VISION
The Five Points community is one of the most vibrant communities in the Milwaukee area, filled with some of the most hard-working, caring, and ambitious individuals our team has had the pleasure of working with. This neighborhood is part of a story that involves many in the area: poverty, limited access to healthy food, and crime have incubated poor physical wellness, mental health challenges, and a generation of children who fear the streets.
In 2018, the Five Points Neighborhood Association (5PNA) sought to change all of this: through cutting edge strategies like urban agriculture, “eyes on the street” crime prevention, and locally sourced, community-grounded construction, the 5PNA launched a campaign to bolster and revitalize this beautiful community.
For many Milwaukee residents in this neighborhood, a variety of problems stand in the way of getting out and moving around. The area is lacking open space, especially green space, which inhibits the community’s potential for interacting with their environment. Five Points Neighborhood association saw this as an opportunity to better the neighborhood: they saw the possibility of an inclusive, clean, green space that benefits the people around them. Raised beds were adapted to allow gardening for all ages all types of mobility, and large selections of attractive plant life were researched and proposed with the intention of drawing the community into the shared space. The park will soon serve as a beautiful shared space for residents to commune for experiences they may not have already had, like gardening in an urban city, and encourage a better life for the people of the area.
Study
Our team has spent a full year studying the urban planning philosophies of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past century, including de Certeau, Desmond, and Davis, conducting precedent studies on the nation’s most innovative neighborhood revitalization projects, and meeting with city officials and local entrepreneur visionaries.
Talks with people like Alderwoman Coggs, Will Allen, and MKE Plays representatives have been deeply inspirational in developing a comprehensive understanding of how a project like this succeeds and survives long into the future.
RESULTS
As the project developed, we worked to get involved in every aspect of the project: meeting with community members, creating technical diagrams, giving presentations, and even going to the site to wash bricks and haul building materials. After eight months of dedicated work, the team has transformed the project from a tentative wishlist and some community inspiration into an extensive design, factoring in several design pivot points to meet the community’s every possible need.
The MSOE team employed innovative designs, incorporating cutting edge urban agriculture installations with a solar array and food forest. These designs developed along with our coursework and engineering experience, beginning with notebook sketches and developing into physical models, CAD drawings, and 3D renderings. We went above the original scope of the project, working to help develop a sculpture art feature based off of concrete segments of a demolished factory building with historical significance to the area.
Through months of careful study, meetings with the 5PNA, consultation with local artist Evelyn Terry, workshops with local elementary school students, and independent surveys of community residents, the Milwaukee School of Engineering Five Points Park team created a comprehensive report detailing our findings, renderings, and recommendations.
In late March 2019, the MSOE team presented the full report of the park development plan to extremely positive reception at the Five Points Neighborhood Association general meeting. This presentation was accompanied with the twenty-six page report detailing each recommended park addition through maps. The 5PNA board plans on voting on the proposal within the next couple of months.
