July 13, 2016 by CallisonRTKL

Creating Community: pop-up parks provide active, engaging and inclusive public space

CallisonRTKL’s Eduardo Castaneda discusses how public projects can go a long way in improving urban neighborhoods

Last April, residents of Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood opened their doors to find a pop-up park. For four days, the park was open to the public, drawing in guests with programmed activities, outdoor movies, music and art. The Crowdus Pop-Up Park was created by CallisonRTKL, TBG and Ash+Lime for the CNU 23 Conference held by the Congress for the New Urbanism’s North Texas Chapter. Our team included Michael Friebele, Yu Xin, Naishi Bu, Steve Knox, Carlos Mireles and Susan Hubenthal and me.

While the park was only a four-day experiment, it helped demonstrate the importance of active, engaging and inclusive public space. The Congress for the New Urbanism’s North Texas Chapter held a series of workshops with the Deep Ellum Community Association to ensure that the park met community needs. Through these workshops, the local design community came together with the Deep Ellum neighborhood and the City of Dallas to use crowdfunding and crowdsourcing to create a series of installations that could be repurposed throughout the neighborhood.

The resulting space created a dialogue between the visitors and the neighborhood and organized a space where visitors could learn about Deep Ellum as it spread out before them. In creating this park, we were able to design a public realm that blurred the boundary between landscape and architecture and redefined the concept of public urban space. The Crowdus Pop-Up Park can be adapted and evolve differently based on the necessity of the specific neighborhood while still maintaining the ability to host great variety of activities.

Our project was recently showcased at the annual exhibit from AIA’s Center for Emerging Professionals (CEP), which highlights the most creative new plans, projects, art and design from architecture and design’s rising generation. The theme of the EP Exhibit 2016 was It Takes a Community. This was a huge honor for us, because community was the central goal of the Crowdus Pop-Up Park.

The project demonstrated that strong community backing, good design and initiative can go a long way in the improvement of our neighborhoods. As Deep Ellum moves forward with broader plans to create a permanent park, our effort served as a means of trial and error—a real life study model—and everyone involved learned so much from the effort.

Design Future Dallas, a grassroots organization of architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners and creatives, recently introduced and enabled a competition to redesign Crowdus Street as a pedestrian-only public park. Building off the successful “Pop-Up Park,” the goal is a vehicle-free zone that can serve as a tactical and complementary connection for the streets of Deep Ellum.

People love what Deep Ellum stands for, and coming to the pop-up park, they felt that they could actually experience the neighborhood’s personality. It was really good to see people excited about this because it’s their neighborhood, and this was something they wanted for a long time. The overall goal was to have a productive discussion about how to create a more public space in the neighborhood and others like it. Ask anyone involved in the effort, and they will tell you with enthusiasm what a positive addition this project was for the neighborhood. If we can turn a 4-day concept into a permanent place where we can all gather and strengthen community, then we will have created something that truly reflects Deep Ellum’s character.

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CallisonRTKL

For more than five decades, Callison and RTKL have created some of the world’s most memorable and successful environments for developers, retailers, investors, institutions and public entities. In 2015, our two practices came together under the Arcadis umbrella, expanding our sphere of influence and the depth and breadth of our resources. Our team is comprised of nearly 2,000 creative, innovative professionals throughout the world who are committed to advancing our client’s businesses and enhancing quality of life.