RALEIGH, NC | FALL 2020

          This client based workshop project was developed for and presented to the City of Raleigh's Departments of City Planning and Parks and Recreation to support their ongoing planning efforts relating to the development of Dorothea Dix Park. Dix Park is a visionary project currently underway just outside the heart of downtown Raleigh that over the next 20-30 years is transforming just over 300 acres of underutilized land into one of the largest urban parks in the nation. For 150 years, the land was originally part of the Spring Hill Plantation and for the next 160 years it was the site of North Carolina's first and largest mental health facility - Dorothea Dix Hospital. For the past decade, the land has also served as the headquarters for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and currently hosts dozens of acres of public-use green space. With the closure of the site's main hospital in 2012, Dix Hill lost its primary anchoring use and a vision was soon developed to transform the old hospital's campus and surrounding land into a versatile green hub for the city of Raleigh, complete with a variety of six unique pastoral and activated landscapes. However, such a massive investment in public infrastructure and green amenities as planned for Dix Park has been demonstrated to exacerbate issues of gentrification in surrounding communities and place long term residents nearby at risk of being priced out of their own neighborhoods. Therefore, the City Planning and Parks Departments of Raleigh partnered with us, the students of the 2021 class of UNC's Department of City and Regional Planning, to develop a master Equity Plan to support the long range planning efforts for Dorothea Dix Park.

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       Our workshop was a student-led effort coordinating the work of 28 individuals on four separate teams to develop a cohesive planning document and accompanying presentation outlining long-term equity planning strategies and goals to be implemented alongside the official Dorothea Dix Park Master Plan. Each of the four focus groups met with our clients biweekly to update them on our work and inform the direction of the overall project. The four strategic focuses of our equity plan were:

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          1.  Identifying and coordinating strategic public and private partnerships to support park development and operations

          2.  Assessing the potential of various forms of value capture strategies to generate upfront and ongoing funding for park development

          3.  Developing a series of equity indicators to monitor and assess the performance of equity initiatives related to the park (affordability, etc.)

          4.  Establishing a set of tools and methodologies to align sub-projects within the park's development with climate and social resiliency goals

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          I was the head of the design team for the overall project and was responsible for overseeing a team of three to coordinate with the team lead from each of the four groups in order to compile the work of all 28 individuals from each group into a single planning document that was cohesive, functional, logical, and visually attractive. The final product was a 125-page internally linked PDF document (see below) complete with the textual research, tables, figures, and sources generated by each of the four focus groups detailing our prescribed approach for the long term equity planning initiatives necessary for implementation at Dorothea Dix Park. In addition to our Master Equity Plan document, as the head of the design team I also developed a slideshow (see below) summarizing and highlighting the key findings of each group, which the class used to report our research to our Raleigh clients and interested guests in a final presentation of our semester long project.