TILLMAN DESIGN
Architectural & Graphic Design
Creating a City for All
Highlighted by the tumultuous combination of the pandemic and decades of rising systemic inequality, it’s clear that Minneapolis has never truly been a City for All. With our community considering how best to rebuild itself, this design proposes that the Longfellow neighborhood should be rebuilt in a way that prioritizes the empowerment of communities of color after lifetimes of systemic injustice and inequity, providing a healing neighborhood as a center for societal support, healing, and growth.
After the Protests
The protests following the death of George Floyd highlighted lifetimes of systemic failures and injustice. These events not only physically scarred the Longfellow neighborhood, but highlighted the community's loss of faith in public institutions.
This damage provides a unique opportunity to rebuild a neighborhood core prioritizing support of residents who’ve long struggled under the weight of overlapping crises and help prepare them for an uncertain future.
A State of Inequality
Despite Minnesota’s progressive image, the state ranks as one of the least racially equal in the United States. Black residents face systemic injustice in terms of housing, employment, education, and health, on top of a history of institutionalized racism and oppression by law enforcement. The pandemic has greatly exacerbated these disparities by hitting these populations particularly hard in terms of health outcomes, employment issues, homelessness and housing insecurity, educational disparities, and likelihood for businesses to permanently close.
Even prior to the pandemic, Minneapolis faced a crushing shortage of affordable housing options, pushing many away from job centers, walkable neighborhoods, public transit options, and quality schools; this will only get worse as inequality continues its expansion.
These disparities highlight clear needs to be addressed in reducing these inequities, resulting in the proposal’s interwoven array of support programs.
Building a Community Around Support
Through an interconnected network of holistic support, this Black community can begin to rebuild their stability and resilience.
The police station has been replaced with a trio of civic programs, symbolically balanced at the intersection of the protests:
A public safety office tests community-led law enforcement strategies, with successful practices shared with the city;
Social services support public safety through mental health and crisis management services;
A community center ensures public input and transparency into these evolving practices, while also connecting this new population with the surrounding neighborhood.
Widened pedestrian spaces at this intersection encourage future peaceful protests to hold institutions accountable. Existing community organizations and nonprofits displaced by the protests are rehoused, connecting them to the heart of the neighborhood while being ideally located to support the new populations.
Transitional and affordable housing provide housing stability to residents in need, while career programs, skills training, and business incubation create options for economic empowerment and social innovation. The marketplace provides flexible storefronts for aspiring entrepreneurs to workshop and jumpstart business ideas with real clients. These new businesses and employees would spread across the area, strengthening the community’s legacy of minority-owned businesses. A Black-owned bank supports prospective businesses and homeowners by providing fair financing. Daycare and youth programs support working parents while improving educational outcomes and complementing the local school programs.
New parkways create healthy recreational spaces while also reclaiming surfaces from impervious parking lots, reducing flooding and filtering runoff before it reaches the river, as well as supporting biodiversity, pollinators, and urban agriculture. These pull pedestrians from busy streets, creating safer alternative connections to public transportation and bike trails. These parkways and buildings’ green roofs greatly reduce the area’s heat island potential and energy usage, both crucial in reducing climate impacts. Access to green spaces has been shown to reduce the risk of obesity and diabetes (both of which increase vulnerability to COVID) and improve mental health. Urban green spaces also buffer against adverse health impacts, including reducing levels of nitrogen dioxide from road traffic (which can lead to a range of respiratory problems) and road noise levels (which over time can contribute to conditions such as increased blood pressure, higher stress responses, fatigue, and irritability).
A variety of exterior spaces provide safer spaces to meet and socialize during the pandemic - individual housing blocks are separated by shared spaces connected along a raised deck, providing opportunities for micro-communities and support networks to form; balconies have been prioritized, spaced for safe socialization with neighbors; wide parkways along Minnehaha provide flexible outdoor space that the various programs can use as needed.
Healing through Creative Expression
Wooden facade panels pay homage to the plywood that protected businesses’ windows and housed beautiful murals expressing solidarity with the Black community. The new panels are similarly intended to be used as a canvas for residents to process ongoing grief and trauma and create a shared sense of community, while providing an informal public gallery for local artists of color. At the marketplace, these panels allow entrepreneurs to quickly create unique business branding.
People all have valuable and unique experiences they can contribute to their communities if their energy isn't devoted to merely surviving.
By providing an interconnected network of services dedicated to helping these underserved communities find stability and balance in the foundations of everyday life, they have renewed capacity to grow and thrive, be resilient in the face of challenges, and support those around them, resulting in a stronger and more equitable city for all.
An Incredible Honor
This inaugural competition hosted by the University of Calgary resulted in a fascinating and inspiring collection of proposals for social change - wildly creative ideas focused around broad systemic issues such as coastal degradation, food insecurity, migrant worker populations, social justice in many forms, and so much more. This breadth and quality of work makes me feel all the more honored and thankful to the jury for honoring this project among such peers.
Explore the competition and these amazing proposals here.