1. Outer Seed Shadow #01:
“A City as a Garden of Cultures Interacting”
June 2014 – December 2014
Professional Report Prepared by:
Ana Orozco
2014 MCRP Graduate
Terminal Project Report, Fall 2014
University of Oregon
Planning, Public Policy and Management
Community and Regional Planning (MCRP)

2. Table of Contents
Executive Summary 1
Project Introduction 3
Section I: Project Contextual Background 5
Why Public Space? 6
U.S. History of Community Gardens 7
Project Location 7
Description of the Open Garden Program 8
Section II: Key Components of Project 9
Partnerships/ Collaborations 10
Four Project Components by Juanli Carrión 11
Section III: Research Problem 13
Theoretical framework by Jeffrey Hou 14
Research Question 14
Transcultural Participatory Design 14
Social 15
Representational 15
Mediated 15
Collaborative 16
Section IV: History of NYC 17
Range of Social, Health, and Educational Services 17
Contemporary NYC Immigrants 18
Section IV: Why New York City? 19
NYC as a Sanctuary 19
New Young Workers in NYC 19
Section IV: Why immigrants? 21
Heterogeneity via Immigrants 21
Immigrant Status in NYC 21

3. Combination of Skills and Polyethnic Neighborhoods 22
Stage for City Involvement 22
Create Political Involvement 23
Communication 23
Public Participation 24
Section V: Materials & Methods to Evaluate OSS#01 25
Step by step Process 26
Short Interview Questions for Participants 27
Section VI: Analysis & Findings 29
Displacement – Placemaking for Social Interactions 29
Understand Local Immigrant Context 32
Community Empowerment 33
Lessons learned from OSS#01 Staff Members 34
Section VII: Influences to draw conclusions 35
Conclusion 35
Project Challenges 36
Project Success 37
Section VII: Recommendations 39
Build relationships with the community. 39
Create a safe space to spark engagement. 39
Reach out to the community. 39
The importance of continual engagement process. 40
Spread cultural competency among professionals. 41
Disagreements into significant culminations. 41
Create opportunities for storytelling. 42
Show Participants their time is valued. 42
Improve multicultural processes through social interactions. 43
Important Definitions 45
References: 47

4. Acknowledgements
Guidance from a Head Faculty Advisor, PPPM Professor Dr. Gerardo Sandoval at the University of Oregon.
Guidance from a Faculty Advisor, PPPM Professor Bob Choquette at the University of Oregon.
Juanli Carrión, creator of the Outer Seed Shadow #01 Project
George Pisegna, Pamela Ito, and staff from the Horticultural Society of New York, Manhattan, New York
George Geist, key supporter from New York and subjects who participated in Outer Seed Shadow #01.
Stephanie Wood, Director and Senior Research Associate, Wired Humanities Projects, University of Oregon.
Terrie Monroe, English & Writing Advisor, PPPM Department, University of Oregon.
Francisco and Alfonsina Orozco, my faithful parents throughout my whole graduate experience
Gifford Bautista, Sahela Kolb, and Linda Barrera promising friend and colleague throughout my years of graduate
school.

5. “The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater.”
(Mumford, 1937, 9)

6. Executive Summary
1 Orozco
1. Immigration has a profound impact on American cities
and understanding how to plan for a multicultural society is a
practical imperative. I address this in the following six sections
of my paper. In the first section, the introduction of Outer
Seed Shadow #01, a public art project subject to this paper,
as well as the research problem in planning practices. The
second I explain the objectives and vision of the public art
project. Section three sheds light on the theoretical framework
used to explain key concepts to evaluate the effectiveness of
the project. In section four contains a literature review and
the history of immigrants in New York City (NYC) to grasp
the scope of the master project. I also provide examples of
how immigrants have reclaimed urban spaces and how they
develop civic and political participation through transcultural*
interactions between social, meditative, representational, and
collaborative settings. Second to last is section five which
has the study moves from theory to practice by specifically
detailing the steps of the methodology used to observe and
record the influence of the project, “Outer Seed Shadow
#01: Transcultural Participatory Design (OSS#01). Lastly,
section five is an overview of the key findings and the main
points synthesized from the opportunities and constraints of
OSS#01.
*1 Transculturation: The term was coined by Cuban anthropologist
Fernando Ortiz in the book Contrapuento cubano del tabaco y del azucar
(1995) [English Translation = Cuban Counterpoint]. He wrote, “More re-
cently, transculturation has been used as a generic term in order to examine
issues relating to the cultural economy between peripheries and centres in
general, a development that shows some benefits but also presents multiple
theoretical shortcomings” (Rethinking Cultural History, p. 17).
This public art installation is evaluated to address whether
the project captured the immigrant experience from nations
outside of the United States (U.S.) in New York City (NYC). The
project’s participants exemplify the life of New Yorkers**
and are
approached as essential components to activate the project site.
The art project is a garden created by the community and for
the community with the support of an artist, Juanli Carrión, in
conjunction with the New York City Department of Parks &
Recreation. Stories from immigrants living across Manhattan, New
York, are represented in the garden to reflect on contemporary
stories of immigration in NYC (Juanli, 2013).
This professional report explores the project with the
intention of demonstrating how planners and designers should
respond to the cross-cultural complexities of today’s cities in the
U.S. My argument is that as societybecomes more diverse, planning
practices in receiving cities need to meet these new challenges
and accommodate immigrants in receiving cities. Such practices
need to be more welcoming and representative. Planners and
designers should imagine new ways to create more inclusive and
adaptive communities for reclaiming urban spaces. This research
demonstrates that such communities can be seen as microcosms
of the transcultural city, particularly when mutual support
networking traverses racial, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries to
enhance quality of life and when it facilitates community members
in the common project of living with limited resources. (Hou,
2013, 11)
**2 New Yorkers: One out of three of our interviewees (see p. 20) de-
fined themselves as “New Yorkers” – which is a designation that can include
“immigrant groups, native minority groups, or be Italian, Irish, Jews, or the
like” (Kasinitz et al. 2004: 17).

7. OROZCO 2
Image 1: View from the south of the OSS#01 project with a glimpse of signage.

8. 3 Orozco
This research uses a qualitative analysis of community
perceptions and responses collected as a part of the project known
as Outer Seed Shadow #01 (OSS#01). OSS#01 investigates the
diversity of migrant communities and potential ways to enhance
the immigrant experience in NYC through flora and garden
design. The project is a temporary art installation in the form
of a community garden. This project has been executed through
the hard work of a sole creator named Juanli Carrión at all levels.
The valuable collaborator and supporter of the project was The
Horticultural Society of New York (H.O.R.T.), a non-profit
organization that teaches botanical best practices and has been
educating people in New York City about gardening for more
than a century. The OSS#01 project is a temporary community
garden installation designed to engage community members to
help create and then interact with the garden—a process known
as an Open Garden Program (community garden movement in
the late 1960s and early 1970s began a hands-on experiment in
caring for the city’s open spaces).
During the creation of the garden and in its six months
of life, OSS#01 expects over 50,000 visitors -- residents living
across Manhattan and throughout NYC -- to interact with what is
both a community garden and an outdoor classroom, transform
the current barren plaza into an open green space and hub for
community interaction and art making. The project installation
is located at Duarte Square Park, which is located in downtown
Manhattan’s Hudson Square district. The park is at the cornerstone
of a mixed-use district and at the crossroads of neighborhoods
with strong immigration histories.
This project to provides the partner organizations in New York
with information, tools, and ideas to increase community
engagement in public spaces by (Juanli, 2013):
• Using plant species as symbolic representations of individual
cultures;
• Serving as a context for conversations and engagement
between immigrants, non-immigrants, and visitors to discuss
and experience the new realities of immigration today; and,
• Offering a space for learning about cultural inclusiveness and
exchanging cross-cultural*
experiences.
*3 Cross-cultural: According to Hou (2012), cross-cultural learning
opens the windows for a critical understanding of the socio-cultural processes
of design in the digital and network age. Increased mobility immigration,
collaboration, and international practice now call for design education to
take seriously the issues of cross-cultural understanding and diversity in the
process of design and placemaking
Image 2: City officials came together for the grand
opening of OSS#01.
PROJECT INTRODUCTION

9. OROZCO
OSS#01 is a site-specific project that serves as an
investigation of what it means to be a contemporary migrant today
and reveals the complexities between the individuals, their culture,
and the country they now call home. As the immigrant population
in the U.S. has grown rapidly over the past century and a half, the
myth that the country is a giant melting pot persists. Immigrants
do not really mix in and disappear into an undifferentiated mass.
In reality, we have fractured cities where various people of many
nationalities and ethnicities come together at a commercial
crossroads, as in the case of downtown Manhattan, to later return
to neighborhoods where their native cultures have been preserved
in more isolated pockets of settlement. OSS#01 will be examined
in order to consider whether it is possible to engage transcultural
interaction in parks and gardens. We will also investigate whether
this installation can be replicated in other areas, to promote a more
democratic approach to revitalizing public spaces. This assessment
will help to provide insight and possibly revise strategies to develop
community inclusiveness in underutilized parks.
Scope of Professional Report
It is my intent in this professional report to raise the profile
of immigrants’ lives in U.S. urban centers and suggest methods for
improving their experiences by fostering opportunities for them
to feel more welcomed and integrated into the urban landscape.
I believe this will provide a much-needed contribution to the
diversification of contemporary urban planning theory.
In approaching this project I use a transcultural theory
to evaluate how OSS#01 uses immigrant ethnic identity, political
incorporation, and placemaking*
to create more inclusive and
adaptive communities. I move away from the views that immigrants
*4 Placemaking: This concept involves the “production of meaning”
as it relates to “the means of production of a locale,” where the symbolic and
spatial are simultaneously expressed. (Hou, 2012, 12)
require cultural assimilation, and I reject the myth of the melting
pot, which leaves planners complacent about allowing barriers
to remain in place that, in fact, could be worn down. I approach
immigrants as group-based actors with agency, engaged in the local-
to-local transcultural construction of migrant ethnic identity and
political incorporation in association with place. And by viewing
transcultural agency in the realms of ethnic identity, politics, and
place, this professional report will showcase a process that could
enhance the growing literature on transcultural cities in the U.S. By
using several case studies in a comparative way and drawing from
them for an analysis of OSS#01, I highlight how transcultural
cities can involve political incorporation, affect identity formation,
and contribute to place-making, which all remain ongoing and vital
sociopolitical processes.
Image 3: Existing conditions of Duarte Square Plaza before
the OSS#01 installation
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10. Orozco
Image 4: Juanli during the Open Garden Program.
SECTION I: Project Contextual Background
Image 5: Participants filling out debriefing questionnaire.
5

