Community Assests

Place Making

Community involvement has been an integral component of the AMD&ART process from the beginning.

Vintondale has been the testing ground where the AMD&ART staff and professional team have learned how to meaningfully involve local residents. Over 10% of the community assembled for the early design forums, and each resident was encouraged to mark up the design team's preliminary site sketches with their own ideas and concerns. The resulting site design is a product of interdisciplinary and community collaboration. In the summer of 1998, Vintondale volunteer firemen assembled to build a dozen picnic tables for a park that was not even built yet. Recently, more than thirty local high school students have been working weekly to prepare a proposal for the Borough council and the insurance agency, suggesting that a BMX bike trail be added to the recreational park design.

This integrative, multi-disciplinary approach provides a new arena large enough to include the interests and concerns of an entire community and create a delightful and interesting public place. AMD&ART turns aerators into fountains, limestone ditches into graceful waterways, settlement cells into ponds and wetlands of wondrous living complexity and industrial site remnants into historical reminders, "ghosts," that invite reflection. Once-passive community members become advocates for a new community place-a treatment system that addresses the water and the people, bringing fresh perspectives and stronger communities