Chinatown

User-Centered Park Design for Improved Air Health

Co-design materials and session with members of the Chinese restaurant workers' 9-Man team.

Beginning in January 2018, the Air Partners group partnered with the Chinatown Community Land Trust (CCLT) and Chinatown Progressive Association (CPA) to co-create strategies for improving usability of an urban park while simultaneously incorporating designs aimed at reducing pollutant exposure. We engaged deeply in a user-oriented design process to better understand park users, park use cases, and opportunities for park improvements that incorporated air quality improvements. We conducted over 50 interviews with stakeholders and users of Reggie Wong Park, ranging from 9-Man players and coaches to Chinese community leaders, local developers and business owners, and local elected officials. The team identified the most impactful role that Air Partners could play in the process, generated insights about park use cases, researched comparables for outdoor air quality interventions, developed park user personas, generated insights about the acceptability of proposed interventions, and researched costs of proposed interventions.

In partnership with researchers from the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) research group, we collected and analyzed air quality data, utilizing air quality instrumentation in an air monitoring lab. Results revealed that the concentrations of pollutants were consistently high (> 300 ppm carbon monoxide; > 40 ppm nitrogen oxide; > 40,000 particles per cm3), but that there was very little discernible trend in elevated concentrations associated with a particular wind direction. Subsequent air modeling, done in partnership with consultants from Linnean Solutions and incorporating 3-D CAD models of the built environment around RWP, indicated that no matter the prevailing wind direction, winds at RWP deflected off buildings, created eddies, and manifested out of the South. These results, summarized in a co-design workshop presentation, suggested that engineered solutions for improving air quality at RWP should focus on mitigating pollutant-laden air flow from the southerly direction. 

One important insight from the process was that despite high pollutant concentrations revealed by air monitoring, air quality was rarely mentioned by park users as a concern or a desired park improvement. Instead, user-identified park interventions fell into the categories of comfort, sports, health, and beauty -- with pollution-deflection walls only identified as part of an overall strategy for ensuring the health of users in the park.

Further, interventions solely focused on air quality improvement (such as an enclosed bubble over the park) were ubiquitously identified as undesirable in co-design sessions. There were, however, opportunities to adapt proposals for improved park usability to incorporate air quality improvements. For example, many park users wanted to increase privacy, given RWP's location near a busy intersection. By incorporating a vegetative sound wall on the south and west sides of the park, a common approach to improving ambient air quality by deflecting polluted air around a particular area, an intervention could achieve user goals of improved privacy, increased beauty, and added vegetation while also improving air quality. 

We iterated on intervention proposals with users, generating a theory of change for park interventions, creating a requirements table for interventions, and considering unintended consequences of proposed interventions. We facilitated a 3-hour long community charrette, designed to present the results of our user-oriented design process, review proposed interventions, and gain additional input and buy-in from stakeholders in preparation for writing a proposal to Boston's Community Preservation Act (CPA) to fund the design, engineering, and implementation of park interventions. The workshop was advertised in the community via a flyer in Mandarin and English, and students created a presentation to guide the charrette, as well as a set of posters for charrette co-design, and a facilitation guide. A recap of the charrette is provided here.

Leveraging insights gained in the charrette, the Air Partners team crafted a recap presentation to transfer key knowledge to community stakeholders and co-wrote a proposal to the City of Boston Community Preservation Act with the Chinatown Community Land Trust (CCLT) and submitted early Fall of 2018. The proposal was funded in full ($100,000), with additional support totaling $50,000 pledged by local developers. The project is currently in the final stages of design and engineering before planned groundbreaking in 2022.

The majority of proposed park improvements to RWP are focused on making the park a more usable, beautiful community center in Chinatown, which reflects the truly user-centered nature of our process. We were nonetheless able to incorporate air quality interventions into improvements that stakeholders proposed, which led to a strong sense of buy-in and partnership between our air health interventions and the community. This buy-in resulted in a community-driven initiative that continues to be carried by the community since Air Partners stepped out of a more active role, realizing the Air Partners goal of equipping community partners for advocacy and action, as opposed to owning those processes ourselves.