11. OROZCO
The project began with an analysis of Manhattan’s
immigrant community using the data published in a study by the
NYC Department of City Planning in 2010. The investigation
developed towards the reality of Manhattan’s immigration through
firsthand accounts. Artist Juanli Carrión, creator of OSS#01,
contacted various organizations and associations in order to find
individuals representative of the different ethnic groups and
countries living on the island. These contacted representatives
agreed to do interviews—videotaped in their homes—in which
they talked about their migration experience.
Today the situation presents a variety of groups and
cultures that are coming to the United States, and more specifically,
to NYC. But often these new immigrants do not melt into and
blend with the predominant culture. They retain their own ethnic
identities and often live with or near others with similar origins
and life practices. Carrión and the team he formed, which included
me, wanted to get the stories of willing immigrants in NYC. By
contacting organizations that could help us identify and reach out
to immigrants, we invited individuals to be interviewed.
OSS#01 was designed to create a new space in the urban
landscape and perceptions from participants and visitors were to
be captured to obtain a list of effective community engagement
strategies. Separate interviews and focus groups were conducted
with people representing three categories with respect to their
role in OSS#01: project staff members, project speakers, and
participants. The data collected during this final phase of research
helped formulate recommendations for ways in which applications
of “experimental improvements” can engage the community and
create a network to serve as a motivator to underutilized public
spaces.
Why Public Space?
HannahArendt*
(1906–1975)wasoneof themostinfluential
political philosophers of the twentieth century. Her conception of
politics is based on the idea of active citizenship, that is focusing,
on the value and importance of civic engagement and collective
deliberation about all matters affecting the political community.
According to Arendt, public space is a ground for political
exchange where people sharing a common world also share this
common “space of appearance” and where public concerns and
issues are articulated and debated from multiple perspectives.
People can draw issues from the coexistence of variously
differentiated districts and contribute to the development of
certain neighborhoods of interest. Such can fertilize the evolution
of their identities and their social networks, building community.
*5 Hannah Arendt (1989) identifies two interrelated and necessary
criteria for the sustenance of public life. These include 1)“Appearance,”
which, according to her, implies that our understanding of our identity and
ourselves is intensely related to the existence and visibility of the “other;”
and 2) the“Importance of the material world” which is shared communally.
This acts as a uniting force to bond otherwise rather disparate groups of
people.
6

12. Orozco
Image 6: A Photo of OSS#01 during the early stages of the installation.
U.S. History of Community Gardens
Community gardens hold a significant place in the U.S.
urban history, as we learn from Art Historian, Martha Rosler. In
1890, American cities used community gardens during the civic
beautification movement for unemployed workers. During World
War I, in 1918, the government promoted agricultural education
by incorporating these studies in public schools and provided
50,000 schools with curriculum materials. Despite the grief of the
Great Depression, gardens were provided for the unemployed to
grow their food and utilize garden plots to increase employment.
World War II started more than a decade after 1930, but after
the war, few gardening programs remained. The 1970s brought
environmental concerns, and the desire to build neighborly
connections by using the gardens in blighted urban communities.
(Rosler, 2011, 2).
Project Location
The project’s installation is located in Duarte Square
Park–named after the Dominican Republican liberator, Juan
Pablo Duarte–and was chosen out of five potential Manhattan
locations from NYC Department of Parks & Recreation for
OSS#01. Given that New York has a considerable immigrant
population from the Dominican Republic, there is a logic to
this choice. Furthermore, Duarte Square Park is a quarter acre
public plaza*
located at Canal Street between Varick Street and
the Avenue of the Americas. The Avenue of the Americas
also recalls an immigration context, referring to Canada, the
U.S., and Latin America. The privately owned spaces are part
of the Special Hudson Square District (HSQ), which was a
* 6 Public Plaza: A public plaza is a privately owned open area adja-
cent to a building and accessible to the public. It must generally be at the
level of the sidewalk it adjoins and be obstructed to the sky except for seat-
ing and other permitted amenities. In certain high-density zoning districts,
a floor area bonus is available for the provision of a public plaza (NYC
Public Planning).
Image 7: The on-site arrangement for OSS#-1.
SECTION I: Project Contextual Background
1 2
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13. OROZCO
former warehouse and manufacturing district*
. This district has
a concentration of large, industrial buildings and encourages
residential and retail development in a mixed-use district that also
tends to attract immigrant labor. Height limitations to prevent out-
of-scale development and the commercial/manufacturing uses are
maintained by enforcing a minimum amount of per-square-foot
floor area. Residential development requires certification by the
City Planning Commission and hotels with more than one hundred
rooms are subject to a special permit.
A designated historic district surrounding the public plaza
and inclusionary housing designated areas**
preserve the neighborhood’s
character and create opportunities for affordable housing. There
has been limited investment in new development for Duarte Square
*7 Manufacturing District: A manufacturing district, designated by
the letter M (M1-1, M2-2, for example), is a zoning district in which manu-
facturing uses, most commercial uses, and some community facility uses are
permitted. Industrial uses are subject to a range of performance standards.
Residential development is not allowed, except in M1-1D through M1-5D
districts by CPC authorization, and in M1-6D districts, as-of-right or by
CPC certification (NYC Public Planning).
**8 Inclusionary Housing designated areas: Mapped in medium- and
high-density residential neighborhoods and commercial districts with
equivalent density, a bonus of thirty-three percent of floor can be obtained
for providing twenty percent as affordable housing (NYC Public Planning).
due to the underlying use regulation, a limited range of retail
services, and a generally low level of activity on the weekends and
in the evenings. This is the case despite the fact that the area is very
well served by public transit and is surrounded by neighborhoods
that continue to experience mixed-use development and growth.
DuarteSquarePlazaisownedbytheDepartmentof Transportation
and managed by the Department of Parks & Recreation. Trinity
Realty has offered to do the remodeling of a portion of the plaza
in exchange for a tax cut when constructing a building next door.
Description of the Open Garden Program
The flagship program was createdto engagethecommunity
directly to use the garden as a living classroom, laboratory, and
case study. Specific activities have been designed and scheduled
with each partner, spanning the six months of the installation.
The artist, Juanli Carrión, and two designated gardeners from
the HORT’s Green Team, who provide gardening classes and
assistance, host the “Open Garden”. In each session a group of
10 to 12 people have been meeting at the garden with the artist and
the horticulturalists and received an introduction to orient them to
the goals of the project as a whole.
Image 8: Structural foundation complete for OSS#01. Image 9: Northeast view of OSS#01 and new plantings.
3 4
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14. Orozco
Image 10, 11 & 12: OSS#01 was located on the left image, to get a better sense of the surrounding environment and to highlight another empty parcel. The images
to the right demonstrated the general layout of the community garden with the corresponding plants.
SECTION II: Project Framework
9

15. OROZCO
Image 13 & 14: Both images show the strong support from city officials to educational institutions.
Partnerships/ Collaborations
Many of the participating groups brought different groups of
students, artists and members of their communities or programs
to take part in the sessions. For example, The Staten Island
DREAMers Coalition, and City Parks Foundation brought
participants in their Green Girls and Seeds to Trees programs.
The sessions and workshops belong to the Open Garden program
OSS#01 has established partnerships with various organizations
and institutions, including the following:
ORE Design & Technology / City Parks Foundation / Urban
Landscape Lab Colombia University/ The Blue School / El
Centro del Inmigrante / Henry Street Settlement / Abrons Art
Center / The Montessori School / Hotel Particulier / Museun
of Biblical Art / Ascend Educational Fund
Several independent organizations sponsored OSS#01 shown
here:
Foundation for Contemporary Arts / Build it Green NYC / The
Hudson Square BID / Trinity Real State / Spain Culture New
York-Consulate General of Spain / Y Gallery / Rosa Santos
Gallery / The James New York / Hotel Particulier
Neighbors, the local business community, arts organizations and
non-profits also endorsed OSS #01. The project has garnered
support from The Hudson Square BID, Manhattan Community
Board No. 2, Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Arts Center,
Spanish Consulate of New York and Build it Green, among
others. The project counted with the support of the community
Board, The Council Member Margaret Chin and the Department
for Immigrants Affairs of NYC.
10

