People’s Planning Forum for City Park kicks off!

Rooting in our organizational values of equity and inclusion, Grow Dat is holding a series of People’s Planning Forums to empower our community and add more voices to City Park Conservancy’s Master Planning Process. Because of the legacy of land theft, enslavement, and segregation on the land that is now City Park, we are aware of the importance of an inclusive process that reflects the voices of all New Orleans residents. We are excited to welcome the public into what we do every day at Grow Dat: creating diverse, youth-led spaces for collaboratively reimagining the future. 

On April 23, Grow Dat held our first People’s Planning Forum for City Park. We began the evening with red beans and rice, exhibits about the CPC’s master plan, images and documentation from the history of this land, as well as short tours of our site. This set the stage for a collaborative design activity where participants worked in small groups to design the park of the future. Working across differences of age, race, and neighborhood, participants worked through these prompts and guiding questions to create a collaborative map or visual representation of their ideal park.

We ended the evening with open time on the microphone to hear about groups’ designs, share hopes for the park, as well as suggestions for the future of our People’s Planning Forums. We heard from a mix of people with different identities and connections to the park, including from young people in our programs, parents of alumni, fellow park users and urban planning professionals.

To get a sense of what we talked about and dreamed about together, check out this document of answers to our prompts, photos of the event and maps below, and the word cloud below representing common themes among the working groups. Words that participants included more frequently are larger; words or ideas that were present on only one map are smaller.  

You can check out our events page to sign up for our next People’s Planning Forum on May 23, at the Nanih Bvlbancha site, from 6:00-8:00pm.