Past Events
Focus Group #1
January 10, 2009
Topic: Safety
Following introductions and coffee, a wonderfully friendly crowd of Residents of Potrero Terrace and Annex and their Potrero Hill neighbors (and the neighborhood’s SFPD liaison) gathered at the Neighborhood House (thank you, Edward Hatter), then broke into small groups to develop personal maps of the neighborhood. The exercise was for each person to identify places in the neighborhood where they felt safe, and places where they felt unsafe – then to explain to their group members what there is about the physical environment of that place that they believed made it safe or unsafe. Each group generated a collective map that identified these places, the defining physical elements operating in those places, and a list of characteristics that seemed to determine the safety of the place. Representatives of the groups then presented their group map. Though the BRIDGE team learned a great deal about the neighborhood, and the array of perceptions that Residents and neighbors have come to experience, the primary goal of the exercise was to help everybody develop and refine their thinking about how the built environment encourages or discourages safety. The master plan architects, Van Meter Williams Pollack, then made a presentation on the principles of defensible design, providing the participants with a particular vocabulary to help describe some of the perceptions they had identified. Finally, the groups met again (over Big Nate’s barbecue) to refine a set of goals and principles related to safety.
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