Visiting guest lecturer Professor Arturo Sanchez (Community Board 3, Professor of Urban Planning, Cornell University) speaks with the Corona Plaza class about the complexities of mapping and interpreting ethnic immigration into the neighborhood:
These images are fragments of documentation from a day ‘in the field’ by the four MFA students participating in the class called Corona Studio: Transforming Corona Plaza.
Sol Aramendi, Barrie Cline, Seth Aylmer, and Jose Serrano-McClain ventured to Corona Plaza earlier this week to listen to what the people of Corona desire of their plaza. Our approach to ‘listening’ was a mixture of things. We used an ‘interview tool’ developed collaboratively by the faculty and students of the class, alongside a “story map” activity that encouraged adults and children to share a story about Corona Plaza and mark it on a blueprint of the current plaza, an approach motivated by a recent visit to the class by Dylan House of the Hester Street Collaborative from their People Make Parks toolkit. We approached several groups of ‘Mudanzas’ (moving van) workers and asked their opinion of the plans to pedestrianize the parking lot where their business has been anchored for years. And we topped off every conversation with a question based on a potential temporary sculptural installation idea of representing famous animals from their home countries.
Listening to the over 20 people that we spoke to that day was illuminating. There was real creative input coming from the actual stakeholders of the re-design of the plaza, and we got a much better understanding of the plight of the Mudanzas men, an issue that has been talked about as one of the most challenging aspects of this transformation. The findings from the field trip by the four SPQ students will be presented to the rest of the students during class next week.
Students Seth Pollack and Joanna Santana practice Interview methods with special guest Valeria Treves, Director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment.