healing cities design workshop

Proposal:

I am interested in this project because it is an opportunity to work locally on a tangible site and engage in design that truly makes a difference. I plan on designing a sort of farmers market/food truck pop-up that is adaptable to various scales and can provide the neighborhood of North Minneapolis with much needed nutrients as well as support and grow the existing local restaurants. Alongside that, a micro-garden could be integrated into the site for the purposes of education as well as self-sufficiency. The vacant lot between Bamba Professional African Hair and Braiding and The 927 building will serve as the site for this pop-up. During the riots in the summer of 2020, West Broadway was hit hard by looting and destruction, which left several historically significant establishments damaged or permanently closed, such as Brix Grocery and Meat. Currently, there is only one grocery store in this area (Cub Foods) and the most prevalent options for convenience are fast food spots such as McDonald’s, Little Caesars, and Popeyes. There is obviously a lot of healing that is needed in this area for a number of reasons, but I think honing in on food as an actionable theme for my project helps me to scale down my efforts and focus them to produce a design that accomplishes one thing very well. The prospect of working alongside locally owned restaurants such as Sammy’s Avenue Eatery and K’s Grocery and Deli is exciting- as it is a way for me to actually connect with people who work and live in North Minneapolis and base my design process largely off of their needs and opinions.

I am the right designer for this site because I enjoy working on a small scale. I feel as if I am able to best express clear ideas when working within the constraints of a confined site such as this one. Despite this constraint, I find it allows me to be more creative, actually, than I would be if I was given unlimited space. If that were the case, I don’t have any constraints guiding my design process or helping me choose the best option when iterating, and this lack of direction hinders my ability to be creative. While I don’t have any personal connection to the site, as I am largely unfamiliar with the neighborhood of North Minneapolis, my few visits to the site itself inspired me due to the sheer potential for growth and development that this area holds. After sharing a meal with a friend at Sammy’s Avenue Eatery, it became clear to me that creating a design focused around food and nutrition would be invaluable to the community and this revelation seemed to sort of guide me towards choosing this site and helped me to connect with it a bit better with the limited exposure that I have had.

For this project in particular, I plan on incorporating community history by engaging with the businesses that have been around the area for a significant amount of time and engaging in conversation with them in order to end up at a design that would truly be beneficial to them but also rewrite a history of wrongdoings in a way that has a positive impact on the future of North Minneapolis. In the past, I have had limited experience with public artwork or actual community engagement as most of the work I have done has been purely theoretical. However, in a previous workshop, we were tasked with creating a Little Free Library for a set of objects surrounding a certain theme. In this case, it was seeds and vegetables. It had to be site specific and was focused on location and community access. We chose to place ours next to Kingsfield Community Garden in Minneapolis, where the supplies and knowledge that the Little Free Library contained would work in tandem with the garden and function as an accessible extension of it. I plan for the pop-up that I design to operate in a very similar way, except with the local restaurants in the area. The experience that I gained from working on that project translates well to what I intend to do here from a programmatic standpoint.