March 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 44

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dialogue, along with documenting
the process through rigorous quantitative and qualitative summaries
of these efforts, started to build trust
between the design team, BREC, the
public and community leaders.
Open houses that enabled direct
interactions with members of the
community became the primary
format for engaging the public.
The team hosted these open houses
within different neighborhoods and
scheduled them at multiple times
throughout the day to ensure that
residents could attend. Presentations were kept to a minimum, offering the community ample opportunities to make themselves heard.
To broaden engagement further,
the design team created online experiences that went far beyond a
traditional survey to accompany
each step of the process. These
tools, such as Sasaki's digital CoMap, which visually maps user experience to collect data, provided a

quantitative view of the way people
perceive the area and used the park.
The team conducted a statistically representative door-to-door
survey across the entire parish. This
information was used to validate
the demographic makeup of sample
participants, as well as gather more
responses to a number of questions.
Across all forms of public engagement, the team aggregated the
anonymous input to identify trends,
ensuring the feedback was directly
informing the park's master plan.
Once the master plan process
concluded, BREC and the design
team demonstrated their commitment to the project by hosting a large
" Party-in-the-Park " event, which
nearly 1,000 people attended. People engaged with the unveiled master plan and heard words of support
from community leaders at the event.
This was branded as the " kick-off " to
the implementation phase, framing a
continuum of planning and design
for a built outcome. The master plan
laid out a series of programs and
ideas that will be rolled out during
the detailed design and construction
phase to continue demonstrating
progress at intervals.

Balancing Natural Assets
and Site Constraints with
Community Desires
The vision for the master plan is,
first and foremost, inspired by the
ideas and preferences voiced by the
community of East Baton Rouge
Parish. Four guiding principles for
Greenwood Park were created from
input received from the community:
* Celebrate Louisiana's Nature:
Embrace the ecology of Greenwood Park and create sustainOver the 10-month long master plan process, more than 4,000 people were engaged in East Baton Rouge and beyond.
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able opportunities for people to
experience the landscape
* A Park for Every Day and the
Big Day: Provide a balance of
everyday neighborhood amenities and destination activities
that are a regional draw
* Open Up and Reach Out: Provide
physical connectivity for walkers,
bikers and drivers to make the park
the heart of the parish
* Welcome and Grow: Put community at the heart of the park's
design and implementation
To ensure the master plan is
grounded in reality and focused on
implementation, the design team articulated a number of opportunities
and constraints, which were born out
of a rigorous site analysis and used to
inform the physical design of the site.
The analysis began to drive a design vocabulary that was shaped
by the site's physical beauty as
well as its history - ensuring that
decisions about what to remove
and what to maintain were considered with the site's context in
mind. Economics of the site also
were factored into decisions to
make certain the design could be
implemented. For example, recent
improvements to the central waterfront area, along with relatively
flat and clear conditions, drove the
team to flip the entrance of the zoo
to be more integrated with the central waterfront area and to create a
new visitor experience that unified
the park into one cultural campus.

Thinking About Community
Impact Before It Happens
From the outset of the project, BREC
and the Sasaki-led design team realized community outreach needed to
go beyond design input to achieve
true community partnership; the
master plan suggestions needed to be
baked into decision-making and play
March 2020 - Parks & Recreation

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