This project was initiated by the North End Business Commission, funded through a NSBLEC covid recovery program. The purpose of the project was to redesign and build a planter on Gottingen Street with the involvement of a local community group with only $10,000.
Over the last few years we have built a great relationship with the folks at the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre and since their current space is on Gottingen Street they were the ideal partner for this project. We worked with the “We are all Connected” Youth Program and “Atilihi Inuit” Program coordinators to organize and run a series of youth workshops that were used to develop design principles, a design for two planters, build capacity and skills and help foster a stronger sense of belonging and ownership over the Gottingen Street area.
We hosted 4 workshops for the design phase of the project, these included:
Vision & Values - We had discussions about the youths individual, community and traditional indigenous values, and developed a collective list of values for this project. We built up the youths understanding of what their values are and why they are important to consider in planning and design projects.
Design Drawing - In this workshop we worked with the Youth to visualize what the project values could look like on the ground and how they can be integrated into the planter design. We explored different drawing techniques such as, plan, section and perspective drawing to visualize the youth’s ideas.
Modeling - The next session focused on model building using a variety of materials to continue to explore design options and bring their ideas to life.
Design Refinement - The final session focused on making design decisions, reviewing everyones planter designs and identifying the main elements that the youth wanted to be included in the planter.
The final design has been approved by HRM and it set to be built Spring 2022. We have arranged another series of workshops with the MNFC youth groups actually build and install the planters they designed.
