New Haven Independent

The meeting of minds occurred at a public brainstorming session hosted by the Urban Design Workshop on Saturday. For the second time in 12 years, neighbors joined forces with a team architects led by Alan Plattus (pictured) to imagine a ten-year plan for their neighborhood.

Although utopian visions were encouraged, the workshop was intended to generate ideas for concrete changes. In 1995, the same event led to a slew of new construction projects, including the Timothy Dwight School on Edgewood Avenue, where Saturday’s meeting was held. This time, many neighbors focused on issues of sustainability, asking for more green spaces, bike paths and better traffic conditions.

All day long, groups of twos and threes trickled into the gymnasium of TD Elementary, where architecture students and Yale faculty had set up tables with themes: Education, Sustainability, Neighborhood Character, Traffic, and Commercial. Students at each table jotted down residents’ ideas and then got to work, sketching ideas onto large pads of paper.

At the traffic table, for example, residents could redraw their part of their street plan on tracing paper, and discuss their priorities, such as reducing speed on Whalley Avenue, with planners. Architects noted their suggestions in a diary which would later be incorporated into a master plan for the neighborhood.

Many neighbors paid special attention to the sustainability table, hosted by Jim Axley, a professor at the Yale School of Architecture who specializes in green issues. Axley said he welcomed the opportunity to hear suggestions from the community, and urged contributors to be as bold or fanciful with their visions as possible.

“People come up to us to discuss the concerns they have,” he said. “We try to encourage higher aspirations, not just immediate concerns.”

In preparation for the workshop, Axley and his students set up colorful displays highlighting the parks and green spaces around New Haven. They had plenty of ideas about how to make the city greener.

One way was to focus on untapped resources within the Dwight neighborhood, Axley said. Many housing developments have interior courtyards that can be transformed into green spaces if the residents agreed to let down their fences. Some neighbors had already taken this initiative, forming community “micro-associations” that focused on sustainability. Axley said he would like to see that pollution-beating model extended to the entire neighborhood.

He also had larger plans for the New Haven’s green future. Pointing to a map of city parks (pictured), Axley described an old unfinished plan to create a continuous corridor of natural land — a “green necklace” — around the city by linking up its various green spaces. Increasing the amount of vegetation in the city would make the ground more permeable, he said, reducing water drainage problems and countering pollution from cars.

The idea for a “green necklace” was first floated in 1910 by Frederick Law Olmsted, a famous landscape architect who designed, among many other projects, Central Park in New York. Asked if he thought Olmsted’s plan is feasible, Axley answered that it didn’t go quite far enough.

The ultimate solution of sustainability, he said, would be to create a “green veil” over New Haven by integrating the city into its regional setting of parks and preserves. Axley said he originally gave the “green veil” to his students as a design problem. But he didn’t think it was entirely unrealistic.

“We’re used to thinking at that scale,” he said. “Small or large, it’s still an intellectual game.”

During a round-up session Saturday afternoon, panelists presented a condensed version of what they had gathered from meeting with Dwight neighbors throughout the day. Ed Mitchell, who oversaw the Commercial table, said he would like to see serious changes on Whalley Avenue, starting with a traffic-slowing swathe of grassy land down its middle. To improve the street’s visual signature, he also proposed creating a “green buffer zone” to shield passersby from the parking lots.

“The Whalley Avenue commercial area is fragmented by parking spaces,” he said. “We discussed ways of a green buffer zone and moving parking back from the street.”

Residents also expressed interest in creating an “elaborate network” of long-distance bike paths throughout New Haven, he said. Other panelists suggested smaller improvements to the Dwight neighborhood, notably on the issue of traffic. They proposed deploying speed bumps and rumble strips, as well as installing large-scale artwork to adjust the flow of traffic around schools.

At the end of the meeting, Alan Plattus suggested that accomplishing a comprehensive neighborhood plan requires a political will for change, as well as collaboration between different interest groups.

“A lot of things we want to do involve collaboration,” he said. Bringing community groups together to discuss the neighborhood’s future, he added, was necessary to create a “political fabric that can then work toward undertaking collaborative projects.”