BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

citizens to walk in off the street at any time during working hours and
look at what is going on, ask questions, and even assume a task. In the
United States this technique has produced notable results. One of the
earliest design workshops opened in the Watts area of Los Angeles after
the racial riots in the mid-1960's. Perhaps the most successful recent
examples have resulted in the construction of the Middle School at East
Orange, New Jersey, and the HUB.multi-service Community Center in Cincinnati,
Ohio.
82. Essentially what happens is this:
- the Center is opened with an exhibition of data-base materials
and an inventory of goals including a public department's statement
of its own goals (e.g. a Board of Education, says that it wants
to build a school which is responsive to the wishes and needs of
parents and students, and it wants to find out what these are;
- the technical staff visits community organizations (church groups,
cultural or arts societies, youth associations, etc.) with a slide
show illustrating issues and opportunities; the organizations
are encouraged to meet each other and officials formally in the
Design Center;
- citizens begin to visit the Design Center informally and are drawn
into interviews, much in the way "perceptions" are gathered in the
Critical Path method;
- those citizens who express interest in particular facets of the
problem are invited to join the formal meetings whose agendas include
those concerns;
- task forces are developed to address clusters of issues, and appropriate
public officials are invited to participate;
- co-ordinated programming begins, and with it the co-ordinated
inter-sectoral planning also begins.
83. The Middle School at East Orange, New Jersey offers a good case study
of the process. East Orange was, in 1970, a city undergoing rapid social
change. Demographically it was about 50/50 black/white. But the black
population was relatively new and young, and unlike other northern industrial
cities it was middle-class and prosperous, immigrating to East Orange
from socially troubled cities such as Newark and Philadelphia. In contrast
the white population in East Orange was residual and ageing. As a
result the schools are 90 per cent black and do not reflect the city's
racial composition or its longer traditions.
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