16. 11 Orozco
OSS#01 Methodology by Juanli Carrión
OSS#01 consists of four components and the first one is an
investigation in the form of a fragmented documentary:
An investigation.
The project began with an analysis of Manhattan’s
immigrant community using the data published in a study by
the NY Department of City Planning in 2010. A total of 40
community members shaped the garden through their video
interviews and self-identified plants.
A public art installation.
The garden will serve as a physical context and laboratory
to develop the investigation and set a stage for a dialogue about
the city, place and immigration. OSS #01 creates a new space in
the urban landscape and will be the core of a series of public
programs.
A public program of activities.
The four–month Open Garden Program consisted
programmed visits that took place on a day that was most
convenient with each organization from June to September,
between a times from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Interested groups for the
Open Garden Program were scheduled to do a garden activity at
the site, which took place once a week. The artist and a designated
gardener from the Horticultural Society of NY’s Green Team
provided gardening classes and assistance using tools and
supplies. OSS#01 team explained that the survival of the plants
in the garden through the duration of the installation relies on the
community. Each plant in the garden needed very specific care
coming from such diverse places of origin, like the people who
selected them. The garden had palm trees growing next to lettuce,
and Bamboo growing next to tulips--a great botanical challenge
that works here as a metaphor of the reality of the people who
selected the plants.
Each session had a group of 10-15 people to meet at the
garden with the artist for an introduction to give them perspective
Image 15 : Duarte Square Plaze before the OSS#01 installation.
1 2
Image 16 After the installation, a green scenery is added.
SECTION II: Project Framework

17. OROZCO
on the project as a whole. After, a 10 to 15 minute introduction
about OSS#01, the garden activities followed. The garden activity
was with the professional gardener the group, “got down in the
dirt” and tended the plants that required care. The duration of the
session was approximately two hours and there wasn’t a charge for
the event, which OSS#01 members had to make clear.
An interactive website: www.outerseedshadow.org/oss01/
A website was created as an archive where all of the
immigrant interviews can be viewed. The websites was launched
on March 2014; an interactive map is featured to link the plants in
the garden with their corresponding interviewees, alongside their
corresponding video interview and botanical information about
the chosen plants. The website would serve as the main portal
for the public to find informati on about the garden’s
origins, to follow its evolution via live stream, to register for
guided visits, check and sign up for public programming and
access a participatory section where interviewees, visitors, and
other members of the community will be able to post comments,
images, videos, related events, and link to social networks in order
to share their experiences of the installation.
Project Goal
The primary outcome of OSS#01 was to create an
informed discussion of immigration resulting from community
engagement, working to create awareness of the realities of
immigration today. Through the participant interviews OSS#01
would offer a direct engagement with the community The process
of participation begins with the individual, who also serves as
an active link to a cultural subset. Each participant brings both
personal experience and collective community history. In turn, the
garden serves to represent the multiplicity of these communities,
offered in a public space with accessible public programming to
encourage community-wide dialogue. This dialogue continues via
the interactive website, bringing people together on numerous
platforms.
The garden’s purpose is a live classroom to serve as the core
site for a series of programs, which includes workshops, lectures
and the Open Garden Program. OSS#01 created a potential
ground for investigation and united different organizations and the
community to share the story of today’s immigrant communities
in NYC.
3 4
Image 17: The photo captures when the project guide walks
along the garden perimeter.
Image 18: Juanli enjoyed the company while the group was
helping to water the plants.
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18. 13 Orozco
The U.S. seems to be far less developed in multicultural
planning policies in compared to Canada and Australia, which
haveofficialnationalpoliciesof multiculturalismthattheU.S.lacks.
U.S. urban planning theory and the accompanying professional
practices have not kept up with the wide-reaching socio-economic
transformations sweeping through local, national, regional, and
global landscapes (Friedmann, 1998, 1995b; Freidmann and
Kuestr, 1994). During the beginning of the planning profession in
1960, planners were not concerned with how their work affected
different cultural and ethnic groups. Planners regarded ethnic
enclaves as transitional areas that would eventually be replaced
through the ecological process of succession (Burayidi, 2000).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, ideas began to shift:
The 1980s and 1990s marked a crucial pair of decades
for the City of New York. It was marked by a time where urban
planners were shifting their discussions about “planned shrinkage”
to refocusing their efforts to benefit the less fortunate and less
affluent citizens of its city. The lower- and moderate-income
families were being “squeezed out by gentrification and scarcity
of affordable housing.” (Foner, 2013, 67) As challenges to the
institutionalized practice of planning and design, the encounters
and exchanges also offer opportunities for a richer understanding
of culture and place in a diverse society, as well as making a more
inclusive and dynamic cityscape (Hou, 2013, 13).
Backward thinking guided the urban renewal programs
of the mid-twentieth century, which razed perceived slums and
displaced urban immigrants (Bollens, 2002). Today planners
and urban designers continue to have difficulties with engaging
diverse perspectives through public participation, as reflected in
actual planning practice (Wood and Landry, 2008, 252). While
planners now deal with cross-cultural negotiations, safer places
need to be created to address the politics of intercultural struggles
and the agency of space. The primacy of structure or agency is
now being addressed to disperse power and activate it at different
levels in a given socio-economic formation and place. This allows
community members to be a pivotal element to distribute power
and to alter the social construction of a place.
According to several sociological studies, planners have
not been capable of working with diverse communities when
confronted with municipal services and patterns of urban growth.
Sandercock argues that planners need to develop a “multicultural
literacy more attuned to the cultural diversity, and to redefine and
reposition planning according to these new understandings”(Hou,
2013, 4). A way to develop multicultural literacy is to practice
the profession with new understanding of different cultures,
especially considering the existing layout of a city such as New
York. Increasingly, planners and city administrators are being
asked to develop cultural competency in working with diverse
communities and constituencies, as they are confronted with
competing expectations about municipal services and patterns
of urban growth (Pestieau and Wallace 2003; Hou 4). Linking
immigrant agency with societies of origin and settlement, the
transnational approach has opened a venue for analyzing how
place is socially constructed and reconstructed across geographical
boundaries. (Sánchez, 21)
Theoretical framework by Jeffrey Hou
The volume, Transcultural Cities: Border- Crossing and
Placemaking by Jeffrey Hou, contains studies presented by a
multidisciplinary group of scholars and activists with backgrounds
in architecture, art, environmental psychology, geography,
landscape architecture, political science, social work, urban
planning, and urban studies,
SECTION III: Research Problem

19. OROZCO
who came together through a shared interest in the cross-cultural
complexity of today’s cities. Together, they cover eighteen cities
across five continents and provide settings in which culture and
identities can continue to be negotiated and reconstituted with
the objective of transcultural placemaking*
. The stories in the book
offer a broader understanding of how immigrants, guest workers,
refugees, business people, and other forms of transnational**
beings act as transcultural agents***
in facilitating the remaking of
urban landscapes and places. Scholars argue that these places and
landscapes can lead to cultural adaptation and transformation.
This volume has been deeply influential in the way I have
approached the OSS#01 project, shaping the activities that I
designed for the public planning part of the experiment. Multiple
elements of the theoretical framework these aut hors make explicit
have proven to be precisely relevant for the exploration of the
immigrant populations we targeted in New York. Here I will
lay out some of the essential research questions and models for
conducting experiments that have impacted our own project in so
many ways.
*9 Transcultural placemaking: The framework embodies a set of
ideas that recognizes the instability of culture(s) and the emergent nature of
cultural formation and reconstitution in the shifting terrains of today’s cities
(Hou, 2013, , 2013, 2013, 7).
**10 Transnationalism: An emerging field of academic inquiry that
incorporates distinct academic disciplines and theoretical perspectives. It
traces back to disciplinary and inter-disciplinary origins the fields of anthro-
pology, sociology, cultural studies, and theorists of post structuralism and
postmodernism (Sánchez 21).
***11 Transcultural Agents: The role of transcultural agents suggests the
importance of supporting individuals and organizations as active players in
the process of transcultural placemaking. This includes capacity-building
on the part of the participants as well as training of professional staff and
organizers for transcultural competency (Hou, 2013, 12).
Relevant Research Question from Jeffrey Hou
How can cross-cultural interactions be constructed, enabled, or
“staged” through social and spatial practices in the contemporary
urban environment?
Research Question
Do the methods of the OSS#01 serve as a mechanism for cross-
cultural learning and inclusiveness in transcultural placemaking?
Sub Questions
How can landscape designers and planners create opportunities
for inclusive transcultural placemaking?
What aspects of OSS#01 contribute to transcultural placemaking?
Specific Aims/Study Objectives
0SS#01 includes a clear research plan dedicated to focusing on
cultural values, adaptation, and how contemporary immigrant
communities are evolving.
Supplemental Research Questions:
• What do you think is the importance of sharing your story?
• Do you think this art installation creates an opportunity for
social interaction?
• Do you think OSS#01 is acting as a link among different
groups of the community? If yes, how
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20. Orozco
Transcultural Participatory Design
Hou’s case study experiences and the responses from
participants, all seem to suggest the following critical dimensions
of successful transcultural participatory design in immigrant
communities. Hou’s research included people from all walks of
life including youth, schoolteachers, elders, and members of
various community organizations.
Hou’s framework contains four important aspects of transcultural
participatory design:
Social
Many of the transcultural processes observed in Hou’s
study were facilitated by social interaction, often characterized by
different levels of interaction. Hou found that the participatory
design activities enabled active participants to emerge. This
was an exciting development, because such opportunities or
frameworks have not yet been made readily available or accessible
in any current community planning public processes. By nature
of Hou’s project, which included bilingual members, a range of
participants was able to share their stories. By maintaining an
informal, conversational environment, Hou was able to break
down some age-old barriers, allowing participants to express
themselveswithsomefreedom.Thenatureof thesettingalsowore
down the separation that regularly exists between professionals
and community stakeholders. The carefully structured “informal
processes” made it possible for participants to receive information
with less reluctance and seems to have inspired them to be open
to learning and bridging social and professional differences. (Hou,
2013)
Representational
Hou’smethodologyfosteredcross-culturalcommunication
and produced more cultural insights than we typically see in public
processes. By nature and by design, the activities developed for
the project overcame some cultural and linguistic obstructions.
This gave the designers access to a deeper comprehension of
the diverse experiences of the targeted urban residents, even
beyond the limits of the project. The project resulted in the deep
exploration of cultural meanings and let project members walkin
the shoes of the participants. Researchers found that, from the
point of view of the participants, cultural meaning can easily
reside in a physical environment. The discussions that took place
through the interviewing process paved the way for better cross-
cultural understanding. Some peripheral and unexpected points
emerged as the interviewees responded passively, at times, to the
questions. Yet participants also actively negotiated the project’s
structure to express what changes they might like to see in their
neighborhoods and public spaces. Partly inadvertently and partly
by design, participants were representing their cultures and fueling
a cross-cultural dialogue. (Hou, 2013)
SECTION III: Concepts by Hou
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21. OROZCO
Mediated
The extent to which participants’ needs and preferences
emerge and are relevant in cross-cultural learning greatly depends
on the design of the project and the extent to which organizers
are able to play the role of transcultural agents. The ability of
the guides to speak the relevant languages and their pre-existing
understanding of the community’s cultural traditions became
important factors in the resulting assessment of the project’s ability
to interpret the concerns of the interviewees and elicit a beneficial
cross-cultural exchange. The researchers needed to prepare and
obtain background knowledge that would be relevant in reaching
out to a particular audience, understanding the traditions of that
community. Facilitators required some training in recognizing how
cultural heritage would be expressed and navigated, and then the
extent to which differences might be mediated. (Hou, 2013)
Collaborative
As communities become more diverse, collaborative
approaches become more complex, exemplified by Hou’s effort
with design professionals to completely handle the public process
on their own. This is especially true in communities that are
not familiar with technical or hypothetical terms. The involved
community partners and professionals become active players when
they are trained to be organizers for transcultural competency.
The collaboration between the project members and community
partners is crucial for outreach and mobilizing the participatory
design.Forinstance,thecommunitypartnersforOSS#01connected
the project with a diverse group of organizations and institutions.
Another key player for OSS#01 were the project members to help
reach a level of complexity and gain a better understanding of
the cultural norms of the community. A successful collaboration
is often a transcultural act between institutions and community
partners. A transcultural act requires the partners to understand
and respect each other’s needs and priorities, then inevitably
manage possible conflicts. (Hou, 2013)
16

