Envisioning The Neighborhood Resilient

At PopTech's The City Resilient design charrette two weeks ago, small groups engaged in a "Ideation" process, facilitated by frog design, focused on putting resilience principles into practice at the neighborhood level. The group I was in ended up re-envisioning an educational center in a neighborhood that was experiencing long-term social, economic and environmental stressors/decline.

 I've been meaning to share some of our thoughts and was inspired to do so for a totally different reason - a good friend and colleague, Kartik, shared a video project he did on the HOPE organization that built a school in Chennai, India that seemed to have a similar vision.

Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGC2W4Cnz84. It's interesting to think about how this vision translates from a community in the US, which we were modeling from, to a community acros the globe. Here's a snapshot of our vision:

The educational center we designed would serve as a network of several (10 in this community) 24 hour community center's that served a multitude of purposes and focused on education and purposeful time-use of the population. For example, during the day it would do K12 education (also available to community members) with several spaces dedicated to "skill" development and "courses" designed by community members for community members. There would be a supply/tool library and workspace where specialty items and particularly expensive items such as lawn mowers, work bench, welding and drilling tools (where members of the community can teach these skills).

The center would also place a focus on individual and community health of course - providing physical, mental and "spiritual" (yoga, meditation, art, music) services as well as an urban farm and kitchen where classes can be held. There would be an emphasis on incubation space where collaboration might bring forth new business ideas and the space could facilitate seeing those to fruition. Importantly, in disaster situations it would also serve as center for distribution (food, goods, etc), communications (redundant, distributed and networked comm. infrastructure), meeting and organization.

(We were encouraged to be as explorative and creative as possible, so while I encourage thoughts on the inherent challenges associated with some of these ideas, understand that were were brainstorming and envisioning so creative license is allowed.)

The team I was on consisted of a statistician from NYU's Furman Center for RE and Urban Policy, the principle of an innovative school in Detroit, an organizer from the University of Orange, and a landscape architect focusing on biomimicry. Other groups were equally diverse and creative, however there were undoubtedly similarities in the designs we came up with.

At this point, PopTech, the Rockefeller Foundation and many others will be taking the products of the conference, synthesizing them and developing projects, products and proposals to further develop them and take steps towards moving from "ideation" to implementation and hopefully towards an increased resiliency in neighborhoods and cities.