with the youth. We took small
groups of three to four kids per one PSU student and allowed the kids to place
clip art elements such as trees, benches, entrances, play space, art space,
water feature, bird bath, vegetable and flower gardens, etc., on a plan of
our vacant lot. We put together a poster containing a collage of gathered
photographs of built gardens, parks, and elements within these that they
possibly had never been exposed to before. We reviewed this poster together
within each group before the mapping activity to get a focus on the activity
and to get them thinking about elements and their arrangement for possible
vacant lot designs. We had hoped to get an idea of how the youth thought about
the arrangement of certain elements, and this held true. They placed entrances
where we, as trained designers would have placed them, placed benches around
and near each activity area, and placed quiet and passive recreation spaces as
separate entities to the active spaces. We were quite amazed by the
engagement of the youth in this activity as well as the thoughtful placement
and thoughtful juxtapositions of the elements on the plan. This activity was
the final activity and acted as a segue to the actual design, planning, and
building phases of our Heart of the Community Lot in South Allison Hill,
Harrisburg, PA on Derry Street. Now, we are discussing, contacting, and
arranging the logistics of our final weeks. We plan to get community juvenile
groups among others, to fine grade (rake) the current lot to prepare it for our
hopeful sodding, bedding, and fencing. We plan to go down to Harrisburg on
April 12th, perhaps to do some preliminary work, and again on April 26-27 for a
packed weekend of solid and efficient construction. We are calling for
donations of benches, picnic tables, soil, sod or grass seed, concrete, hard
surfacing, mulch or gravel and any other materials to create this playspace. The community is aware that we are creating this playspace for the youth and is
as excited as we are about it! On May 3rd, then, we are collaborating with Sue
Hutchinson's Hotel, Restaurant and Intitutional Management class in Harrisburg to showcase both our newly renovated lot as well as a mural project taking place in the community. The HRIM class is an
event planning class and is planning the festival to celebrate community! Lindsay Burleigh

Dispatches from Harrisburg Landscape Architecture 453/497H (Community Assessment, Planning and Design) The Harrisburg Collaborative Studio Spring 2003

Dispatches from Harrisburg
Landscape Architecture 453/497H
(Community Assessment, Planning and Design)
The Harrisburg Collaborative Studio
Spring 2003