Park Design on a Dime

“What was that number again?  Are you sure?  Perhaps you forgot a zero somewhere?”  These thoughts ran through my head as I sit with Bethany Steiner, Community Planning Workshop’s associate director and my project lead, poring over the $$ numbers for the upcoming Detroit Park Plan project.  But in reality, I knew we would do great work.

Our mission: design a conceptual plan for the City of Detroit, Oregon’s first public park.  In a time of constrained budgets doing a lot with next to nothing is the new normal.  And more and more I’m realizing that for cities to be successful they must craft creative, resourceful, and still professional solutions to meet the social needs of their communities.

For the Detroit project this meant working with the client to create a succinct project scope and being very efficient in our process.  My teammate, Madeline Carroll, and I learned a lot through the process.  Having a great client group that was responsive and motivated with a wonderful sense of humor made the process more than a learning experience. It was fun too!

A Valuable Product
We realized that the ultimate goal of our project was to provide the City of Detroit with a vision for what the park should feel like, and what the major programmatic elements should be.  It was to be a vision that the City could use to seek grant funding, to communicate with landscape architects in upcoming project phases, and that could rally the community to get involved with the process.

We delivered.  The final product was a concise 35-page visioning document that described the project’s process; existing site conditions; design recommendations including illustrative character drawings; suggested project phasing; and an estimate of capital construction costs. 

Final Report >>> Former Elementary Site Park Plan, City of Detroit, Oregon September 2013

An Efficient Process
To keep within the budget, I created a very straightforward work process, which included three visits to the City of Detroit to set project goals and receive design feedback from the Parks Advisory Committee, City Council, and community members. Meetings agendas were planned effectively to make sure the discussion stayed on topic, without the conversation becoming rigid.  At each meeting we took assiduous notes that would later be integrated into the document.  It was critical that notes went digital immediately after the meeting so we wouldn’t have any guesswork in the future as to what any particular comment meant.

As a veteran team, Madeline and I needed to work seamlessly, giving and receiving feedback on the park designs and other parts of the plan document.  An added challenge was that Madeline, a recent MCRP and MLA graduate (Planning, Public Policy & Management, University of Oregon) had just moved to Portland, meaning that we met over skype to discuss the project.  However, this proved to be beneficial because we both needed to make sure any drawings or writing that we planned to discuss needed to be ready for review before we met.  In the end, that added to our capacity to work efficiently.

If I had another $3,000 dollars in this budget…
Although, Madeline and I are truly proud of the design package we produced, it’s hard for me to avoid fantasizing about what more I would like to include to ensure the success of this project.  If we had another $3k on the project, here’s my wish list for what we would explore:

• Funding sources for the project—state funding, private grants, and city fee structures
• A parks master plan for the entire city including opportunity siting for future park space
• Partnerships and community engagement opportunities that could bring down capital construction cost—i.e. opportunities for community members to plant trees and build park elements
• Maintenance planning
• Creating a stewardship group

But for right now, the Detroit Civic Park Plan is exactly what’s needed for the City of Detroit to move forward to the next step in this process.  Come 2020, Madeline and I are looking forward to visiting Detroit on Independence Day weekend, laying on the civic lawn with the fountain at our backs, watching the fireworks over Detroit Lake.

About the Author – Anya Dobrowolski is a project manager with Community Planning Workshop.  She received her Master’s of Landscape Architecture from the University of Oregon in 2011 and specializes in design for outdoor recreation sites and urban parks.  When she’s not working on landscape designs you might find her backpacking in the high country, riding her bicycle on country roads, or knitting by her wood stove.