Which Chinatown do you think is the more walkable?
In light of various scenarios of physical, mental and social benefits, building walkable neighborhoods, as a "thriving industry", is receiving huge attentions from researchers, decision-makers and the wider public. There is no doubt that many positive impacts that can result from walkable environment. However, what does walkable neighborhood look like for local communities? How walkable neighborhoods influence people's living habits, cultural cohesion, and social capital. These questions are vital because they matter for both policy-making and physical design processes. While the general physical and environmental impacts of walkable neighborhoods are being broadly studied by using numerous quantitative methodologies, the social impacts on specific neighborhoods have not been detailed analyzed.
About this project
My project proposes a public scenarios collecting toolkit, which encourages and helps researchers and decision-makers to interact with local communities and have better understandings of the situation, to engage actively public participation while designing the versions of walkable neighborhood with immigrant neighborhoods. I used Chinatown, which is a low-income immigrant neighborhood and ranked as the third most walkable neighborhood in New York City by Walk Score, as my research site to develop and practice my toolkit. Due to its historical and cultural causes, Chinatown has compact neighborhoods pattern and high residential and commercial densities, which helps this neighborhood getting excellent performance on walkability, if only take quantitative analysis into account. However, it is also facing dramatically changes and suffering from poor physical conditions for many years. My toolkit doesn't try to assess whether Chinatown is walkable, but it unpacks how local communities understand "walkable neighborhoods" in terms of affordability, cultural identity and social capital.
What you can get from here...
Why does it matter to the communities in Chinatown? What are the issues inside the traditional research? In this section, you will learn the situation in Chinatown, and the issues within the research and desicion-making process of measuring and promoting walkable neighborhoods.
How to engage public participation in the process of defining "walkable neighborhoods" in the low-income Chinese immigrant communities? What are the values they precious in the street activities and how those activities influence their route preference and emotions? To answer these questions, I developed a innovational model by using storytelling methods and tools to expose the meaning of "walkable Chinatown" through communities' eyes.
Based on the innovational model, here is the value-oriented toolkit for practitioners to explore the feasible multi-method tools to gather communities’ everyday stories and insights. This toolkit is designed for identifying values and issues of walking in Chinatown, for making communities voice be heard by the wider public, for encouraging decision-makers and researchers to develop more adoptive plans for walkable low-income immigrants neighborhoods.
