Urban planning can involve endless maps, intricate codebooks and political authorities. But over the weekend, the Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation showed that children’s toys, a little creativity and the community can play just as big a role.
Roosevelt Row CDC, supported by a national grant from ArtPlace, hosted a series of four workshops this weekend featuring urban planner and artist James Rojas.
The workshops — two on Saturday and two on Sunday — brought Rojas and the downtown Phoenix community together to brainstorm ideas and short-, mid- and long-term goals for the area between 19th Avenue and 16th Street along Roosevelt Street. The remainder of the $150,000 grant will be used to implement these proposed improvements and visions.
“Receiving this grant was just humbling and incredible,” said Cindy Dach, acting director of Roosevelt Row CDC. “It allows us to do some great work.”
Tim Halbur of ArtPlace said the foundation awarded the corporation this grant due to the potential they saw in the Roosevelt area and in the organization’s work.
“We see the arts as having a big role in attracting people to neighborhoods and brightening communities,” Halbur said. “We think the CDC is taking a great approach to drive people to the area and improve the community.”
Dach identified Rojas’ experience as a reason he was asked to lead the workshops. Rojas is an accomplished urban planner, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and the founder of Latino Urban Forum, a nonprofit that brings light to the problems in planning and design facing low-income Latinos.
“James has a breadth of experience. He knows what has worked right, and what has worked badly,” Dach said.
However, experience wasn’t necessary to be a participant in the workshops; members of the community were key players in the discussion.
“There’s been a lot decided in the past for the community. We want to change that,” Dach said. “Citizens may not be experts in urban planning, but they are experts in being a part of a community.”
The choice of bringing in Rojas also echoes these intentions. When asked what is his largest concern when working with a city, Rojas answered “community engagement.”
“No plan is good without the people’s input,” Rojas said.
Rojas sees the workshops as a “really simple process,” one that depends on the community as much as on him or Roosevelt Row CDC.
Participants had 15-20 minutes to build their ideal vision of Roosevelt Row with toy blocks, foam dinosaurs, paper money and other eclectic items. They shared their individual ideas before being divided into groups to build a cooperative view of Roosevelt with the same time constraints and items.
“By giving you all this wacky stuff, you were forced to be creative,” Rojas said. “We have to go out of the box these days.”
Participants were asked to draw upon their emotions, memories and day-to-day experiences in Roosevelt and the downtown area.
“Planning fails because it doesn’t take emotion into consideration,” Rojas said. “You’re all the experts of your neighborhood, not me.”
Lora Martens, 33, a frequent visitor to Roosevelt Row and downtown Phoenix, attended the Saturday morning workshop, which beat her expectations.
“It was a more creative process than I thought it would be,” she said. “It was the most successful collaboration I’ve participated in. Our team came up with an idea we couldn’t have made up on our own.”
These workshops serve as the first step in a long process of new development for the Roosevelt area led by the CDC. The next step is a community town hall meeting on December 5, as well as the distribution of a survey inquiring about neighborhood improvements to Roosevelt residents.
“Roosevelt Row has great potential to become a unique, sustainable part of Phoenix,” Rojas said.
Contact the reporter at ascoville@asu.edu
