Gardens Rising
Designing a Community Engagement Strategy to inform Resiliency Efforts and Green Infrastructure on Manhattan’s Lower East Side
The NYC Community Garden Coalition was awarded a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery from the New York State Governor's Office of Storm Recovery (GOSR). The purpose of the grant was to develop a feasibility study and a Master Plan to address climate change vulnerabilities and implement green infrastructures in 47 gardens within the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Our team designed an engagement strategy to capture gardener needs that supported architectural and engineering design for increased environmental permeability and stormwater infrastructure.
Context
How might we develop applied resiliency strategies with community members for environmental education and long-term use of green infrastructure? NYC Community Gardens Coalition (NYC CGC) needed to identify the needs, challenges, and opportunities for 47 community gardens vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. The region was one of the hardest hit areas from Superstorm Sandy due to tidal surges in highly dense areas of housing and businesses. NYC CGC sought to incorporate sustainability and resiliency strategies into the patchwork of gardens to support the day to day use and needs of the surrounding community, while mitigating catastrophic events.
Mapped Lower East Side Gardens and Subdistricts to engage during process.
Approach
Our approach was to combine human centered and participatory design tactics alongside landscape architecture and engineering strategies. We developed a research methodology and workshop series to collect community information about governing structures, daily use, and environmental capabilities of each garden. The community-centered process solicited input to evaluate needs and priorities of gardeners, informing the application of green design, engineering strategies, and ecological indicators. After gathering several waves of information from site visits, workshops, and gaming techniques, we identified and mapped a list of sustainability and resilience strategies for all 47 gardens in our toolkit.
Developed Card Game to help gardeners learn about green infrastructure for informed discussion making.
Outcome
Our Gardens Rising Feasibility Study outlined an action plan and proposed projects for each garden that were identified during our engagement process. We piloted an information sharing system to support each garden’s governing structure and packaged a digital tool to crowd map garden information. The web platform enables people to share information in real time, collect feedback from gardeners, and support the transparency and exchange of information across a network of diverse neighbors and gardeners. Gardens Rising Feasibility Study received the American Society of Landscape Architect (ASLA) NY merit award.
Final Green Infrastructure Report.
Gardeners play the ‘spark card’ game during the Playshop Event to learn about learn about green infrastructure strategies and spark discussion about garden needs.