Caroline Macfarlane

The Sunset Park Gazette: Overcoming Overcrowded Schools was produced by the graduate students and faculty of The New School’s MS Design and Urban Ecologies Program as part of an urban research and design project which spanned over the course of four months. The gazette is a culmination of detailed student research conducted in and around Sunset Park and concludes with four in depth design proposals. The research shown throughout the publication incorporates various research methods including interviewing Sunset Park organization leaders and residents, attending community meetings and protests, participatory mapping exercises and close analysis of data sets and census records.

Our investigations begin with a history and demographic breakdown of Sunset Park, followed by current population trends in the neighborhood; housing conditions, shifting industries and occupations in Sunset Park followed by an analysis of overcrowding in Sunset Park public elementary schools. Our gazette concludes with four design proposals which were produced acknowledging local knowledge and resources with the aim of sharing actionable strategies, projects, and policies that could help to alleviate some of the pressures faced by residents of Sunset Park. The Sunset Park Gazette was published in three languages and distributed through out the neighborhood to community members and local organizations. The knowledge produced is collective.

During this studio, we joined Make Space for Quality Schools in Sunset Park, a local campaign advocating for the construction of new public schools, and other civic organizations involved in education and community services. Considering public plans, urban development trends and housing market changes students envisioned ways to mitigate the over population of students by identifying spaces for public schools and community learning spaces and proposing planning schemes and policies to prevent overcrowding in the future.

The audience of this publication were the residents of Sunset Park and community organizations working towards different urban issues in the neighborhood. The main goal was to design accessible and engaging content for the affected communities and communicate these complex issues with the multi-language and space constraint challenges.

Public Faculty is a method of public conversation developed by the artist Jeanne van Heeswijk. The purpose of a public faculty is to learn how to talk to strangers and actively listen to people describe their daily conditions. It is a practice of determining how an existing conflict can be made productive by speaking and thinking together. A Public Faculty takes four days, four hours each day. During these hours, facilitators stand at locations where they can speak with passersby about the issues at hand.

Public Faculty No 11: Imagining a Curriculum for Sunset Park was envisioned as a tool to unearth the voices of residents, parents, students, and teachers from an immigrant neighborhood where basic services have not satisfied some of the needs of its increasing population due to lack of public investment and attention. A large white board was used to document the conversations each day. The board served not only as a sketchbook to archive different voices but also as a space for knowledge exchange.

The Sunset Park Gazette was included in the exhibition "Places in Relation” at the Pampidou Center in Paris. The show was coordinated by Ruedi and Vera Baur from Civic City in collaboration with HEAD-Geneva and Théâtre Sint -Gervais, Geneva.