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Community Gardens are an increasingly popular feature of community development. These gardens are said to help create bonds with neighbors, while encouraging healthy eating and also providing a source of food for local homeless and poor. It also could be used as an educational tool.
Tampa Heights is seeking permission tonight to start a garden along their Greenway. The land is owned by the city of Tampa under an agreement with the Florida Department of Transportation.
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The Tampa Heights website has a brochure touting the plans for the Garden and the benefits. Other possible uses include a section for growing flowers, a children section, and a butterfly garden.
There are potential downsides to this unique feature of community development. For example, how will the garden be regulated? Will pesticides be used? Growing food for the community is not beneficial if the food is not safe.
Is this Garden a good idea? Could it be replicated in other neighborhoods?
Green Space is an important part of community development. Having a nice quiet area not only adds aesthetic value to a neighborhood, but creates a space for play, quiet reflection, or public interaction.
Tampa Heights already has a couple of fairly decent sized parks with Robles Park on the east side, and some smaller parks in the west. Creating another full-scale park would be costly, and restrict that land from other potential uses. Their solution to creating more green space is to designate “Pocket Parks”.
Visitors to Savannah, Georgia would recognize this concept from their historic district’s “squares”. Interspersed throughout the street grid, squares provide open green space, benches for resting, reading, or chat, and shade trees to escape from the heat.
The small scales of these squares make them easier to maintain, and still allow for infill in the surrounding properties. Additionally, a group called The Green Artery has been working to link greenspaces in Tampa via a system of trails, sidewalks, and bike paths. Previous research has identified key pedestrian areas within the Artery’s scope, and it is my hope to utilize that research to site possible locations for Pocket Parks in the Tampa Heights neighborhood, and integrate those sites into the update to the Community Plan.
Today was my first meeting with some of the key players in the redevelopment of Tampa Heights. My primary contact, Ms. Lena Young-Green, met me at the Urban Sanctuary offices in the southeast section of TH.
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The office we met at was Atelier Architecture. The firm, with Vivian Salaga, was key in converting the building from the old dilapidated First Methodist Church into an office and apartment space. This is called “Adaptive Re-Use” and it is a key component in community development. Instead of building outward, creating sprawl, adaptive re-use involves finding an old building and converting it to something new.
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Mixed uses, like the Urban Sanctuary’s use of office space and loft-style apartments, can increase the potential of these buildings and can be a real draw for people who don’t like long commutes from home to work.
You can learn more about Urban Sanctuary’s apartments here
This will be my blog chronicling my work with the Tampa Heights Civic Association assisting them with the ten-year update of their Community Plan.
More information about Tampa Heights can be found here
And this is the original Tampa Heights Master Plan
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