This site level implementation project is the second of two dual components in a set of paired design proposals relating to the resiliency of the urban environment in the largest city of Alabama.  Both components explore the use of urban trail networks and public green space as ways to make vulnerable communities more adaptive to economic and cultural stressors by connecting disparate communities to each other as well as to public assets and services.  The first component, Community Unity, is a citywide scale, broad level analysis of Birmingham’s ninety-nine neighborhoods that identifies a social problem via original research and proposes a general urban planning policy to help alleviate that problem.  This sister component, Rails to Trails, addresses the need identified in component one by refining a general planning policy into a more detailed, site specific, neighborhood scale proposal.  It shows how to potentially reintegrate and revitalize poor racially concentrated communities that have been socially excluded by everything from physical infrastructure to cultural trends.

 

          In this secondary segment, I mapped all of the public green space and water resources of the city to determine which areas held the highest potential benefit from the development of the trail network proposed in the first segment.  I was tasked to further research the three neighborhoods: Norwood, Smithfield, and Woodlawn. In Norwood, I came across a linear park known as Norwood Boulevard that ran through the northern half of the neighborhood in a roughly semi-circular shape.  From the map of Norwood that I created, I knew that the southeastern portion of the neighborhood was physically isolated from the rest of Norwood by an interstate and several overpasses, and that it had been designated an area of significant racial concentration and high poverty.  While considering ways to reconnect this fragmented zone, I had the idea to extend and complete the circle of Norwood Boulevard and have the extension run through southeast Norwood as a way to bridge the divide caused by Interstate 20 / 59. This closed-loop linear park would cross the Interstate on either an overpass or an underpass at the designated locations, with its circuitous form promoting pedestrian circulation and interaction throughout the entirety of the Norwood community. I additionally identified vacant lots adjacent to or near the proposed loop for potential use as one in a series of urban community gardens dotting the Red Rock Ridge and Valley Trail System. The plan I made for the new Norwood Boulevard also connected the two schools in the neighborhood to the rest of the community so as to foster social interaction and cohesion among varying age groups as well as among racial and socioeconomic classes. Part one of this project sought to effect inter-neighborhood connectivity through a citywide trail system, whereas in part two (this part), I propose establishing intra-neighborhood connectivity through interior, linear, circular parks that mimic and are connected to the broader urban trail network.

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          I expanded on the core principles of the Norwood site plan, using the same selective criteria and planning methodology to develop plans for similar interior closed-circuit parks in the Smithfield and Woodlawn neighborhoods.  The inner parks of Norwood and Woodlawn would be connected to the Village Creek Corridor of the Red Rock Ridge and Valley Trail System, with that of Smithfield being connected to the Jones Valley Corridor.  While this proposal calls for numerous such parks in neighborhoods throughout Birmingham, it is not necessary to have one in each of the city’s ninety-nine neighborhoods, just in key population centers closer to the city center.  By creating a system of interior circular parks connected by an exterior matrix of trails, city planners could bolster the resiliency of Birmingham’s social environment by encouraging cross-cultural interaction through the connection and integration of once segregated communities.  Such an ambitious urban planning policy would help create a cohesive community identity not only within individual neighborhoods, but throughout the city as a whole.