Crowdus Pop-Up Park
Crowdus Pop-Up Park, created for the Congress of New Urbanism 23 Conference, demonstrates the importance of active and inclusive public spaces that combine architecture and landscape.
The theme of the EP Exhibit 2016 is It Takes a Community. Selected projects showcase the best work from young designers highlighting community impact and engagement.
For four days, a park popped up in Deep Ellum with programmed activities, outdoor movies, music, and art. The park was created for the CNU 23 Conference, held by the Congress for the New Urbanism’s North Texas Chapter, through a partnership between CallisonRTKL, TBG, and Ash+Lime.
While the park was only a four-day experiment, it helped demonstrate the importance of active, engaging, and inclusive public space to a wide variety of people. Through collaboration of the groups, the Congress for the New Urbanism’s North Texas Chapter held a series of workshops with the Deep Ellum Community Association to ensure the park met community needs while creating a series of installations that could be repurposed throughout the neighborhood. Additionally, it brought the local design community, neighborhood, and the City of Dallas together through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing of ideas and labor.
The resulting space creates a dialogue between the visitors and the neighborhood, where visitors can learn about Deep Ellum as it spreads out before them. This allows us to design a public realm that blurs the boundaries between landscape and architecture. In doing so, we redefine the concept of public urban space. The Crowdus Pop-Up Park does not function generically but, as demonstrated, can adapt and evolve differently based on the necessity of the specific neighborhood, while always allowing for a great variety of activities such as memory, leisure, and commerce.
