community members meeting (left), and a first step towards food production near the park (right)

…gets the day going right off the plane – for meetings with community members about their concerns with, and hopes for, the place, with a visit to some nascent urban food garden plots, and then a tour by a local historian telling the amazing tale of this strange new green space which was cleared of residential communities twice (first in the 60’s with “slum-clearances” leading to modern mega residential Ville Radieuse-type developments – and then again in the 1980’s when that plan didn’t work and 15 of the 17 large high-rise housing blocks came down too), now leaving a peculiar mostly unused half-designed programmed substantial green space covered with vacant rolling lawns in the middle of an neighborhood where the population and prosperity has dropped.