Buckle up, Lower East Siders, it’s time for final reviews. After months spent in studio designing a community engagement tool for potential infill development opportunities on New York City Public Housing Authority (NYCHA)’s Baruch campus, we decided to give our simulation a test run.
Envision Baruch, as we named it, is a multi-player simulation that calls for residents, developers, the city and NYCHA to band together to imagine where development could occur in the Lower East Side. Players are assigned a navigator to help guide them through the development process as they propose new buildings and open spaces. All decisions are recorded on an interactive spreadsheet which documents incoming revenue as well as indicators such as community vitality and affordability.
Post-Exercise
In the last few weeks, we broke into smaller groups and looked at ways to take this exercise further. Topics explored included:
- Using the Tygron software previously mentioned to test development decisions
- Developing a youth curriculum around teaching school children about the real estate development process in their neighborhood
- Utilizing Participatory Budgeting to give power to residents over real money and real projects
- Creating 2 urban design proposals of proposed new, infill and open space development
My group looked at participatory budgeting as a tool NYCHA could use to empower residents to have greater access to the way funds are allocated and spent using online voting.
The visiting critics, or players of our simulation, were composed of affordable housing advocates, former NYCHA employees, developers and community advocates. As a collective studio, we hope our ideas can help NYCHA and other housing authorities engage stakeholders in a more collaborative and transparent way to better envision potential infill development opportunities in the Lower East Side and beyond.