What is a Lawrence Pa' Lante?

 

Lawrence Pa’lante sits at the intersection between urban planning, advocacy, and community empowerment. The project seeks to create more affordable, safer, and cooler transportation options for residents that improve health, quality of life, and help increase resident’s resilience to the impacts of extreme heat.

Groundwork Lawrence and Conservation Law Foundation in partnership with the City of Lawrence are working with residents to help reimagine how people move around the city. Together, we seek to create more affordable, safe, and cool transportation options for residents that improve health, and quality of life and help increase residents’ resilience to the impacts of extreme heat.

Lawrence Pa’lante builds on the Lawrence Greenway Framework, an aspirational plan that seeks to provide close to home active transportation infrastructure along the city’s rivers, canals, and abandoned railroads. The framework includes the Spicket River Greenway and five other walking and cycling trails throughout the city. Building on this foundation Lawrence Pa’lante will work closely with residents to plan a network of corridors that help improve the experience of moving around Lawrence while addressing climate and health inequities. For example, creating green space and urban tree canopies provides co-benefits like shade and cooling, stormwater capture, improved air quality, and recreational opportunities. By locating elements such as these on critical and frequently traveled corridors, the project will also help address equitable distribution of resources.

Cool Islands is an identified combination of environmental elements that facilitate access and connections to core destinations in the community so that people can connect with local resources like healthy food, parks and green spaces, shade, community and health centers, and schools. At the same time, Lawrence Pa' Lante builds a foundation of climate and community responsive measures. A Cool Island:

• Provides equitable mobility and access
• Builds a safer pedestrian and biking experience
• Promotes multi-modal transit
• Increases tree cover
• Promotes business
• Encourages the use of open space
• Decreases flood vulnerability
• Prepares for the impacts of climate change.

What's the Project?

Groundwork Lawrence (GWL) and Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) have received funding from  the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a “Lawrence Pa' Lante” project. We are working to create holistic and transformational change that will build community resilience to climate and health impacts in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The Lawrence Pa' Lante project builds on the Lawrence Greenway Framework, a framework that includes the Spicket River Greenway and five other walking and cycling trails throughout the city, by establishing an initiative with many benefits as a framework for a network of multi-modal corridors that can host a suite of planning and policy interventions to both improve the built environment and address climate and health inequities. For example, creating green space and urban tree canopies provides co-benefits like shade and cooling, stormwater capture, improved air quality, and recreational opportunities. By locating elements such as these on critical and frequently traveled corridors, the project will also help address equitable distribution of resources.

This project builds on the 20-year legacy of successful community-led work to reimagine and reclaim vacant spaces for health and recreation across the city. The Spicket River Greenway, now complete, is a 3.5-mile-long "emerald bracelet" of green spaces and walking paths connecting parks and open space through multiple neighborhoods, helping the community achieve the dual goals of riverfront restoration and neighborhood revitalization.

What's the Project's Focus?

The Lawrence Pa' Lante project seeks to import global best practices on health, equity, and climate resilience to supplement local knowledge and efforts. We are using ideas and lessons learned from initiatives in four global cities: Paris, London, Fortaleza, and Bologna.

• Paris’ Cool Island” Mapping Project allowed the city to share information about refuge from heat available to citizens. The success of the app led to updated features including “cool itineraries” and “cool networks,” which according to the City, has changed how citizens move through and use public space.

• London’s Healthy Streets Approach sought to create fairer, sustainable, and attractive urban space through a multi-level planning and policy approach utilizing a three-level (street, network, and strategic-level) planning framework.
   
• Fortaleza’s Plano de Ações Imediatas em Trânsito e Transport tackles traffic and congestion in Brazil’s fifth largest city by prioritizing mobility policies, emphasizing public transport, traffic safety measures, walking, and cycling infrastructure. By 2016, the city had the lowest number of road traffic deaths in 15 years.
   
• Bologna’s Urban Commons leverages the expertise of local residents to generate ideas through collaboration pacts, which streamline the approval and implementation processes. The Urban Commons approach emphasizes four key principles: (1) the city is an open resource where all people can share public space and interact, (2) the city exists for widespread collaboration and cooperation, (3) the city is generative, producing for human nourishment and human need, (4) the city is a partner in creating conditions where commons can flourish.

The Lawrence Pa' Lante project will model these approaches and provide residents with opportunities to lead and propose to the city how to activate resources to benefit the most residents. One of the core values of the project is identifying Resilient Corridors through engagement with residents and stakeholders. The project will conduct a series of community engagement activities where residents will help co-create a definition for Lawrence Pa' Lante and collaborate to generate ideas for planning and implementation.

How to Participate?

 

                         

 

Job opportunities!

 

Pa'Lante Resident Task Force (Contractor Position)

GWL is seeking someone that would like to make a difference in their community by joining Pa'Lante, a Resilient Corridors Resident Task Force. You will work collaboratively with Pa'Lante members and project staff to support community engagement, Resilient Corridor planning, and the implementation of an air quality monitoring program. The project will implement three community meetings, several in-place neighborhood-based engagement projects, and a pilot Resilient Corridor project that is created from the resident engagement activities. Pa'Lante member description here

Lawrence Pa’lante is Generously Supported with Funding from:

 

Partnering Organizations