Mifflin Square Park is a vibrant 3.5-acre park in South Philadelphia that recently underwent a transformative redesign through extensive community collaboration to better reflect the needs and aspirations of one of Philadelphia’s most diverse neighborhoods, a place where Philadelphia’s immigrant and refugee families gathered and celebrated their shared community. The park was originally designed in the late 1800s as a mostly passive space as opposed to a recreation space, making it extremely difficult to retrofit improvements into the park to accommodate new kinds of uses as the surrounding community became more diverse and more densely populated in recent decades.
The session will cover the unique community collaboration, design, and stewardship involving an extensively diverse neighborhood with families from over 77 countries and speaking more than 55 languages. This diverse composition shaped the park’s revitalization efforts. Beginning as far back as 2016, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land, and a deeply rooted and trusted neighborhood organization SEAMAAC worked alongside the community to lead planning and intensive community-driven design sessions to develop a community vision for this space. The focus was to create a welcoming, accessible environment with amenities that foster inclusivity, safety, and a sense of pride among all residents.
Attendees will learn how community organizers had to cross language barriers as well as class and race lines to facilitate communication, and had the challenge of creating a design that met diverse needs. Local residents were directly involved in shaping the features of the park to reflect their identities and better meet their needs.
