John Hinkel Park / Grand Opening

When the beautiful historic clubhouse of John Hinkel Park burned down in 2015, neighbors and Berkeley city staff came together to discuss the future of the park and its users. Built in 1918, the redwood clubhouse structure served its purpose for 73 years, officially closing its doors in 1991 due to the estimated $1-2 million-dollar repair costs to restore it to habitability. After the 2015 fire, the city (Berkeley) was able to receive insurance money, which planted the seed of innovation. At the same time, this allowed John Hinkel Park – like a Phoenix – “to rise from the ashes,” and reinvigorate the experience of the park that embodies the cultural and architectural history of Berkeley at the turn of the 20th century.

Toward the end of 2015, Carducci Associates and diverse stakeholders – including city staff, Council Members, and invested neighbors – collaborated to envision a new chapter for John Hinkel Park. Over five years, after multiple community meetings and the approval of the Landmark Commission, the community decided to replace the clubhouse with enhanced site access, ADA improvements, unique site furnishings and a picnic terrace that would maintain the park’s natural aesthetic while celebrating the past that John Hinkel himself gave to the neighborhood.

Carducci Associates leveraged the park’s history through the use of salvaged materials from the clubhouse, such as wood and stone, and designed custom features that highlight the park’s past for present and future users. Some of these features include rock walls, rock and wood benches, and picnic tables topped with 100-year-old salvaged redwood to preserve the memory of the clubhouse’s original location. If one were to examine the picnic tables, one can see the chars and scars of the blaze that paved the way for the park’s renewal.

Finally, after years of waiting, Carducci Associates is honored and excited to say that John Hinkel Park can once again serve as a space where neighbors and friends can gather to make new memories. After the Ribbon Cutting Ceremony (July 31, 2020), visitors practiced social distancing while enjoying the renewed park. There were plenty of smiles that even face coverings could not mask.

Thank you to the City of Berkeley, the Landmark Commission, and the John Hinkel Park community for entrusting this special project to Carducci Associates. May John Hinkel Park continue to flourish in all of its cultural and natural beauty.

Learning and Unlearning Community Engagement

When a project impacts the quality of life of a particular community, the designer, client, and stakeholders are each responsible for the outcome. A community is defined by the size, complexity and histories of a group of people connected by a common interest. The broad topic of “community engagement” is constantly changing in pedagogy. Carducci Associates continually investigates forms of engagement to ensure positive outcomes for public and community-focused projects. As fellow coworker Wesley Bexton states, the best approach to all our community outreach experiences is grounded in honesty, humility, and compassion.

During nearly two years of work at Carducci Associates, I have experienced several scales of design and planning community engagement processes. Whether we’re discussing a small neighborhood park or a school campus, my observations are grounded in my involvement in activism as a student.

Unlearning is a process that identifies outdated, restrictive models and replaces them with improved, more inclusive practices. Unlearning requires the perseverance to reflect on knowledge, skills, and outcomes of previous models. Our current model emphasizes the designer’s role as facilitator. The physical layout of a meeting is a good example of nurturing the unlearning process: the designer shifts from leading at the front of the room, to facilitating as one among a circle of participants, where both can feel more comfortable speaking and listening to each other.

Through my education, I have defined guidelines to foster a safe and productive space for decision-making tailored to the community involved in a specific project:

• A positive outcome depends on preparation; in advance, the facilitator drafts an agenda.
  
• At the meeting, the facilitator sets objectives for the discussion while clarifying their role as listener as opposed to leader of the conversation.
  
• The facilitator should be aware of participant’s goals as much as their own. Begin the meeting with each attendee sharing a brief introduction and goal for the meeting to create a shared language of diverse perspectives.
  
• Throughout the meeting, the facilitator listens to and documents all suggestions and concerns and provides honest responses where needed to assure no false promises or hopes.
  

The following experiences at Carducci have inspired new strategies for a more effective approach to community and stakeholder meetings.

Le Conte Elementary School, Berkeley

As experienced by Associate Principal Wesley at LeConte Elementary School, a site committee led the development of a landscape master plan and a resulting capital improvement projects for immediate development. During the final meeting of the site committee prior to board approval, a large group of parents in attendance communicated they had only just learned of the planning process, and had missed the opportunity to participate. This group had previously conducted an independent study that would have informed the master plan’s development, which in turn would have led to different development priorities.

