Jennie Li, a graduate student in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning, wrote a synopsis of the UW Farm Charrette. Learn about what a charrette is all about and how we came together to generate ideas for the future of the farm!

On the morning of Friday, June 5, fourteen people consisting of members of the Farm Operations Committee, UW Botanical Gardens, and UW Farm staff and volunteers came together to envision what the future might hold for the UW Farm’s Center for Urban Horticulture site. Over the course of three hours, participants were involved in an iterative, collaborative process that asked them to generate, prioritize, and synthesize the ideas they heard from each other.

During the spring quarter, the UW Farm Operations Committee had requested help to run a charrette as a way to understand both the potential and the limitations of the farm site at the Center for Urban Horticulture. I was invited by Hailey Mackay (my fellow colleague who passed on the request from the committee) along with Britton Shepard to lead and facilitate this event. Our training in the landscape architecture field has emphasized the importance of current site users as having deep knowledge of the site and the innate ability to know what is possible. Thus our main goal was to create a framework for everybody invested directly at the farm site to participate in an open, collaborative and visual discussion of site needs.

The exercises for the charrette were designed to have three components: a generation of ideas, prioritization, and synthesis. Participants were split into three smaller working groups that would then elect a representative to share their work with the larger group. The first two aspects (generation and prioritization) was work done within each subgroup, where participants were asked to share their thoughts on the question/exercise being asked of them in rounds. Synthesis was then worked in as a recap of each subgroup’s results to the entire group.

The subject of each exercise was designed to build upon the growing dialogue generated by the prior exercise. Thus our charrette went through the above process five times, answering the following questions:

1. What do we love about the farm?
2. What is important to remember as we move forward?
3. How will circulation work at the site (consider current uses and future priorities)?
4. What are features we need to account for at the site (consider current uses and future priorities)?
5. And lastly, how might we begin to synthesize circulation and features at the site?

The final products from this event included a list of values, constraints, and potential three different possible layouts of the farm site and a list of concerns to further investigate or keep in mind as additions to the farm site are proposed and made.

General comments afterwards indicated that the exercises were useful, opened up dialogue for collaboration, and that everybody was excited to continue projects based off of the work generated from the charrette. One such outcome that Amy Hughes has shared with us for the Children’s Garden is a collaborative project in the works to design a sheltered hobbit-hole cave for an observation beehive.

As facilitators, we were very pleased with the results of the charrette, and felt that participants were duly diligent about being open to new ideas and multiple concerns. Again, we want to emphasize that the documents generated by this process are not set results, but process pieces that record collective thinking and prioritization by those who attended. We hope that the results of this charrette will continue to generate meaningful dialogue and collaborative processes between the stakeholders of the UW Farm site.