When an alleyway became too undesirable to even walk through, play and tactical interventions helped residents address their neighbourhood’s trauma and reclaim the space.
Alleyways don’t get much attention but can be a critical space for revitalising a neighbourhood.
One, in the West Hill neighbourhood of Albany, New York, USA, is today an active community space, but there was a time when local residents felt too intimidated to enter it.
The Hive project changed that. With a mix of community-led design and tactical placemaking, a visually arresting installation of six honeycombed structures now clearly mark the territory as a place for people.
Built in unpredictable shapes by affixing hexagonal modules together, many of the “hives” incorporate various features of practical use, beautification, and local significance, including children’s artwork, markers for places of interest, seating, games, and planters. All of them identified and created by West Hill’s residents, The Hive has restored colour, pride, and valuable social and street capital, giving this space back to the local community.
What is the Hive?
It was all made possible when Van Alen Institute was looking to support a new placemaking project outside of its native New York City.
Andrew Brown, their Director of Programs, tells us that the nonprofit helps communities “that have suffered rounds of disinvestment and neglect get the resources they need to start shaping their neighbourhood” – resources which they couldn’t necessarily secure on their own, like funding, technical support, and design.
Drawing on an extensive network of experts, Van Alen facilitates projects that realise local people’s own visions for public space, using their lived experiences to understand “where the needs are, the things that are worth preserving, and maybe the things that are worth letting go”.
A Space of Concern
Locals had been telling the mayor of Albany for some time that West Hill was “blighted”. They saw tangible traumas, caused mostly by people living outside of the neighbourhood, but the blame could more appropriately be attributed to systemic shortcomings.
Andrew explains that the City of Albany owned the space but “had more or less let it go”. Occupants of nearby homes – mostly renters – were understandably reluctant to take care of a patch “that’s not publicly supported”.
A complete absence of ownership and maintenance left the alleyway vulnerable. After heavy rainfall, the path disappeared under puddles; mud made it hard to move through, as did the occasional falling tree, which no one removed.
Connected to the main street, but hidden from view, the alley became a dumping ground for trash, abandoned cars, and waste from contractors. Over time, as local people increasingly avoided the alley out of fears for their safety, the space was sometimes even used by drug dealers and as a cut through route for vehicles speeding away from the scene of a crime. Gun violence was not unheard of.
Inequity in the public realm only made matters worse. More affluent neighbourhoods may have had the time and money to throw at these kinds of problems but as a low-income community, West Hill needed support.
Before. Image credits: Shannon Straney
Community-driven Design
At first, the city provided funding for a six-week project, but residents were angry with the temporary approach to long-term problems. The designers agreed.
“It was really important for something permanent to be there to grow with the community,” recalls Maeghann Coleman, Principal Architect with The Urban Conga, the architectural firm that Van Alen brought on board to lead the revitalisation.
The importance that The Urban Conga put on listening to locals built trust and indicated a pivot in fortunes for the project: it eased the crucial public consultation phase, and any scepticism seemed to evaporate.
After Mayor Kathy Sheehan got wind of the enthusiasm for the project, the city announced further funding to make it permanent. Ryan Swanson, The Urban Conga’s principal and founder, recalls that the change in direction “was really great because it showed the power of co-design and the power of process, which is often what we’re trying to highlight to clients”.
Play Methodology
The Urban Conga is “a multidisciplinary design studio focused on utilising open-ended play to spark creativity, exploration, and free choice learning in the built environment,” Ryan explains.
Play as an architectural methodology raises eyebrows among some factions that question whether this makes light of serious urban challenges.
Not so, Maeghann says. “When we’re at play, we’re sometimes in a very vulnerable state.” It’s a form of expression that allows trauma to surface, then acts as therapy.
The pair also employ play to share and amplify the stories a community wants to tell.
When we play, it inevitably evokes empathy in a space, understanding, and connectiveness.
Ryan Swanson
How to Get Communities Playing
In Albany, they started by creating a “playscape” in the West Hill alleyway, which revealed a lot about how people interact with the space, Ryan explains. “The first thing we did was getting people dancing in the space and walking around and moving their bodies in different ways. You saw this weight start to lift off people’s shoulders.”
For the first time in ages, the people of West Hill saw this as a community space again.
The Urban Conga team expanded their engagement activities by speaking to people at locations close by, to gather their reflections on and ideas for the alleyway: places like the farmers’ market which set up occasionally at one end of the alley, book bag giveaways, and events run by critical community partners, such as gun violence prevention group, Albany 518 SNUG.