22. Orozco
New York grew to be a city of five boroughs in 1898, with
a population of more than seven million living primarily in lower
Manhattan and northwestern Brooklyn. Population densities in
the tenements of the Lower East Side were about 500 persons
per acre: by comparison, today’s high-rise neighborhoods of the
Upper East Side or Upper West Side rarely exceed 300 persons
per acre (Foner et al., 2013, 35). It was the 1965 Immigration Act
that put an end to country quotas and opened up immigration
to the world (Foner et al., 2013, 36). With the passage of the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the U.S. began its
Fourth Wave of immigration. Prior to the Fourth Wave, from
1920 to 1965 the nation experienced a 45 year lull in immigration.
The Nationality Act was the first trend in a significant movement
to alter the immigration dilemma, and for the first time it “placed
all countries on an equal footing.” The foreign-born*
population
in NYC was at 1.4 million, only totaling 18 percent of the city’s
total population of 7.9 million in 1970 (Foner et al., 2013, 37).
By 1970, less than five percent of America’s population was
foreign-born (Vitiello, 2009). More than a century ago, NYC was
predominantly European-born; the majority were Russian Jews
and Italians. Today most immigrants are from Latin America,
the Caribbean, and Asia (Foner et al., 2013, 3). For much of
the twentieth century, a fifth or more of NYC’s residents were
foreign-born. The figure reached 41 percent in 1910 and by 2010
it was nearly as high, at 37 percent (Foner et al., 2013, 6).
*12 Foreign-born: Immigrants and foreign-born are used interchange-
ably by several scholars as both groups are defined as persons living in the
United States who were not born as American citizens.
Range of Social, Health, and Educational Services
Today New York City (NYC) with more than 8 million
residents is a multicultural city, and many residents are interested
in revitalizing its diverse neighborhoods. According to broader
U.S. standards, NYC has an impressively wide range of social,
health, and educational services, including the City University of
New York (C.U.N.Y.), which is the largest urban public university
system in the nation. This has been a major selling point for
immigrants attracted to NYC. C.U.N.Y had about 240,000
undergraduate students enrolled as of 2011, and the majority
of these students were immigrants or children of immigrants.
Besides having attractive educational centers, NYC provides
a wide array of institutions offering support and assistance to
new arrivals, in the form of settlement houses, churches and
synagogues, hospitals, and labor unions. Immigrants in NYC
also profit from the fact that labor unions have been consistently
strong and politically influential for many decades (Foner et al.,
2013, 7).
SECTION IV: History of New York City
17

23. OROZCO
Contemporary NYC Immigrants
Many immigrants still arrive in NYC with little education
and few skills, but a much higher proportion of contemporary
newcomers have college degrees and professional backgrounds
(Foner et al., 2013, 3). For instance, Mexican migrants in NYC
are indigenous people who are racialized and segmented into the
labor force in unique ways, along with other indigenous migrants
from the mountains of Ecuador and Guatemala (Gonzales, 2013,
22). Immigration is not a new phenomenon or a new issue for
planners. In 1970, non-Hispanic Whites made up 83 percent of the
population, Blacks 11percent, Hispanics five percent, Asian and
Pacific islanders one percent, and American Indians less than one
percent. However, today’s immigration is different because most
immigrants are from non-Western nations and as many as 700,000
per year are undocumented (Myers, 2008). Moreover, according
to a report released by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean
and Latino Studies of the Graduate Center of the City University
of New York, the number of Mexicans living in the city and its
surrounding counties increased from 96,662 in 1990 to 334,220 in
the year 2000, and to 607,503 in 2010. The same report notes that
Mexicans are poised to become the city’s largest Latino group by
the early 2020s (Gonzales, 2013, 21). Scholars have projected that
by 2030, 15 percent of the U.S. population will be foreign-born
and in 2050, nearly half the population will consist of minority
groups.
Immigration is changing the composition, physical form,
and socio-cultural processes of cities. Urban life transforms
migrant groups into ethnic communities with shared memories and
perceptions because it is on city streets that migrants discover their
own similarities to the world around them. Cities (in particular)
become the locus of migration chains and economic networks
in which brokers move easily between minority communities and
societies at large (Hanley et al., 2008, 2). The immigrants and their
host communities are constantly evolving and live in a dimension
of transition, eventually adapting to and merging into U.S. society.
These immigrants must find an appropriate balance: maintaining
their cultural and ethnic integrity, while simultaneously accessing
their new city’s social, political, and economic opportunities
(Hanley et al., 2008). I agree with Leonie Sandercock, a planning
Professor from the University of British Colombia, who argues
that planners must cope with the added dimensions of external
socio-cultural forces, which are reshaping cities of the twenty-
first century (Sandercock, 2004 - 2009). New York City is an
immigrant city, where planners need to accommodate subsets
of the population that have a wide range of socio-demographic
characteristics, languages, financial resources, and cultural values
that are entirely legitimate and important in their lives and for the
cultural diversity that enriches the urban landscape.
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24. Orozco
NYC as a Sanctuary
NYC is sometimes referred to as a “sanctuary city,”
whereby practices have been followed to protect undocumented
immigrants. In 2006, for example, the city distributed a letter in
11 languages assuring immigrants that no one would question
their legal status when they sought care at the city’s public
hospitals, and undocumented immigrants in New York State are
eligible for in-state tuition at public colleges (Foner et al., 2013,
15). Supporting diversity in neighborhoods is a pronounced
goal of New Urbanism. The preamble to the “Charter of the
New Urbanism” identifies the “increasing separation by race
and income” as part of an “interrelated community-building
challenge” (Congress for the New Urbanism, 1996). New
Urbanists advocate for the principle that “neighborhoods should
be diverse in use and population,” yet they offer few strategies
for directly achieving diversity (Congress for the New Urbanism,
1996). The Charter (1996) states: “Within neighborhoods, a broad
range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse
ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the
personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.”
Similarly, the “Principles for Inner City Neighborhoods Design:
Creating Communities of Opportunity” states that in order to
achieve diversity the promoters seek to “provide a broad range
of housing types and price levels to bring people of diverse
ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction” and, “in doing so
they believe that we will inevitably be strengthening the personal
civic bonds essential to an authentic community” (Congress for
the New Urbanism & U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, 2000, 4).
The city can be a safe haven for immigrants when they
are able to develop a sense of belonging, which is important in
any society. There has to be a reason why Queens is the most
ethnically diverse county in the U.S. Planners should be asking,
“how can cultural diversity generate new urban forms and new
systems of neighborhood governance, rather than attempting to
recapture an imaginary past” (Rahder & Milgrom, 2004, 37). One
example of a specific ethnic group in NYC that is adjusting to
city life is the Mexican population. Its integration into the city’s
cultural, social, and political life has taken on its own path and
has its own unique characteristics (Gonzales, 2013, 22). Mexican
communities have been in New York since the 1920s, but the
majority has come from the last 30 years from south of Mexico.
According to Gonzales, there Mexican communities have their
own idiosyncrasies, cultural and community organizations.
New York is a haven for immigrants for many reasons.
A one notable one resides in its seemingly infinite number of
organizations, that have helped immigrants settle and integrate
with the social and economic fabric of the city. New York arguably
started modern social work as we know it in the United States.
This was born out of the Settlement Houses that were operational
during the years of Ellis Island. A more modern version is the
New York Association for New Americans (N.Y.A.N.A.). This
institution has helped a vast array of immigrant groups. New
immigrants such as the Soviet Jews, found housing and enrolled
in courses, that NYANA offered, including English language
courses. The NYANA’S style of teaching, “enabled many new
arrivals to grasp basic conversational English in just a few weeks”
(Foner et al., 2013, 97). The organization then helps train them
for various vocations. The fact that NYC offered such services
has made it an attractive destination for immigrants, and as long
as such services continue to exist, it will remain a Mecca for new
immigrants.
SECTION IV: Why New York City?
19

