Greener Gulfton

February 2022   Houston, TX

Client

  • The Nature Conservancy

Category

Award/Recognition

  • APA, Houston Chapter, Advancing Diversity and Social Change
  • APA, Texas Chapter, Advancing Diversity and Social Change
Key Points

A Greener Gulfton for Nature, Health, and Resilience was an interdisciplinary planning effort which paired community leaders, passionate residents, and non-profits with a consulting team comprised of planners, designers, and experts on the environment, health, art, and multilingual engagement.

Equitable Engagement

The team’s deliberate effort to “meet residents where they were” ensured consistent community accessibility throughout the planning process.

Implementation

The project’s impacts are felt in and outside the community. Greener Gulfton’s ground-up approach, grounded in equity not only on paper but also through its purposeful inclusion and compensation of diverse community groups, stands as a precedent for planning projects across Houston and beyond.

Asakura Robinson worked closely with The Nature Conservancy, Tecolotl, UPArt Studio, and Watearth to (1) develop a community-informed “greening” master plan.

This plan would help delineate existing natural assets and needs and spotlight how and where new natural assets could be developed to bolster climate resilience, One Health (human, environmental, and biodiversity health), neighborhood connectivity, and nature equity, and (2) to design a pilot community greening project arising from the community engagement portion of this master planning process.


The mission was to comprehensively document and narrate the history, people, nature, environment, infrastructure, and planning context of the Gulfton community, while also identifying ways to promote ecological diversity, enhance health, prioritize equity and inclusivity in community engagement, and establish criteria for selecting pilot projects and future greening initiatives in Gulfton.

In order to reach the mission at hand, the following goals were set:

  • Goal 1: Tell the story of the Gulfton community through the historical context, the people, the flora and fauna, the environment and infrastructure, and the planning context of the neighborhood.
  • Goal 2: Identify opportunities to foster ecological diversity and improve health in the neighborhood.
  • Goal 3: Understand the demographics / nuances of the community to ensure that we are using engagement processes that are driven by equity and inclusivity.
  • Goal 4: Lay the foundation of what important neighborhood criteria should guide the location and type of pilot project selected as well as other future greening processes for nature in Gulfton.

 

The creation of these goals and their specific components fostered a continued expansion of residents’ knowledge base and increased overall momentum for bringing change to Gulfton. Leveraging this momentum, the “Placita” pilot project served as a tactical short-term intervention that opened opportunities for placemaking and enjoyment of public space. This served as an additional avenue for recognizing the community’s efforts in conceiving the Greener Gulfton plan. With the report now completed, the overall project’s impacts are felt in and outside the community. Greener Gulfton’s ground-up approach, grounded in equity not only on paper but also through its purposeful inclusion and compensation of diverse community groups, stands as a precedent for planning projects across Houston and beyond. In Gulfton, community members now hold a higher standard for projects in their communities, with increased civic participation and stronger connections serving as visible reminders of their increased resilience in the face of adversity.

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