'That's their future': Elementary students consulted to help City of Spokane with urban planning project

Yahoo

2 days ago

Jun. 9—Francis Scott Elementary's fifth-grade class peered through the chain-link fence surrounding their playground Monday to get a closer look at the lot just a block north of the school.
Students spouted lofty ideas for what could fit in the plot of dead grass: An indoor swimming pool. A gaga ball court. A gaming center featuring retro video games.
They retreated from the glaring mid-day sun to the school's colorful library to begin cycling through stations involving Minecraft, Legos and the urban design platform Streetmix, creatively reimagining their schoolyard and the area surrounding it.
This student workshop is the result of a collaboration between The City of Spokane Planning Team and Spokane Public Schools aimed at engaging students about community needs.
Leading the session was Carlos Felipe Pardo, a mobility and urban transport policy consultant who has worked on projects with the United Nations and the World Bank.
Having previously redesigned his hometown in Colombia using a video game, he enlisted his son, whom he refers to as "a genius in Minecraft," to help him understand the game. Then, he helped develop a two-day curriculum for inspiring children to care about infrastructure.
"Our role is to just create the spark and systematize everything that we come up with," Pardo said. "We're going to show it to everybody and say, 'This is what children would like to see there.'"
The event is part of the Smart Growth America Community Connectors Program, a national initiative helping small- and mid-sized cities restore communities impacted by divisive infrastructure.
"The classic example is federal highways that divide communities," said Justyn Huckleberry, a projects and research associate at the New Urban Mobility Alliance, a partner of the program. "And so I-90 is an example."
Though Interstate 90 stimulated the growth of industry and connected towns to Spokane, its construction came at the cost of community in the East Central nneighborhood. The historically diverse and working-class neighborhood was cut in half by the freeway, displacing residents and forcing small businesses to close as traffic redirected drivers away from their neighborhood.
Frances Scott Elementary, which is located less than 500 feet from the freeway, is just one part of the community still affected by the construction.
Eleven-year-old Juanita Geary has big ideas of what could fill the empty lot by the school.
"Probably a mall or a homeless shelter," Juanita said.
Sketching a map of the school in blue pen, she also envisioned larger sidewalks with fewer bumps for better accessibility for people in wheelchairs.
Charity Resian from The Carl Maxey Center attended Monday's session to facilitate the students' street designs on Streetmix and hear the ideas they have for their school.
As a part of the community connectors program, she immerses herself in the East Central neighborhood to ensure community members' needs are listened to and voiced.
A key part of reviving community is educating children, which is why events like these are crucial, she said.
"It's important that they know that they are included from a very young age, that their voices matter," she said. "And so such an activity is very, very important, and it's very powerful in a way of ensuring that these young kids grow knowing that they are part of this community."
Maren Murphy, a principal planner with the city's Planning & Economic Development Department involved with the project, suggested that the students' active imaginations will drum up ideas adults did not consider.
"The idea of bringing children, youth into planning is something that we are exploring and trying to do more of to think about the future," she said. "That's their future, and giving them a bit of say in their future is a really important part of what we want to do with planning."