596 Acres: Here’s the problem: Located primarily in areas of the city where low-income communities of color live today, more than a thousand vacant public lots languish behind fences, collecting garbage. One such lot was in Paula Segal’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 2010, she began talking to her neighbors about this lot. She gathered as much information as she could find about it and called a community meeting. That meeting led to more meetings, which led to Myrtle Village Green: an active, nearly 2-acre community space with garden beds, an outdoor movie screening area, a pumpkin patch, and an educational production and research farm. From then on, she thought, “How many more such lots are there in New York City?” She got access to city data and learned that, in 2001, 596 acres of public land were waiting for communities to transform them, and soon after, 596 Acres was born.

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: The 596 Acres team starts by translating the data available about vacant municipal land into information that can be useful in context, using customized mapping tools. With that knowledge in hand, they put signs on the fences of vacant city-owned lots that say, “This land is your land,” in English and Spanish, and explain which agency has control over the property. The signs also say that neighbors, together, may be able to get permission to transform the lot into a garden, park, or farm. They list the city’s parcel identifier, and information about the individual property manager handling the parcel for the agency, including a phone number.

The signs also connect neighbors to an online map and organizing web-tool called LivingLotsNYC.org and to 596 Acres’ staff, who steer and support residents through a bureaucratic maze in order to gain access to the space.

596 Acres takes on a supportive and advocacy role during each campaign — but residents remain the leaders. Each space, ultimately, is managed autonomously, transformed and maintained by volunteers and local community partners to gather, grow food, and play.

Results:

• Since 2011, neighbors have begun campaigns to transform over 200 sites.
• 596 Acres has steered groups through the process of creating new community organizations and helped these organizations get formal access to vacant lots to create 39 new community-managed spaces.
• Nearly all of them have become so valuable to their local and citywide communities that they have been permanently preserved as community spaces by the New York City municipal government. This strategy for activating the potential of vacant public land has been emulated in over a dozen cities around the globe, including Philadelphia and Melbourne.

Learn more from:

• 596 Acres
• Open-source version of the digital tool used by 596 Acres

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

Photo by dreamexplorer

The post ‘This land is your land’: Reclaiming public land for communities in Brooklyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I returned to Phoenix inspired.

But how was I going to find a place for a community garden?  Even when I found it, how would I go about getting the space zoned and approved? Unlike the City of Portland, Phoenix does not have a website encouraging community gardens.

In New York, 596 Acres has plenty of experience in working with municipalities to convert vacant lots into community gardens. Even more helpful, 596 Acres has produced an open source tool to map any city’s potential community garden spaces. Other cities have already customized the 596 Acres tool to reclaim vacant land for public use.

extracted from http://596acres.org/en/about/about-596-acres/

Hundreds of acres of vacant public land are hidden in plain sight behind chain-link fences in New York City, concentrated in neighborhoods disproportionately deprived of beneficial land uses. We are building the tools for communities to open all these rusty fences and the opportunities within them to improve the areas they live in. In response to a steady stream of inquiries, in 2013 we expanded our work to support communities organizing for control of warehoused private land.

596 Acres creates tools to help neighbors find the lot in their lives by:

(1) making municipal information available online and on the ground (e.g. by placing signs on vacant public land that explain a lot’s status and steps that the community can take to be able to use this land);

(2) providing education about city government and ways to participate in decisions that shape neighborhoods;

(3) assisting communities with legal support and campaign-development on land use issues;

(4) maintaining networks that allow communities to share knowledge and relationships with decision-makers;

(5) working with groups after they get access to land to build sustainable community governance as they become stewards of a public and inclusive resource; and

(6) advocating for municipal agencies to increase participatory decision-making surrounding public resources.

extracted from http://596acres.org/en/about/other-cities-copy/

Maps For Other Cities!

What if I’m in another city? Where do I start looking for land that my neighbors and I can use? 

The place to start is the City or County Property Register, which will tell you definitively who owns what.  Usually, the register is set up for use by those who have a particular property in mind. You’ll want to find out how to contact the office that maintains the Register in your city or county and call them: ask how to get a list or map of public land. Your City Planning Department might also be a help. We started our project with data, but if you have a particular property in mind, you’ll be able to follow the steps we outline on the advacacy resources page.

What if I want to see all the opportunities in my city? 

We’re creating a practice of building online tools neighbors can use to clear hurdles to community land access and of connecting land access advocates in ciites around the world with a set of tools and best practices, and one another. The tools turn city data into information about particular pieces of land and connect people to one another through simple social networking functions. The 596 Acres Team is available to consult with you on your project in another city. Contact us to discuss a fee-structure for customizing tools and tactics for your group or organization. We’re really proud of these partnerships:

• Grounded In Philly, with the Garden Justice Legal Initiative at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, funded by the Merck Family Fund and the Claneil Foundation.
• LA Open Acres with Community Health Councils (Los Angeles, California) and C-Lab (NYC), winner of the Goldhirsh Foundation LA2050 Competition.

• Living Lots, a prototype vacant lot activation tool for any city supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. We put the prototype together to meet the needs of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network‘s FarmCity Toolbox and created Living Lots NOLA.
• In May 2015, Eric Brelsford of 596 Acres served as consultant for the development of Parkdale People’s Map, a mapping tool for the Parkdale Neighborhood Land Trust in Toronto (Canada).
• In August 2015, Paula was a resident at Neighborhood Academy at Prinzesinnengarten (Berlin, Germany); the goal of the residency was to begin the process of making Berlin’s hidden commons visible to residents for potential reclamation. We created an online map and placed signs on Berlin’s potential “commons.”

You can also build your own version of 596 Acres’ tools. Groups around the world are doing just that:

• Heritage Montreal, an organization that works to promote and to protect the architectural, historic, natural and cultural heritage of Greater Montreal, adapted the Living Lots approach to vacant and vulnerable built sites here: the H-MTL Platform. The project allows people who live in Montreal to identify buildings that they believe should be preserved and then work together to preserve them.
• Lande, also built for Montreal, is a tool created based on 596 Acres’ best practices for resident-led transformation of vacant lots.
• GTECH Strategies, a leading land access and activation organization in Pittsburgh, liked our approach so much they captured it in an Request for Proposals with The City of Pittsburgh’s Planning Department to build a customized tool using municipal data calledLots to Love.
• After learning about 596 Acres’ map, Love Old Trafford Lots created a their own using available technology modeled on ours. They started by making their own data through a series of organized walks. The map is helping neighbors see possibilities and sieze them.
• 3000acres in Melbourne Australia borrowed our strategy and created their own tool. Instead of starting with municipal data, they started with a few sites that users submitted and explored the opportunities they presented by researching each one-by-one, then posting and acting on their findings. These opportunities are turning into growing spaces with the support of 3000acres staff.
• 2000acres in Sydney built on our strategies and the success of 3000acres in Melbourne.

Our code base, Living Lots^TM is open source and free to use; just be sure to attribute and make your improvements available for us and others to use. Code and detailed instructions available on GitHub.

Image Credits

File%3AEverett_Community_Garden.jpg By Finetooth (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Raiz from 596 Acres photo gallery

Photo by rickbradley

The post Project Of The Day: 596 Acres appeared first on P2P Foundation.