25. OROZCO
Image 19 & 20: On August 10, 2014, the Ascend Educational Fund (A.E.F.) group has joined OSS#01 staff for one of the
Open Garden workshops. A.E.F. is a nonprofit to enable students to reach their full potential through higher education.
New Young Workers in NYC
NYC relies on the influx of young working-age people.
Immigrants are in this mix: “Just as immigrants a century
ago provided NYC with the labor necessary for creating its
infrastructure, the city now relies on its immigrants to shore up
its labor force and to provide services for its aging population”
(Foner et al., 2013, 61). For example, Mexicans in New York have
entered the city as the quintessential flexible laborers who make
possible the high-end consumption of the city’s affluent classes
(Gonzales, 2013, 23). Mexicans have also become a force in New
York’s informal economy, in which the underemployed work street
corners as day laborers and as street vendors, and they offer other
types of informal work (Gonzales, 2013, 23).
The flow and presence of these young workers, often
more visible from the street, can provide fuel for new ideas,
improved policies, and enhanced planning practices, all with an eye
to embracing this multiculturalism. While there is ongoing debate
about multiculturalism as an ideology, planners generally agree that
multiculturalism as a “public philosophy acknowledges racial and
cultural differences in a society and encourages their sustenance
and expressions as constituent elements of a national social order”
(Qadeer, 1997, 482). The city continues to rely on immigrant
laborers, calling for American society to develop an improved
“glue” that will help hold many different subcommunities together.
20

26. Orozco
Heterogeneity via Immigrants
Since the major wave in the early twentieth century, the U.S.
has experienced its next largest wave of immigrant newcomers in
the past thirty-five years. Its mix of population has become even
more varied, with a further diversification by country of origin.
Immigration is still part of the continuous cycle of population
fluctuations, as people who have lived in the city move on and
are replaced by immigrants. This “demographic ballet” is a source
of strength for the city because it provides a supply of talent
upon which its institutions rest. This stands in contrast to cities
that have been unable to attract people and face demographic
and economic decline (Foner et al., 2013, 36). We must grasp
the dynamic reality that new immigrants keep arriving in NYC.
Their political roles and power will only increase, too, as they face
choices about their identities and citizenship.
Immigrant Status in NYC
In 1970, 18 percent of NYC’s population was foreign in
born, the lowest percentage in the twentieth century. But 2010,
more than one out of three New Yorkers (35%) were immigrants.
Today’s immigrants in NYC come from Latin America, the
Caribbean, and Asia (Foner, 2013, 1). The 1980s and 1990s were
crucial decades in the city’s history, as urban planners shifted
from earlier discussions of “planned shrinkage” to concerns
about low- and moderate- income people being squeezed out by
gentrification and scarcity of affordable housing. Yet looking back
on these years, it is clear that immigration was also a crucial part
of the story of reviving the city’s under-populated neighborhoods
(Foner et al., 2013, 67). Early twentieth-century planning
recognized the significance of immigration on planning issues
such as housing, growth, congestion, and economic development.
Immigrants helped redefine the planning professions because
they were prompted by the injustices of urban renewal projects
and mobilized communities to demand social justice. Their
mobilization inspired the rise of advocacy planning, and the
evolution of community development, merging planning, and
affordable housing and social services (Vitiello, 2009). A scholar
named Melissa J. Kim had a great point that planners need to
acknowledge immigration as an increasingly important economic
and social factor in urban development, which affects both the
physical form and social composition of cities. (Kim, 2010)
These immigrant newcomers do not stand out because
the city has a tradition of immigration with many different racial
groups and they provide a distinctive role for the life of the city.
As immigrants change when they move to NYC, they affect the
life of the city in various qualitative ways. And as immigrants
play a role in transforming NYC, this “new” New York in turn
influences them (Foner et al., 2013, 2). If the first-generation
immigrants’ lives change in NYC, we need to also consider the
second-generation children that are born and bred in NYC because
they provide fresh and surprising ties out of the mixture of
different cultural backgrounds. Both first- and second-generation
immigrants are willing to share their story about the reasoning
behind their decision to move to NYC and the adaptation that
some underwent. The energy unleashed by a city continuously
remaking itself demographically—and by the dreams of upward
social mobility that immigrants embody—allows it to reinvent
itself socially, culturally, and economically (Foner et al., 2013, 35).
SECTION IV: Why Immigrants?
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27. OROZCO
Combination of Skills and Polyethnic Neighborhoods
There is an urgent need for research from a transnational
perspective on how immigrant reception both opens and constrains
the construction of place and on the formulation of extraterritorial
socio-political practices and demands (Sánchez 23). Immigrants, at
the individual level, represent a basic unit of social and cultural ties,
pulling from their respective national backgrounds. Immigrants’
occupations and specializations take hold for a variety of reasons.
They reflect a combination of the skills, cultural preferences, and
human capital within a group as well as the opportunities afforded
to them upon their arrival (Foner et al., 2013, 12). Throughout
the five boroughs, immigrants have expanded the number of
businesses; many of them are catering to a growing ethnic market,
which is just one of the ways that new arrivals have contributed to
economic growth in the city (chapter 3, this volume; and see Foner
et al., 2013, 18).
NYC is not a melting pot in which all cultures dissolve
into one undifferentiated whole because the city continues to
have different sections of neighborhoods and people do not
easily surrender their heritage. Still, a sense of belonging can
come from the meaning associated with other cultures, gaining in
strength through accommodation among and interrelations with
others. It is important to recognize and nurture those spaces of
accommodation and intermingling (Hou, 2013, 60). Immigrants
are leaving their mark on a broad range of mainstream institutions
in the city, from schools and hospitals to churches and museums
(Foner et al., 2013, 22). Immigrants have created not only large
and dense ethnic settlements, but they have also created polyethnic
neighborhoods that are amalgams of newcomers from all parts
of the world (Foner et al., 2013, 17). These neighborhoods are
segments that increase the character of a place, and they also
increase the viability of a community-based project.
Stage for City Involvement
New Yorkers see the U.S. political arena as the appropriate
stage for citizen involvement. Younger local leaders are more likely
to develop political coalitions in New York than in their respective
homelands. Even though some immigrants’ hearts are in the
affairs of their homelands’ political parties, they will still strive to
be informed about U.S. politics. Concerns about the country of
origin can also provide a catalyst for engagement in U.S. politics,
and involvement in homeland-based organizations can provide
organizational skills and strengthen migrants’ ability to mobilize a
base of support for political issues and elections in New York (see
Basch 1987; Guarnizo et al. 1999; Rogers 2006; Wong et al. 2011;
and Foner et al., 2013, 10). Moreover, place ultimately reflects and
is the outcome of these various negotiations, including coming
to belong to a community, participating in local decisions, and
struggling to gain power. A place such as this can be forged through
the creation of a “cosmopolitan village,” as NYC has often been
called. In OSS#01, we have had a mission to see local residents
engage in a deep dialogue about past and present conditions in
order to secure the right to create a place that could belong to
everyone.
22

28. Orozco
Image 21: Juanli demonstrating the gardening process. Image 22: Wrap-up session with a group of curators.
Create Political Involvement
A definite place is needed to support an immigrant
community and help these individuals recognize the importance
of their cultural citizenship. Author Michael Rios describes
place rights as an outcome of, various negotiations. The rights
immigrants develop in their new settings come as the result of
a range of negotiations that relate to the formation of a new
territory with which they identify, their participation in decision
making at the local level, and other political actions they might
increasingly take over time (Hou, 2013, 173). The desire to create
collaborative leadership capacity is perhaps one of the greatest
challenges as it ultimately raises the issue of power. This is
especially true among the different cultural groups and between
different scales of decision-making ranging from the local to the
regional (Hou, 2013, 173).
Communication
Some communication scholars have argued that negotiation is the
basis for identity construction and aids in the bridging of cultural
difference.Further,itcanhelpshapeamoresuccessfulintercultural
form of communication (Hou, 2013). Negotiations may be the
basis for arguments, but they also involve shared experiences that
can lead to the formation of stable relationships in the future.
Groups that find agreement may be to share cultural values and
make commitments to one another, building community. There
are cases that demonstrate that agreements can serve as a basis in
transcultural processes that involve both combative and peaceful
interactions (Hou, 2013, 174). Hou and Tanner (2010) argue that
the expression and give-and-take between the varying identities
and competing interests in multicultural ethnic neighborhoods
can present both challenges and opportunities for designers,
planners, activists, and community leaders. The OSS#01 project
arose in response to such challenges
SECTION IV: Why Immigrants?
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29. OROZCO
Public Participation
In the 1980s and 1990s many foreign-born along with other
New Yorkers participated in projects to “clean up parks, reinvent
community institutions, and reclaim neighborhoods.” (Foner, 2013,
74) Planners now, need to deal with cross-cultural negotiations
and create safer places to address the politics of intercultural
struggles and the agency of space. The primacy of structure or
agency is now being addressed to disperse power and activate it
at different levels in a given socio-economic formation and place
(Hou, 2013, 9). This allows every-day citizens to be a pivotal
element to distribute power and to alter the social construction
of a place. For example, New Yorkers have painstakingly worked
towards recreating and rebuilding their neighborhoods over the
past century to combat change and other unexpected occurrences.
They were able to successfully do this as a city by, “forming civic
groups and community organizations, cleaning up neighborhoods,
and pushing city, state, and federal governments to reinvest in the
city.” (Foner, 2013, 67) These public spaces are a space where “a
sense of group identity has been forged, reinforced, and continually
reinvented.” (Foner, 2013, 109)
Urban life transforms migrant groups into ethnic
communities with shared memories and perceptions. Cities (in
particular) become the locus of migration chains and economic
networks in which brokers move easily between minority
communities and societies at large. (Hanley et al., 2008, 2)
Immigration is not a new phenomenon or a new issue for planners.
However,today’simmigrationisdifferentbecausemostimmigrants
are from non-Western nations and as many as 700,000 per year
are undocumented (Myers, 2008). Scholars have projected that by
2030, fifteen percent of the U.S. population will be foreign-born
and in 2050, nearly half the population will consist of minority
groups. The immigrants and their host communities are constantly
evolving and live in a dimension of transition, eventually adapting
to and merging into U.S. society. Planners must cope with “added
dimensions of external socio-cultural forces, which are reshaping
cities of the twenty-first century” (Sandercock, 2009).
Image 23: A native Canadian volunteered to tell a story.
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30. Orozco
The data collection method of OSS#01 includes interviews,
observations, and focus groups during--as well as after--the Open
Garden Program. All sessions and meetings have been open to
the public. The methodological plan of OSS#01 consists of four
means of data collection.
Observation: Collecting primary data from direct observation
of public behavior in an educational setting at the OSS#01
installation. The OSS#01 installation will be evaluated and
analyzed to investigate whether it serves as the core for the
Open Garden Program.
Focus groups: Facilitating five focus groups with five different
institutions (ten to twelve participants) to capture perceptions
of participants and learn about their social ties, as well as their
reactions to OSS#01.
Short Interviews: Conducting short, follow-up interviews with
responsive participants in collaboration with Juanli Carrión,
Director of Public Programming for OSS#01, and the
Horticultural Society of New York, in an effort to understand
the target population’s reasons for choosing to visit OSS#01.
Extended Interviews: Organizing follow-up interviews with
past interviewees and project staff about their experiences
and (ideally) their satisfaction with the ability of OSS#01 to
impact cross-cultural learning and inclusiveness.
Step-by-step Process:
1. The purpose of the observation of public behavior
without the researcher’s participation is to investigate the
outcomes, challenges, and whether it has met the following goals:
• ToobservewhetherOSS#01servesasastageforconversations
of active engagement between immigrants, non-immigrants,
and visitors.
• To observe whether the community garden allows for a study
of social interaction and an aesthetic exercise to activate the
public space.
• To analyze and look for broad patterns, ideas, or issues
brought up in meetings or sessions involving public behavior.
• To evaluate the use of immigrant stories and plant preferences,
plus the associated public activities, to see if the result was a
garden that would attract people and have some of the desired
results in transcultural communication and relationship-
building.
Image 24: A group from the Visual Arts Department joins Juanli.
SECTION V: Materials & Methods to Evaluate OSS#01
25