“We needed to find a way in that meeting to unlearn, with our site committee, the process we had assumed would occur,” Wesley states, “and as a group expand the discussion to include these additional community members in a way that respected the work already accomplished by the site committee, and equally respect the points of view held by the independent group. We spoke to district decision makers who agreed to extend the community process so that the additional input could be incorporated, and were able to schedule several more meetings to address the expanded discussion in a meaningful way.

We created a community input process that allowed us to visualize critical issues for the campus through the lens of both the staff and the students in a way that was immediately apparent and accessible to the group. We correlated the data gathered by the independent group with the data we’d gathered through our own process, and demonstrated the correlation to our expanded group. The additional input didn’t ultimately change the master plan itself, but dramatically changed key priorities, which led to a very different capital improvement scope that addressed needs identified by both students and the independent group.”

Washington and Rosa Parks Elementary Schools, Berkeley

For Washington and Rosa Parks Elementary Schools, Wesley and I applied lessons learned from the LeConte community meetings. While flexibility and redirecting decision-making are very important skills, using media that communicates across different user groups is vital to retrieve genuine feedback. We used the community input process created for LeConte to generate feedback from both staff, and students. This process asks basic questions that can be answered simply or in narrative form and asks participants to map out their ideal campus plan, as well as identify specific “problem areas” on the site. We interpret the narrative usually to make it accessible to the site committee; and additionally graphically represent concepts and issues identified on the campus maps onto a plan that usually weights each concept – a word map – to help guide the decision-making process. This input process generates what was called by an architect on one committee, “the most democratic design process [he’d] encountered.” The exploration of playground program informs the master plans and the capital improvements prioritized for that summer. In the end, the input gathered, highlighted student needs that led our site committee to critical discussions re-envisioning campus program, and distilled a campus design favorable to all stakeholders. This project not only changed the structure and breath of play experiences for the students, but also increased the quality of interactions with students for the teachers and staff both on the school yard and in the classroom.

John Hinkel Park, Berkeley

Researching the stakeholders connected to this park - neighbors, parents and children – as well as the structures regulating the park – a historic landmark title – improved our preparation for these community meetings. As a result, we were able to create goals for the project aligned with a number of competing values held by stakeholders.

Hosting the community meeting at the site allowed us to address barriers in both design process and topography. Upon seeing the meeting in process, park neighbors, including contractors and designers, joined the project. Because a key site challenge was its steep topography, participants unaccustomed to contour maps could walk the site with us, locate places simultaneously on the plan drawings and in the park, and come to a better understanding of design decisions.

As this process continues today, it is clear that extracting information from the park’s users about their needs allows for us as designers to communicate to the client the possibilities of engagement. The relationship between the client, stakeholders and designers allows for inspiring interactions yielding designs that increase impact and reduce inefficiencies.

City Parks and Recreation Today

A foundation of trust with stakeholders goes hand-in-hand with a productive and valuable community engagement process. The knowledge and skills invested by the community in the design process inspires exciting outcomes and experiences for the end user. At a recent interview for an East Bay landscape architect on-call position, we encountered reminders of language barriers and political climate. By hiring a Spanish-speaking staff member in their Parks and Recreation Department, the city noted an increase in engagement from Spanish-speaking community members in parks and recreational issues. Building trust through listening and fostering an accessible and safe environment better ensures that public facilities serve the entire community. Our learning and unlearning of engagement practices is fluid, to meet the needs of the community and create stronger partnerships.

Karly Behncke and Wesley Bexton, your neighborhood designers

Edited by Petra Marar

Contested Turf in San Francisco Bay Area Sports Field Design / Designing for Synthetic Turf Fields

Sports fields provide a surprisingly complex terrain for landscape architects. Multi-use athletic fields ground significant contemporary themes in landscape architecture’s professional and academic worlds: the duality of the natural and the artificial, ecology as the protagonist of a design, and the unsung role of maintenance. Conversations during their site design process can play into a cultural aversion to material artifice or into the aesthetic preference for an evergreen lawn inherited from England.

