I found out that the absence of amenities such as community centers, gyms, restaurants that provide healthy food options has a significant impact on the residents’ quality of life in Coney Island. That allowed me to take a closer look at the neighborhood and the living situation of the residents, therefore, being able to come up with a temporary solution to improve residents’ lives. For my project, I created a tent that would be placed at Kaiser Park. It will be open during the whole school year for a few hours after school and will provide a safe space for children and a variety of activities which will help keep them entertained. Because Coney Island does not have social trust or a sense of community my goal for this project was to provide an environment where people could socialize.
I wanted to make the design of the tent as simple as possible to make it versatile and easy to set up. I purposefully made the outside material of the tent white to give an opportunity for the children, who are going to be using the tent, to create their own design thus making it fit their interests and their community.
The two sources that contributed to my research and my idea were City Life: Rankings (Livability) Versus Perceptions (Satisfaction) by Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn and Why Living in a Poor Neighborhood Can Change Your Biology by Andrew Curry. These articles gave me a clear idea of livability as a concept and provided additional information that informed me about the consequences of living in a poor neighborhood.
Before I began my project, my idea was to create a few proposals for different interventions which would benefit the community of Coney Island. After finishing the first one and listening to the feedback, I realized that people would like to see me do a little bit more of research so they could have a better understanding of the idea rather than having several proposals that only tell you about the concept on a surface level.