31. OROZCO
2. The focus groups have been used to probe more deeply
into the OSS#01 participant’s experience and get a fuller picture
of participant’s sense of place. The activity has been conducted
with five groups of ten to twelve people from the following
organizations:
Studio of Visual Arts, Museum of Biblical Art, City Parks
Foundation, El Centro del Inmigrante, and Urban Landscape Lab
The allotted time for the focus group activities has been
approximately 30 minutes. The activity was audio recorded to
allow for a flow in the storytelling and not detract from participant
storytelling by taking notes. Only key points will be written to
enable the researcher to gain an evaluation from the viewpoint
of people who visit OSS#01 and communicate their ideas to the
researcher. The participants will be asked to talk among themselves
to discuss the likes and dislikes of OSS#01.
3. The short interview will be conducted with three active
participants from the five aforementioned groups and after their
programmed session at OSS#01 with people who decided to visit
or participate in OSS#01. The 15 to 20 minute interview will be
conducted to follow up on their experience at OSS#01.
4. Another set of interviews will be conducted with four
influential speakers; three project staff members, and the director
of the OSS #01 and 10 interviews with past interviewees from
10 different countries. All the interviewees are considered to be
advocates for OSS#01 at Duarte Square Park within Manhattan,
New York. The in-person interview will consist 10 to 15 questions
and lasts about 30 to 45 minutes to generate responses geared
towards their perception of the OSS#01 experience.
The interviews and focus groups are voluntary and will
be anonymous and will not ask for any personal identification
information. Audio recordings and handwritten notes may include
direct quotes and paraphrasing from sessions and meetings;
however speakers will remain unnamed. The interviews and focus
groups will be administered shortly after IRB approval is granted.
Individual interviews and group discussions will be transcribed and
coded based on themes that emerge. The responses will inform
people about the common themes to assess concerns and opinions
that relate to their experience in OSS#01. Completion of the
interview and focus group indicates the willingness to participate
in this project and that you are over the age of eighteen. The data
collection will be retained to find the collective themes and to
disclose important findings without identifiable information. All
notes will be used for transcription purposes.
Image 25:Young college students are working together to plant
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32. Orozco
Perceptions of OSS #01: The Cross Pollination of Cultures
Name (Optional), Description, Date of visit, Date filled out:
1. Social- What was it like to be a participant for OSS#01?
2. Social- Do you think this art installation creates an opportunity
for social interaction? Why is that?
3. Representational- Which aspects of OSS#01 do you value
and feel appropriate to implement in other areas of the city?
4. Collaborative-If thisprojectwillhappeninyourneighborhood,
would it be beneficial for your community?
5. Mediated- What have you learned from OSS#01 that will
improve your relationship with your neighborhood?
6. Social- What do you do now that you didn’t do before the
program began?
7. Representational- Do you think OSS#01 is acting as link
among different groups of the community? If yes, how?
8. Mediated- What do you think about the Open Garden
Program as a tool to engage its visitors with the artwork and
the ideas behind it?
9. Collaborative- Has something changed in yourself as a result
of your involvement to OSS#01?
10. Representational- Based on your experience, what would you
say are the strengths/ weaknesses of this program?
Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to say?
Did I leave anything out? Please feel free to write down your
responses on this page under each question.
Image 26: Juanli explained the interaction between two different plants.
Image 27: The Project Coordinator was concluding the session.
SECTION V: Questions for OSS#01 Participants
27

33. OROZCO
Image 28: All participants were willing to help with maintaining the garden.
Image 29: A group of children were excited to built the shade structure.
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34. Orozco
The responses from this final phase of data collection,
received from the interviews and focus groups, will provide the
next step for recommendations. These recommendations are ways
to engage the community and help foster the creation of a network
to revitalize underutilized public spaces. A key finding from the
interviews was the importance of open space in supporting
social interactions and networking, a critical aspect of social life.
In turn, the garden serves to represent the multiplicity of these
communities, offered in a public space with accessible public
programming — the “Open Garden” program used to encourage
community-wide dialogue. This dialogue continues on the Internet
via the interactive website (http://www.outerseedshadow.org/),
and it intentionally brought people together on numerous
platforms. Welcoming spaces like the Outer Seed Shadow #01
can harvest cross-cultural learning, dialogues, engagement, and
political empowerment among a diverse population by sharing
people’s respective immigrant stories.
During the last three months, OSS#01 members spoke
to approximately one hundred people. The team did not keep
track of ages, ethnicities, or immigration status, but all were 18
and older. During the project, we invited participants to talk
about immigration and any questions they had about the project.
The participants identified themselves with educational and
social service institutions. They were encouraged to fill out a
questionnaire about their reflections and experience with OSS#01.
I carefully recorded and collected responses and identified some
of the recurring central themes that emerged. The responses
fell into three areas of community need. First, respondents want
more inclusive public spaces in the city. Second, they wanted to
learn more about the immigrants who live throughout the city.
Lastly, NYC residents want more opportunities for gardening and
would like to see the project replicated in other parts of the city.
Displacement – Placemaking for Social Interactions
Respondents said they feel safer within inclusive public
spaces; the OSS#01 garden welcomed visitors and participants
to explore the center of Duarte Square Plaza. One participant
mentioned that the installation “felt open to the pubic and
was more inviting.” As participants got familiar with the new
environment, project members encouraged participants to explore
the center to help wear down the separation between professionals
and participants. This enabled subjects to participate without
the intimidating presence of an unfamiliar or unsympathetic
audience (Hou, 2013, 11). The facilitated interactions functioned
to create a space where people were able to articulate and reflect
in the new installation. Interactions between the project staff and
participants were flexible, designed to express their experience in
their own voices.
As the project evolves with new interactions, the
collaboration between project staff and community partners
becomes essential to carry out the project goals. This partnership
is necessary because the participatory activities are crafted
collaboratively based on the level of comfort of the group.
Partnerships also mediate experiences between participants and
listen to the exchanged ideas to judge the level of participation.
Paticipants were asked whether the project created an environment
for social interaction and whether they can imagine this project
in their neighborhood. People were willing to revisit their own
daily routines and think about whether their neighbors would
understand OSS#01. All respondents supported the project
because it was very easy to understand and they felt there was
importance in “sharing your story.” The physical installment of
the project was portrayed to be pieces at human scale because
people can sit next to the plants and carefully examine each plant
SECTION VI: Analysis & Findings
29

