Clemson Collaboration

While attending a meeting of the Parks and Recreation Committee of Manhattan Community Board 10, the A. Philip Randolph Neighborhood Alliance (the Alliance) became the beneficiary of a serendipitous act. The then-Vice Chairwoman of the committee, Ms. Karen Dixon, recommended to her committee that the Alliance would be a good candidate to collaborate with a university that was looking to introduce Tactical Urbanism to communities lacking in public investment of their public spaces. Her recommendation could not have been offered to the Alliance at a better time. The Alliance had recently closed its Community Visioning Survey where over two hundred (200) community members responded to questions about improvements to the physical space, programming for the space, quality of life concerns, community engagement of the space, and the demography of the participants. The Survey was conducted by the Alliance during its tenure as part of the Community Visioning Cohort led by Partnership for Parks, a joint program of the City Parks Foundation and NYC Parks.

Working under the direction of Associate Professor B. D Wortham, graduate students in the Architecture and Urban Planning programs at Clemson University, members of the Alliance were introduced to using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions designed to trigger and catalyze long-term change at A. Philip Randolph Square. Those graduate students (add their names) produced visualizations of some of the data collected from community members in the Community Visioning Survey conducted by the Alliance. The visualization were based on the visionary infographics created [add hyper link here] by a pioneering team of black sociologists who used those captivating designs drawn by hand to explain systemic and institutional racism to the world.