PHPM06 Who benefits? What community?

My interest and goals in directing a meeting on the green-space, at the proposed NKCDC site for a future theatre and offices, is multifaceted. Initial questions that have arisen are:
How does this project benefit the community?
Is one person or one organization’s understanding of benefit enough to make the claim that it is beneficial?
Does there need to be a shared understanding of what benefiting the community means?

Perhaps benefit should be accessed by a list of criteria in order to claim the title beneficial. (Similar perhaps to any standard, such as “certified organic.”) There could be a committee who creates these standards, the committee would include a diverse representation from the community. Yet what is this community that we are talking about?
Who does it include and who does it not include?
Should one of the standards of what it means to benefit be that it includes a broad sector of the community?
Is it an imagined community a future community, one that currently exists or a little of all three?

I will also be looking as possible implications, both socially and psychologically, of establishing a green-space with the future intention of then removing it. I will be looking at historical precedent both in recent contemporary history and dating further back to include governmental land policy and other forms of past development, both public and private that institute temporary “public publicity sites” (my term) in order to pave the way for private agenda’s.

It is my hope that by facilitating a meeting a dialogue between community members, whose views of this project are diverse will open up a more nuanced understanding of the issues at hand and perhaps lead to possible collaborations on the oversight of development in our neighborhood and beyond. What is the purpose of bringing differing voices together, it can be argued that less will get done this way, yet this would of course achieve the goals of (DISP) Department for the Investigation of slowing-down progress.

The following posts will address the above issues along with the research that is collected and contributes to the conversation.