Over 250 people filled tables at City Park’s community planning meeting Wednesday (Dec. 12) to share their ideas for the park’s future, the first such meeting since City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that runs the park’s daily operations, paused planning meetings in April following backlash to the plans to relocate Grow Dat Youth Farm.
The park reached an agreement with Grow Dat earlier this year that will allow the farm to stay in its current location until 2030. Now, park officials are focusing on reviewing their goals for improving the park as they craft a master redevelopment plan that hasn’t occurred in over two decades.
The meeting, held at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral, was lively — attendees ate gumbo provided by the park and chatted with strangers, filling the room with the noise of their collaborative efforts.
City Park Conservancy’s new CEO, Rebecca Dietz, said the monthslong pause allowed park leadership to plan around community needs.
“There’s been a lot of listening and not a lot of drawing,” Dietz told Verite News. “And what’s come out of that is learning from people where the common ground is.”
Dietz said park leadership is also rethinking what City Park means to people, reframing it as a collection of shared spaces rather than a monolithic place. Instead of looking at one plan for all 1,300 acres of the park, she said the planning process will take a place-by-place approach. After solidifying their goals, park officials will consider how certain places can be redeveloped or improved.
Conservancy staff members highlighted five core principles for the park’s future based on community responses they received over the past eight months: welcoming entrances, ensuring safety and accessibility, prioritizing biodiversity and sustainability, balancing cultural history and cultivating fun activities for all ages.
“That foundation allows us to go into specific places and areas of the park and ask ourselves in this area: How are we going to meet those [five] intentions? And if we can’t meet all [five], are we meeting any of them?” Dietz said.
The last principle — balancing cultural history and cultivating fun activities — was developed by the Ideas Youth Committee, a group of 60 youths that were recruited from across the city to help park officials understand how to engage with young people. Naomi Hart, a 17-year-old on the Ideas Youth Committee who lives in Bywater said park leadership has done good work to engage people her age and make sure they are heard.
“The activities they do are very effective, especially the group work,” Hart said. “It kind of allows everyone to collaborate, and you get to hear a lot of different positions or views that you wouldn’t have heard before.”
City Park Conservancy hired Concordia, an architecture, planning and engagement firm, to help reach disengaged community members. Bobbie Hill, a partner at Concordia, said that the firm looked for diversity in race, age, background and neighborhood while creating committees that would help in engagement efforts. This marks a departure from the initial stages of the planning process when the park did not include race or gender demographics in its surveys. Income demographics are still not included in the survey.
Wednesday’s meeting diverged from previous meetings the Conservancy led in both structure and age of attendees. Attendees and representatives from City Park noted that there was a balance between younger and older generations at the meeting. Community fellows recruited by the park facilitated discussions at round tables, where residents worked with people they had just met to review the park’s core intentions. They laid sticky notes on a large piece of paper in the center of the table, which were all picked up by organizers at the end of the meeting.
Brianna Bryant, a crew leader at Grow Dat Youth Farm, said she came to the meeting to make sure that young people’s voices are heard. She said previous meetings, like the one in March that was disrupted by supporters of Grow Dat, weren’t inclusive and didn’t create space for young people’s voices.
“The inclusivity of the young people and their voices is what I’m noticing right now,” Bryant said. I think that was what was missing at [March’s] meeting.”