35. OROZCO
that represents a different immigrant. “The center attracts people
from different backgrounds and provokes thinking. This project
allows you to realize the neighborhood’s diversity and is intuitive
to all people who feel immigrants in one way or another.” They felt
like they were part of something larger than the garden because of
the stories shared between them and realized that it took several
members to put the installation together. One said, “good for
thought, especially because I’ve never been part of a community
garden.” This explains how the project can be used to mediate a
discussion about local polyethnic enclaves. The whole point of
a cultural difference discourse is that it can be used to negotiate
and sometimes bridge people during the process of placemaking
(Hou, 2013, 9). These transcultural encounters and interactions
occur in everyday landscapes such as restaurants, shops, streets,
schools, libraries, parks, and community gardens (Hou, 2013, 9).
The social encounters that hinder or facilitate transcultural
processes can be captured by planning and designing for
participation. For instance, one participant explained how the
underlyingsocialmessageinOSS#01occursduringtheparticipatory
activity: “The installation conveys a social message, but I would
feel more involved if I participated in the gardening process.” I
noticed that people were more in touch with the garden activity
because one group only had the chance to get an introduction of
the project and wanted more time to truly experience the piece.
For example, a participant said, “people love plants and gardening,
and in a place like NYC, people like to express his/her opinion
on their cultural identity.” These participatory activities empower
residents and youth to become more active participants.
After designing workshops with different levels of
interaction, there were appreciative participants and opinionated
comments about oSS#01. A participant expressed appreciation
for the project by saying, “It felt nice to be a part of maintaining
a piece of culture and nature in the middle of Tribeca.” Another
said, “It felt good to help maintain the garden.” One of the most
interestingcommentssaid,“Racedoesnotmatterwhengardening.”
The feedback indicated that the place and activity functioned as a
safe place in which cultural barriers were temporarily suspended
(Hou, 2013. 11). Participants expressed themselves more freely
during the garden activities: “You see plants you recognize and
it starts a conversation. The piece can function as a topic of
conversation to create interaction.” The conversation about the
project had opened the planning process of the garden to non-
professional actors who may be better equipped to handle cross-
cultural translation and transactions (Hou, 2013, 12).
Participants appreciated how the art installation
represented cultural diffusion in NYC by having each participant’s
native country symbolized through a familiar plant from his/her
homeland. The garden had many different plants and “it organizes
the community over a common place.” The project served as a
vehicle for understanding cultural adaptation and transformation
(Hou, 2013, 13). OSS#01 allowed people to see how “crossing the
border” was not only about traveling from one nation to the next,
but also realizing how immigrants’ every day encounters in the
city shared with others. These urban dwellers experience different
encounters in streets, schools, markets, gardens, restaurants, and
parks illuminating how people negotiate for space, identities,
values, and rights with others (Hou, 2013, 13).
The aforementioned encounters and exchanges are
represented during the Open Garden Program because it offered a
richer understanding of culture and place in a diverse society, such
as NYC. The negotiation and unsettled notions can be a challenge
to the institutionalized practice of planning and design, but it can
lead to a more inclusive and dynamic cityspace (Hou, 2013. 13).
As one participant commented, “In the words of Voltaire ‘I part
cultivar notre jardin,’ we must work on our garden focus on the
task at hand together.” Several comments support that OSS #01
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36. Orozco
became a strong link among different groups of the community
because of a dialogue and “shared experience” between the
participants. This is reinforced by another remark, “The
project gives people something to work on together.” OSS#01
“staged” social and spatial practices to provide opportunities for
participation and civic engagement, especially with the stories of
immigrants being represented by plants.
Most people were fascinated with the notion of how
plants interact with each other for space, and how well each plant
did in its new urban environment. Every week each plant had
grew and offered a new setting; the story evolved every day. A
participated wrote an insightful comment about “the mirroring
between the type of plants and the type of people can act as a
bridge to the concept. The piece is easy to understand, which
makes it meaningful.” Several people were surprised to see plants
adapting into a harsh urban corner even after sharing room with
neighboring plants. “The garden allows people to see what can be
grown in NYC,” one person remarked. This “adaptation” process
is then associated with how people survive and adapt to urban
culture. As one participant noted, “different groups are like plants
because they grow together.” OSS#01 created “a great experience
to see different plants and where they originated,” by allowing
“this installation and it gives a chance for people to see different
cultures through the use of plants.”
The physical encounter between the participants and the
garden stimulated people to share their stories and some people
gave extra advice about how to mediate cultural differences. One
comment described how participants were stimulated: “It made
a visitor from a passive observer to a participant, and created a
ownership and belonging to the project.” Many responses included
recommendations about how the idea of the garden could be
expanded in a physical form and even as an online resource. “The
idea of having various plants together can also be taken to other
boroughs in order to show what it really means to be in N.Y.,”
said one observer. The reactions and responses of the people
indicated that they are willing to discuss the displacement of the
plants and people to create better places beyond the project.
Image 30: The Project Coordinator joined the group from the Urban
Landscape Lab Colombia University to reside in the shade and talk about
their experience.
SECTION VI: Analysis & Findings
31

