Bicentennial Park, Part One: "Whom Does Design Really Serve?"

Professionals are against participation because it destroys the arcane privileges of specialization, unveils the professional secret, strips bare incompetence, multiplies responsibilities and converts them from the private into the social. 
– Giancarlo De Carlo

De Carlo’s truly versatile quote, which would have applied just as meaningfully to last year's professionally-designed "Come To City" marketing campaign (an DNA-imposed "solution" rejected in the wake of high public Dudgeon), prefaces a piece at the website of the Project for Public Spaces. Jeff Gillenwater brought it to my attention, and it's a recommended read in the wake of secretive planning and subsequent tree toppling at the future site of Bicentennial Rent Boy Park.

Whom Does Design Really Serve?, by Fred Kent (pps.org)

On a recent trip to Toronto, I visited Sherbourne Common, a waterfront park designed by Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg. Walking around the park, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were actually passing through an elite museum’s pristine sculpture garden. Everything is placed just so, in a way that has created an environment so totally uninviting and ignorant of how human beings want to use public space that I knew, within moments of arriving, that what I was seeing was undoubtedly an “award-winning” design ...

The author contrasts this award-winning but profoundly uninviting space with another one in the very same city.

 ... Dufferin Grove Park, of course, has not won any major design awards. It is not designed, in the sense that we think of that word today; but it is highly cultivated. So much thought has gone into questions like “How do people want to use this space?” and “How can visitors to the park be involved in its continuing development?” The park’s managers have gone to great lengths to make sure that their public space is welcoming and inspiring to the broadest range of people possible: young to old, quiet to rambunctious ...

Community involvement versus top-down "gifting" of designs from the same old trustworthy suspects -- the bugbear of New Albany as long as any of us can remember.

Communities do not think “we need to talk to a designer” when they want a new park; they talk to each other, and to their elected officials. Architects, landscape architects, and urban planners come later (if ever), and would benefit enormously from increased public interest in what they do. Involving people in shaping public spaces not only benefits those individuals and their neighborhoods through the development of social capital, it benefits designers by making what they do an integral part of a sacred community process instead of an expensive “extra.” Designers have a great deal of knowledge that is infinitely more resonant when it is used to help everyday citizens articulate their needs and create public spaces that are responsive to the communities they serve.

Keeping these ideas in mind, we'll turn next to an unfinished conversation between Jeff and Pete Andriot, who works for the park's designer.

Part Two: "When did the public input process into this park's location, imagined functions, design, and construction occur?"