A decade in the works, the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C., has yet to be built. But it could be a model for how to create public space while lessening the effects of gentrification.
Scott Kratz is the senior vice president of Building Bridges Across the River (Building Bridges), and director of the 11th Street Bridge Project, Building Bridge’s largest project to date. Building Bridges and the Washington, D.C., city government are transforming an old freeway bridge into a park above the Anacostia River. The base of one of the bridges will become a one-of-a-kind civic space supporting active recreation, environmental education, and the arts.
On a cold Monday morning, Yihua Liu sat on a bench with a friend at the Rail Park. Now a student at Drexel, he’s lived in Chinatown all his life, and he’s noticed the neighborhood changing.
Human beings are hardwired to seek out what we define as “wellbeing”: connection and belonging; safety; familiarity and predictability; purposeful and creative influence on our surroundings and future; and access to food, shelter, and other resources without shame or danger. Wellbeing is about being whole, as individuals and communities. While health and wellness are part of this, wellbeing reaches much further and deeper. It’s foundational.
Successful equitable development takes work but there are steps and actions organizations can take to ensure local communities are truly involved. The 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C. will break ground later this year, but it is the long-term community engagement work that illustrates how time, trust, and collective ownership are vital to successful equitable development.
Washington has a consensus: American infrastructure is overdue for capital improvements and maintenance. The most fervent debates on this topic have focused on how much funding should be allocated. But the most important discussion, even when it comes to hard infrastructure (e.g., rail, bridges, roads, and sidewalks), should be about how funding should be spent.
The 11th Street Bridge Park, slated to break ground this year in Washington, D.C., will offer a pedestrian walkway uniting D.C.’s Capitol Hill/Navy Yard with the historic Anacostia neighborhood. In addition to providing a public performance space, the hope is that the park will also forge a connection between one of the district’s most prosperous areas and one of its poorest neighborhoods, which has been historically overlooked.
With COVID-19 restrictions on events and gatherings beginning to relax, Washington, D.C.’s urban agriculture sector is starting to gradually open back up to the local community.
Largely overlooked in President Biden’s economic recovery and infrastructure plan is a sweeping effort to reconnect communities divided by urban highways. The $20 billion in aid Biden proposed in his American Jobs Plan would be a historic effort to correct the racism in how we built our highway system and lay the groundwork for reinvigorating neighborhoods — such as Anacostia in Southeast Washington — that have suffered for decades because of those decisions.
The upheavals of the past year – the pandemic, recession, protests over racial injustice and a violent insurrection at the Capitol — have laid bare the great fissures in American society. Today we are a nation deeply divided by income, race, and class. Amid calls for healing and justice, President Biden promises to “build back better,” with development that promotes racial and economic equity.