37. OROZCO
Understand Local Immigrant Context
Many participants wanted more opportunities to socialize
and learn about the existing immigrant population in NYC. For
example, a participant wrote, “yes this project is an opportunity for
social interaction because this art installation is a representation of
how different cultures interact and no matter where people come
from, there’s just that need to survive.” In most cases, participants
were fascinated with how the plants were distributed on a flat aerial
view of Manhattan, because they could identify different countries
that exist in the city today, based on which plant was planted in
each neighborhood. Someone wrote that the project would be
beneficial for his/her neighborhood, “because people will get a
chance to see how diverse NYC is.” This is further emphasized by
another participant who noted that, “bringing culture and plants
to the neighborhood, more importantly, will give me a chance to
see whom else from what other countries are living near me. It
can give me a better understanding for them and make me more
inclined to socialize.” Participantslearned about the distribution
of the plants and how each placement was based on where the
interviewee lived. Each interview was very different, even though
each immigrant lived in the same island. A participant described
OSS#01 as an engagement tool: “I live on the upper west side,
area full of Colombians and Barnard students. It would bring great
awareness to students in NY.”
OSS#01 creates an opportunity to raise awareness about
the local immigrant community. During the explanation of the
interviewee process, the participants valued the inclusive feature
of having different interviewees and being able to connect to an
immigrant story. One said, “The project can bring awareness to
people who are negative in their attitude toward immigrants. It
can maybe encourage them to be less anti-immigrant by clarifying
misconceptions about immigrants.” Some participants viewed the
project as assessment of cultural spaces in NYC and noted how
participants “finally” have a chance to bring neighbors together
and talk. One mentioned that the installation transforms “the
plaza and becomes a welcome space to pause and interact. And
the people who maintain it work together as a team and bond
together.” Participants appreciated Juanli’s process of interviewing
different immigrants from Manhattan because they assumed that
Juanli took the time to get to know his interviewees to include
them in the project. Participants would ask how Juanli chose the
interviewees and he said it was open for anybody who was willing
to share an immigrant story. A participant wrote, “I’ve learned that
everyone has a background story, whether they are immigrants or
city workers. Immigrants co-exist everywhere in the city.”
The OSS#01 project is installed in a neighborhood to give
people the chance to see who lives near each other and get them
inclinedtosocialize.“If thisprojectwasinmyneighborhood,Ithink
everyone in my neighborhood would realize the numerous amount
of immigrants living among them,” observed one participant. This
is true especially when people have the opportunity to listen and
watch each of the 40 interviews. For example, a students says,
“OSS#01wouldbenefitalotof students.IamlivinginMorningside
Heights. Students here come and go a lot so this type of temporal
installation would match the neighborhood.” Participants are able
to walk in the shoes of an immigrant in Manhattan when they
listen to the interviews online. One said, “Indeed, the symbol for
the garden is for the interaction between cultures.”
There were immigrant stories of how they were brought
to America when they were young or accepted new employment/
school opportunities to fulfill the “American dream.” One example
is from a woman named Daria from Italy who grew up in NYC
and went to Italian school in the city. Her parents decided to move
back to Italy, but she could not leave NYC and felt lost in Italy
because she was not sure which culture she self-identifies, whether
American or Italian. Daria did everything in her power to get into a
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38. Orozco
well-known NYC school and managed to convince her parents to
stay in the city. She is now married and stayed with her husband in
NYC. Another story is from Milagros, a woman with a Dominican
Republic background. She was also brought into NYC when she
was very young. Milagros wanted to finish her medical degree in
NYC, but a lot of people did not speak Spanish during the 1970s
and she found out that it was too difficult and expensive to finish
the degree required for her dream job. However Milagros still
works in NYC and realized she had a better life in the U.S. than in
Mexico. The aforementioned stories have two similar beginning
with different results and memories about city life. There are also
stories like Sasan’s, who was born in Iran and moved to NYC to
study architecture. He was a used-to big city life and did not have a
hard time adapting to the city, but he believes that diversity makes
it easier to find different relationships. According to participants,
“OSS #01 enforces diversity which benefits everyone in the
community.”
The project created links among different groups of the
community. The connections were expressed when a participant
wrote, “OSS #01 creates a platform for interaction and
discussion.” I also observed people and noticed that the project
created an approachable “stage” because everybody could easily
walk over to the garden, and discover how different plants could
coexist with one another. The simplicity of the garden design
broadened the ability of the participants to register and express
their thoughts. The installation allowed for a better cross-cultural
understanding of how locals, including elderly residents, view the
project. One participant said, “I love that the planter is a bench!
Sitting next to the plant is something not usually seen in the city.”
Each plant represents a different immigrant interviewee and
has very different demands in how to grow, but most of them
thrive nevertheless. Another participant wrote, “very fun, very
symbolic to think of our city as a garden of cultures interacting.”
In respect to the ‘garden of cultures’,” Duarte Square Plaza truly
underwent placemaking because it was not only about claiming
an underutilized space, but also learning about the unsettling
characteristics of today’s culture and place (Hou, 2013, 14)
Community Empowerment
Almost all participants and visitors have suggested that
NYC could benefit from greater cultural competency and better
use public places to get to know their neighbors or experience
other levels of interactions. As one participant said, “The project
created an opportunity to analyze different backgrounds and
scale them to a proportion that is easily perceived by anyone.”
For example, some participants are explicit about their desire to
bring together people with different cultural backgrounds and
traditions to learn from one another. One design student said,
“I learned to be more in touch with the process of community
engagement. I also learned the importance of community on a
larger scale.” The desire to learn from one another was exemplified
by this comment: “It has made me appreciate more the value
of interaction with other groups as a whole.” This interest in
community building is valuable; as an urban design student wrote,
“I will think more about public engagement in my projects, not
just in the design process, but also in how they can participate in
the finished project.” People, especially urban designers need to
acknowledge community differences and perspectival positions
because everyone experiences them. The differences are “staged”
in a public space where people can share public concerns and
issues that are articulated and debated from multiple perspectives
(Hou, 2013, 20).
SECTION VI: Analysis & Findings
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39. OROZCO
Sometimes a participants spoke up about their familiarity
with immigration after getting comfortable discussing the
relationships between different plants. As one respondent put
it: “ OSS#01 encourages people to talk about where they came
from and his/her current city connections.” Another said, “I feel it
would reveal a lot about the neighborhood’s cultural identity.” The
talk about the different relationships of plants led to discussion
about NYC’s existing polyethnic enclaves. Ethnic enclaves are
where cultural practices of immigrants and residents find new
expressions in the given settings (Hou, 2013, 9). Demonstrating
how Manhattan represents an island of cultural exchanges created
an opportunity for community members to have a sense of cultural
pride, as one respondent talked about: “feeling an increased sense
of pride in sharing my father’s story.” Another said, “It has made
me proud of where I am from and what I can learn from other
cultures.” These moments of interaction are important because
they afford opportunities for imagining and experiencing cultural
similarities, common interests, and solidarities. It allows people
to identify neighbors, co-ethnics, citizens, friends, colleagues, and
outsiders (Hou, 2013, 22). New residents embraced NYC as a
place where they feel like they belong because, as one participant
wrote, “I feel I have a better understanding of this city. Since I just
moved here and I am glad to find people struggling with cultural
identity, like me.” This community garden is a site of everyday
transcultural learning and community building (Hou. 2013, 9).
Lessons learned from OSS#01 Staff Members
Juanli recognized that the key interviews had to be in
a comfortable zone for each interviewee since he was using
people as a medium for the project. The interview process was
complicated and took about one and a half years, but it was an
enriching experience for him. He thinks there is a greater risk with
permanent installations than temporary ones because places need
to be flexible. We both agreed that people are catalyzers and can
expand contagious ideas to organize a supportive system. The
communication with different organizations built a strong network
for OSS#01 and opened other opportunities for practitioners to
work with Juanli. Juanli used his personal experience to construct
the idea of the project, and people were able to relate to his story.
He strongly believes that the Open Garden program made each
participant feel part of the project. Despite the difficult amount
of work he encountered, he felt it was a rewarding experience.
He was even invited by some of the representatives of the
educational institutions to visit their facilities and provide a quick
lecture about his process with OSS#01. When he received some
OSS#01 feedback, he was inspired to continue the project in other
boroughs within NYC.
The Open Garden Program permitted participants to
work with their hands and ask questions during the session. Some
people were intimidated by gardening and felt more comfortable
after the experience. Participants became more curious after
they planted because they realized that each plant has different
needs and their environment changes when one plant outgrows
another. For example, taller plants can cover the sun from smaller
plants, but this can be an advantage or disadvantage depending
on the type of plant. This constant struggle and change in the
garden has opened up opportunities to understand the symbolic
representations, both of the plants and their ethnic associations.
All told, OSS#01 was a rich and rewarding experiment for the
designers and the participants.
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40. Orozco
Hou’s theoretical framework and his experience with
different cities embody a set of ideas that recognizes the instability
of culture(s) and the emergent nature of cultural formation. His
concept of “transcultural placemaking” addresses “transcultural
processes as a building block for a more inclusive democracy and
critical embrace of diversity.” Most importantly, he highlights
how placemaking can be used as a tool or a vehicle for cross-
cultural learning, individual agency, and collective actions. Hou
incorporates strategies in how “cultural boundaries can be
porous, and cultural practices can be reinvented and, at best, self-
determined.” With this in mind, I have come to a conclusion and
a set of recommendations.
Conclusion
A way to develop multicultural literacy is to practice
the planning profession with new understanding of different
cultures. Planners and design consultants need to facilitate
a dialogue, as well as agreements between culturally diverse
community members. New ideas and practices arise from non-
traditional groups, particularly from new immigrants who arrive
in American cities. Planners should value the knowledge that
migrants bring from their home to create more opportunities
for transcultural interactions and connectivity. The knowledge
shared between different cultural groups can become more
fluid with the development of cross-cultural understandings.
They can then proceed to find a common ground between
technical understandings and the value of input from community
members. Planners can become transcultural agents, which will
help them recognize the importance of supporting individuals
and organizations that embody the nature of cultural formation
and how a place is socially constructed. The ability to become
a “transcultural agent” is essential to better facilitate the
communication and transaction of different customs and values
toward a shared goal whether the goals are short or long term.
I believe that cultural competency in the planning
profession is a pressing issue because planners can help create
places and landscapes for cultural adaptation and transformation,
especially in city settings. Cities like New York City attract these
large migrating groups, because the city relies on its immigrants
to shore up its labor force and offer more opportunities that help
accommodate to their pressing needs. NYC has a series of “ethnic
nights” that highlights the cultural heritage of different cultural
groups by featuring different food, clothing, and dance traditions;
however immigrants represent more than simply just a different
culture. Immigrants can offer insights and raise questions that
will enrich a planner’s understanding of newcomers in America
and how to foster a more diverse and inclusive community.
Immigrants are a pivotal element to the distribution of power
and will inevitably alter the social construction of place because
of their different socio-economic backgrounds.
Producing culturally responsive designs and enabling
professionals to learn from the perspectives of the
communities should not be the only goals of the transcultural
participatory process, nor should the process stop at
the completion of a design. In the face of institutional,
political, and cultural barriers, transcultural participatory
design is also a means of empowering immigrants and
other marginalized individuals to become active members
of society across multiple barriers (Hou, 2013, 234).
SECTION VII: Influences to Draw Conclusions
35

41. OROZCO
Planners must support art installations like Outer Seed Shadow #01
that have served as a stage to host a discourse between participants
to address the dynamic process of cultural change and cross-
cultural interactions. The politics of intercultural struggles needs
to be discussed, as well as the agency of space and placemaking for
cross-cultural learning, engagement, and political empowerment.
Project Challenges
OSS#01 members had a couple of challenges to face
during the Open Garden Program, especially in keeping all the
plants alive under the hot sun. Nurturing the OSS#01 plants with
such a diverse plant palette was a bit challenging because of the
different demands, but this situation created the opportunity for
a garden activity during the Open Garden visit. For instance, the
corn started to grow higher and higher, then the agave started
looking sickly. These relationships between the plants were used
to pose questions such as whether the agave should be moved to
another place to be able to survive. After the garden activity, the
project staff received many comments asking if the community
garden could possibly be larger, but there was not enough time
or funding to extend the OSS#01 garden. Another participant
suggested engaging more volunteers to help people who pass by
to understand the meaning and purpose of the project, but there
was limited staffing during the OSS#01 visits.
At the end of the Open Garden Program for OSS#01,
a group of college students with a design backgrounds provided
insightful recommendations. One student proposed to integrate
the idea about displaced communities through themes such as
gentrification. However, the OSS#01 team was not fully prepared
to identify areas of Manhattan that have been gentrified. Also,
after each session, OSS#01 invited the participating groups to
have a debrief session, but it was a constant struggle to talk over
the noise of the surrounding traffic. The area had a lot of traffic
because the site was located about five blocks from the Holland
Tunnel under the Hudson River to connect Manhattan, New York
to Jersey City, New Jersey. Most of the people who were driving
were “on a mission” to cross the tunnel.
Image 31: The partcipants decided to fill out the questionnaire at the bike
share station next to the garden to enjoy the shade.
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42. Orozco
Project Success
The OSS#01 project was a success because the NYC
Department of Parks & Recreation offered four more bi-annual
consecutive commissions, over the next 8 years until the year 2022.
Every two years the Outer Seed Shadow project will be replicated
in one of NYC’s other four boroughs. A participant wrote, “I
would love to see the same project in every borough because it
would be interesting to see what plants they choose.” The success
of the project was measured based on Juanli’s goals and the
response from many different partnerships and organizations.
Every visitor and participant understood that each plant species
was a symbolic representation of individual cultures, and they
were impressed that 36 out of the 40 plants successfully grew. For
instance, one participant commented on “how well plants from
all over the world can do in the middle of a busy urban spot.”
The garden served as context for conversations about
immigration and discussing the contemporary city life of
immigrants. For example, a participant said: “The idea of having
various plants together can also be taken to other boroughs in
order to show what it really means to be in NYC.” OSS#01 offered
a space to learn about cultural inclusiveness and the exchange of
cross-cultural experiences; one participant described the value
as, “giving us the background information and involving us in
the garden.” Even though OSS#01 was surrounded by traffic,
most participants and visitors still envisioned the project being
replicated in other areas. “If people spend more time outside
enjoying the space between buildings there will be more social
interaction and human happiness.” (Gehl, 97) The support of the
participants was demonstrated by their reflection of OSS#01 as
“an idea of revitalization that can propagate throughout the city,
enriching the surroundings as a diverse culture does.”
The primary outcome of OSS#01 will be an informed
discussion about immigration resulting from community
engagement and preferred strategies to activate public space
by creating a comfortable environment and dialogue among
participants. Through the participant interviews and focus
groups, OSS#01 offers a direct engagement with the community,
beginning with individuals, who also serve as an active link to
their cultural subset, bringing with them both personal experience
and a collective community history.
Image 32: Several participants asked questions about the project process
during the gardening workshop because of the receiving environment.
SECTION VII: Influences to Draw Conclusions
37

43. OROZCO
Image 33 & 34: Most of the plants were quite lush in their growth and provided evidence that a green island can be maintained in the middle of an urban matrix.
38