Birdtown Flightplan: A Neighborhood Taking Off

This past semester I have participated in an independent study class, working with the City of Lakewood (just to the west of Cleveland proper). Three classmates and I have created a neighborhood plan for Birdtown, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of Lakewood. Named Birdtown for its many streets featuring names of indigenous birds, it is a low to moderate income area. It is a well-defined neighborhood, and features a recently renovated park, brand new elementary school and community gardens.

The neighborhood planning process is long; ours was abbreviated to be a semester long. We started off by researching the neighborhood. Site visits, data crunching and reading about the history helped us ascertain the current conditions in the neighborhood, its development over time and lastly, opportunities for improvement. We also held a community meeting with the dual purpose of introducing them to the planning process as well as for us to gather information from the most important people of all: the current residents.

With this information in hand, we set about dreaming up suggestions to address some of the concerns that had arisen from the research stage. Some were invented by us; others were best practices from elsewhere. We organized our proposals into three key areas: commercial, housing and transportation. Each of the proposals was assigned at least one of the following categories in a fashion similar to the "tags" found on blogs such as this one: neighborhood identity, safety, connectivity and urban design. Once our ideas were developed, we moved into the production phase.

In addition to assembling the text for a plan, we created many images to help express our proposals. We used ArcGIS to create maps, Google Sketch-up to create some three-dimensional models and Adobe Photoshop to create photographic renderings. In a neighborhood plan, the visuals are every bit as important as the text.

To create the actual plan document, we sketched some possible layouts on paper. From there, we chose the best one and created a layout in Adobe InDesign. All the text and images were assembled into a thirty page document on legal size paper, in landscape mode. We titled it: "Birdtown Flightplan: A Neighborhood Taking Off." To ease navigation through the document, it features multi-colored bars on the outer edges of the pages. It also includes a resource guide for the residents, with information on municipal resources.

The last step is to submit our plan to the residents of the Birdtown neighborhood. We are presenting it to them this coming Tuesday at another community meeting. As this is a project completed by students, we will also be presenting it to selected faculty members of the Levin College of Urban Affairs this coming Thursday.

This semester has been an incredible opportunity for a not-yet-certified planner. To actively participate in this process, to create 1/4 of the final product, to actually create a real plan that will be implemented- this is huge to me. My educational career has been full of "make-believe" projects, with my only chances at working on real projects through internships. This is the real deal, though. It has been a great window into my future career, and I'm looking forward to including the plan document into my portfolio.

Rally in support of bike and pedestrian access on new Innerbelt Bridge

Location
Lincoln Park
W. 14th Street and Kenilworth Avenue
Cleveland, OH

Join the fan page for "Innerbelt access for everyone" -http://www.facebook.com/pages/Innerbelt-Bridge-access-for-everyone-including-bikes-and-pedestrians/183358026650

A rally to support pedestrian and bike access on the bridge will be held Sunday, December 6 at 2 p.m. at Lincoln Park in Tremont (W. 14th Street and Kenilworth Avenue).

Anyone interested in safe, convenient and healthy car-free access between Downtown and Tremont (and a great scenic overlook of downtown) is invited to attend. The event is free, and refreshments and entertainment will be provided. Cyclists are urged to ride their bikes, with free mechanical safety checks provided by the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op. Helmets are strongly suggested, and OCBC will have some available to borrow or purchase.

The rally will evaluate alternative walking and biking routes proposed by ODOT for the bridge and present other information about a dedicated path over the bridge. Participants will divide into groups, taking a different route from Lincoln Park to the intersection of Ontario Street and Carnegie Avenue, where a brief rally will address the issues of equity and civic interest in this nearly $1 billion project, before returning to Tremont for refreshments and discussion of strategies for further public input in this process.

After the rally, the job is not over. Please consider attending and voicing your support at a very important follow up: The December 11 meeting of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) at 10 a.m. when this local board will decide on ODOT's final proposal for funding of this project.