Benefits to Synthetic Turf Field Applications

The following land use, ecological, and athletic issues contribute to the growing use of synthetic turf:

- conflicting demands of natural turf for maintenance (which, like other biotic things, needs to breathe) and of a large population for play space in the expensive San Francisco Bay Area,
- shrinking maintenance budgets,
- creating a literal ‘even playing field,’ by avoiding soil’s lumpiness and grading for drainage, and
- growing public demand for low-water, drought-resilient landscapes.

Evolving Scientific Research and Site Design

But a synthetic turf sports field also raises emotionally-charged concern over its impact on the environment and on health and safety of athletes, especially children.

On public projects, landscape architects are caught in between those convinced synthetic turf is harmful and those convinced synthetic turf is safe, each citing different studies. Anticipating this challenge, Carducci Associates mediates between the diverse priorities of public field users, scientific findings, and clients. Bringing scientists, with expertise in the material components of synthetic turf and in research processes, into design and public processes helps.

Within the nuanced process of designing a synthetic turf field, infill has become one of the most controversial components. A granular material that works as a synthetic stand-in for soil, infill is often comprised of crumbled, recycled rubber tires. Crumb rubber has raised concerns nationally and locally, from a recent artificial turf installation at the Beach Chalet Fields in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, to a multi-agency federal initiative launched in February 2016 known as the Federal Research Action Plan on Recycled Tire Crumb Use on Playing Fields and Playgrounds. In June 2015, the California Environmental Protection Agency the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) committed under a contract with CalRecycle to conduct a new study on synthetic turf and potential human health impacts.

While crumb rubber is under scrutiny, user groups are calling for infill alternatives that contain materials like recycled athletic shoes, cork and coconut, or other synthetic materials. The Los Angeles Unified School District and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation no longer use crumb rubber. In the greater San Francisco Bay Area, dozens of facilities (including schools, public parks, the Facebook Corporate Campus) have used infill alternatives fabricated with cork, organic fiber, recycled turf, sand and TPE (a plastic).

Carducci Associates’ Leadership in Sports Field Design

For community meetings, Carducci Associates has analyzed more than a dozen synthetic turf infill materials with its team of experts: Principals Bill Fee and Vince Lattanzio, Associate Principal Wesley Bexton, Senior Associate Alvin Tang, and Associate Philip Dinh (bios here). While comparing playability, cost, material components, and maintenance, alongside a timeline of political, funding, and construction processes, we record and respond to public questions and concerns. Attendees’ priorities at recent community meetings focus on long-term ecological, economic and health concerns:

1. Install a non-crumb rubber field that allows for healthy recreation.

2. Study the lifecycle costs of crumb rubber and alternatives, beyond capital cost, to address disposal and longevity.

3. Consider phasing strategies that permit for more expensive alternative infills.

4. Cost is less of a priority than health and safety.

The results of current federal and state studies on crumb rubber infill have yet to surface in part because the health impacts of exposure will be studied during the hottest months of 2017. While agencies, designers and athletes wait for the outcome, landscape architects should study and incorporate the research findings that are available on crumb rubber and alternative infills, and engage in outreach and discussion with athletes, coaches and families on their preferences for and experiences with synthetic turf fields and different infill.

References

California Environmental Protection Agency Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, “Synthetic Turf Studies,” last modified March 9, 2017, https://oehha.ca.gov/risk-assessment/synthetic-turf-studies.

Gutierrez, Melody, “US to mount multiagency study of health risks of synthetic turf,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 2016, http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/US-to-mount-multiagency-study-of-health-risks-of-6827632.php

United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Federal Research on Recycle Tire Crumb Used on Playing Fields,” last modified December 30, 2016, https://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/federal-research-recycled-tire-crumb-used-playing-fields.

Community Workshop for Hill Recreation Area

A community design workshop for the Hill Recreation Area Master Plan was held on August 9th to give residents one last chance to provide input before the approval process begins. Many community members turned out to the see the master plans and listen to Vince Lattanzio discuss the design elements.

More about the workshop can be found at here.