Maeghann and Ryan also led drawing workshops, asked residents to photograph features that they felt represented their neighbourhood, and invited people to use kits to make their own designs. “We brought out our kit of imagination, which is a toy to make a toy and really a very abstract tool where people can build,” Maeghann tells us. “People of all ages can use it. A kid built a whole archway at one of the workshops.”
Image credits: Courtney Staton
Extra effort was made to elevate children’s voices, including play with designs made from interlocking toy bricks. “I think that’s really what drove a lot of the design of the Hive,” Ryan reflects.
Consultation with the community had a palpable transformative effect. Former demands for more fences, security cameras, and police patrols – indications of a desperate need to feel safe – gave way to them “starting to think about hope”.
Hive Mentality
After the consultation phase, The Urban Conga team presented three options for the alleyway. The Hive was the community’s clear choice.
Incorporating elements of renaturing along the length of the alley, they planned for youngsters to plant a blueberry orchard and added a bioswale – a stormwater management drain that incorporates vegetation – that skirts the edge of the path, which zig-zags like a slow-flowing river.
As for the Hive nodes, all of the components were derived from conversations with residents.
We really wanted to redefine that space, give that space back to the residents, have their own identity written onto it.
Maeghann Coleman
Someone said that they felt like a family of bees without a home – a reference to the lack of shared space. The honeycomb motif directly answers this, representing the Hive as a communal area where residents can walk, tend to a community garden, and enjoy a programme of social and cultural events.
A chess table was built into one hive after an elderly man had expressed how much he wanted to teach the game to others. Artwork by youngsters asks custodians to take good care of the space for the next generation. Wayfinding signage raises awareness of local points of interest and gives information about features in the alley – right down to the compost heap!
It was clearly important for local people to have a memorial for their neighbours who had passed in tragic circumstances. To avoid it becoming a place that evokes sadness, however, the designers installed honeycombed planters, where people grow flowers dedicated to victims of gun violence.
Hive structures pepper the undulating path flanked by bioswales, providing an appealing, fun, organic finish to the community alleyway. Image credits: Mars and Moon Films
Exit Strategy
With a job well done, one lingering question still remained: who would be responsible for maintaining the space?
Van Alen encouraged the City of Albany to step up. The municipality agreed to provide long-term stewardship, but on condition that it was in cooperation with residents.
Formalised by an official memorandum of understanding, the Department of General Services provides a minimum standard of regular maintenance, including scheduled rubbish collections and drainage checks by the water department. But in return, the community acts as eyes on the ground: they commenced a mechanism whereby the city responds to residents’ reports on issues such as illegal dumping.
It’s not just putting pen and paper and saying, “Yes, this is public property”, there’s actually a measure of public investment and responsibility attached to it.
Andrew Brown
Artwork of local children was incorporated into the Hive designs. Image credits: Mars and Moon Films
Albany: The Big Apple’s Little Brother
Van Alen too gained a lot from the project.
Previously, their initiatives were mostly within New York City, where they regularly faced challenges like regulatory hurdles, hyper expensive building costs, and struggles “figuring out who even controls the space, let alone what permitting you need to secure to build something,” Andrew says.
By the 2020s, the board felt it was time to expand. They eyed smaller cities like Albany thinking that there would be far fewer actors, and the moving parts would be closer together, potentially making progress quicker and chances to test innovations easier.
This was misguided. The challenges were much the same.
“This project eliminated the word easy from my vocabulary,” Andrew says, half joking. “There are no easy projects. They’re all hard. The question is, how are they going to be hard?”
Worth the Hassle: A Long List of Impacts
It goes to show that even highly experienced institutions – Van Alen has bene in operation for 130 years – can still learn lessons from the communities they support; it’s a much more mutual exchange that it first appears.
The Hive has certainly been a success. People are using the space again, and both sides have kept their side of the agreement to maintain it.
Residents are also taking the initiative. Community groups have painted a mural on the ground in a show of reclaiming the space and a demonstration of how the fear which was once prevalent has now dissipated.
For Van Alen, this is a showcase example of what can be achieved when the right people are connected. “It was once a neglected alleyway,” Andrew begins. “Now it is effectively a community art park. That’s pretty successful.”
There have been other notable, organic, outcomes as well. The weekly farmers’ market, which used to be confined to one end, has grown and spread throughout the alleyway. Kids are often seen playing.
It’s been really nice to see the alleyway become this communal space that people feel safe being in.
Ryan Swanson
It seems that The Hive provides the home this community of “bees” was always craving. The constant use and ongoing care from local stakeholders point to a place – and a community – with a much brighter future.
“We really wanted to show that this is a place of gathering,” Maeghann concludes. “It is a place of hope, of activity, and this is a space used by residents and we really want to celebrate that.”