If you cannot make the meeting, consider sending an email, calling, or writing the Mayor's action line 216/664-2900, and the ODOT project director, Craig Hebebrand, at 216/581-2100 to let ODOT know you support biking and walking the proposed I-90/71 bridge. This huge taxpayer investment—ODOT's largest ever—will affect the places we live, work and play for the rest of our lives. Any donations to the event organizers will be used to help pay for engineering and professional services to document ODOT miscalculations of the feasibility and cost to safely accommodate pedestrians and cyclists in this project.

For more information, please stay tuned and visit http://www.gcbl.org/innerbelt

Landscape Urbanism @ MOCA

The nifty thing about a blog is that I can defy chronological order. Linear time? Nah! I've been meaning to post about a landscape urbanism lecture I attended last Friday (and, separately, a happy hour about advancing Cleveland last Thursday). Apologies for the tardiness- it has taken me a little longer to pull my thoughts together on this.

The Landscape Urbanism::After the Post-Industrial City lecture was sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art - Cleveland and the architecture/design school at Kent State University. It featured an architect and a landscape architect, both from Milan, Italy. I had a bit of a hard time understand their accents so I assume I missed out on a lot of good stuff, but their imagery and basic concepts were excellent.

Essentially, they had been charged with creating a master plan for Milan. Oh, the opportunity! They focused especially on the "greening" of a post-industrial city. Sounds familiar? There's a reason why they were invited to Cleveland! Their basic concept was the "green ray." Eight greenways radiated out from the city center with the goal of making the city more permeable and more connected to the parks. I now am envisioning green rays radiating westerly, southerly, and easterly out from Voinovich park next to the Rock Hall for Cleveland... e.g., Euclid Ave but even greener.

Other gems I gleaned: design the landscape THEN the architecture; utilize microprojects; the goal is "not to project - to protect" (no more sprawl); make the inner city *new* so that it draws people back (can't offer the old one still); informal planning flowing into formal strategy; and marketing/branding of one's vision. To speak more about the last 'gem' there, they hired retirees to travel the proposed routes for their green ray project and to record their experiences in a diary. The diaries were complied and then published. What an innovative way to do the traditional 'site visit' with fresh eyes and to simultaneously build support!

Nolli connections

Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by a local author on urban design, mapping, and how cities have evolved. The author (whose name I am now conveniently blanking on) is a professor in the urban planning/design department at a local university (but not mine). I didn't glean much from the talk other the chance to see some very pretty looking historical maps and the chance to briefly see how the author had created a standard mapping schema to understand and compare hundreds of cities.

The one thing that really piqued my interest more than anything, though, was the concept of Nolli connections. A Nolli map is a special kind of map developed by a guy named Nolli (you guessed it!) to map Rome back in the 1700s. Briefly, it shows all public areas in white, and all private areas in black. It varies a bit from a traditional figure/ground or solids/voids map in that public area can include interior spaces that are open to the public, such as the Pantheon, small churches, etc. I've definitely seen the Nolli map before, and have even made a couple of my own for various projects. What I hadn't been alerted to before is a neat little feature of the Nolli map: showing interior connections. For instance, if one is in the center of a block and desiring to get to the other side, normally one has to walk down the streets to get to their final destination. However, a Nolli connection might cut through the block by walking through a church and then through a passageway out to the other side of the block. I do not think it was Nolli's express intention to show these connections, but he does provide a valuable resource.

We all have our own Nolli connections, though. They don't simply exist in Rome, and they may not be officially mapped, but they do exist. For example, at my undergraduate university, to get from morning swim practice to my 9am methods class at the opposite end of campus, I would take this much shorter route instead. I'd exit the athletic center, walk around the playing field, through the children's hospital to the atrium where I would purchase breakfast at the bagel stand, on through the regular hospital, over a walkway bridge, through a parking garage, through a parking lot, down a side street, and up a sorority house's driveway to get to the side door. Quite complicated, it did take me quite some time to learn that shortcut (and learn the official name: Nolli connection!). The nice thing was that it mostly inside, always a plus in these brutal winters, and that it was partially self-created. The hospital shortcut had been passed down from older swim team members, and I did my best to pass it on, too. The rest of that route? All mine. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only one who knew it. In a university of 10,000 students all navigating the same urban campus, sometimes it is nice to feel like one has their own space.