To help our towns be attractive, healthy places for people to live, this year we are piloting a set of community design workshops, called Place Work[s]hop. Through these workshops, we are working in two communities to help them each identify their most important questions and hopes about their futures. Our next step is, through a community-led design workshop, to match up this wisdom from the community with ideas from local architects, planners, preservationists and more. In this way, we are hoping to help these towns proactively build a future based on their strengths – in other words, planning from the inside – out.
Place work[s]hop is built on 3 principles:
• Providing a low-cost design and visioning process to the small towns of the Eastern Shore
• Focusing on the few most pressing questions facing a community
• Valuing and empowering residents and volunteers as equal partners in placemaking
Place work[s]hop is a process composed of 4 phases:
• Understanding Place: researching the historical and contemporary context of the town
• Framing the Right Question: investigating the most pressing issues for this place
• Discovering Collective Answers: partnering local residents and regional designers to identify practical answers to the pressing questions
• Shifting Capital: empowering the town to take the lead on implementation with support from ESLC and Urban Dialogues.
Pilot Project 1: East New Market
Together with our partner Urban Dialogues we are working closely with the Town of East New Market. For the past few weeks, residents from across East New Market have been patrolling their town with disposable cameras, taking pictures of things they are proud of in town and things they would like to see improved. Together, residents took over 1,500 photographs of their town.
On Friday, October 2 at the East New Market Volunteer Fire Company, ESLC, Urban Dialogues and the town exhibited the photos. More than 65 residents attended along with regional preservationists, politicians and planners. In addition to reviewing the images collected by their neighbors, attendees to the exhibition commented on the photos and the issues that had been drawn forth by the exercise with post-it notes placed directly on the photo posters. Visit our Image Library to see photos from the event!
The next phase of the project will be held October 23-25, combining local expertise (possessed by residents) with creative expertise (possessed by volunteer planners, designers, etc.) in a 2 ½ day design workshop. The workshop will focus on translating the community photographic research and resulting areas of interest and concern into specific goals, visions and ultimately projects.
