Urban planning sparks pupils' creativity

Chance to draft T makeover gives youth a voice

- Chabelyz Mejia, 13, placed boards around a design for the Jackson Square station. Her team worked with the Gund Partnership architecture firm. (Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff)

When middle school students from Roslindale teamed up with architects from Boston's Gund Partnership to brainstorm ways to improve the Jackson Square MBTA Station on the Orange Line, the architects got an earful.

One eighth-grader envisioned a glass-walled community center on top of the T station, with basketball courts and art galleries. Another middle school pupil wanted to install a recycling facility, with a titanium exterior modeled on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Yet another 13-year-old had more practical suggestions: more trees and trash bins.

"I live in Jamaica Plain," said Chabelyz Mejia. "What I see every day is trash and not really a lot of color."

The program, sponsored by Citizen Schools Boston, was created to give minority and low-income students the knowledge that they have a voice in the development of their neighborhoods, and in particular, their T stations. Many of the students in the program live in Roxbury, Dorchester, or Mattapan, or regularly use the Orange Line.

The competition arranged for teams of students to meet weekly with officials from the city's most prestigious design and architecture firms as their apprentices. The teams could choose between the stations in Jackson Square or Sullivan Square. Teams then competed for the top prize: the chance to show their work to Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

Citizen Schools executive director John Werner said he hopes the experience will inspire students to consider working in professions related to architecture. The field currently employs only about one percent minorities, he said.

"The fact that the kids produce high-quality work and could talk about it and feel like their opinion matters to the city, that's really special," Werner said. "A lot of young people don't get these opportunities. They walk around the city, they have these ideas, but no outlet."

Werner's favorite idea from the competition? A suggestion that the MBTA rebuild one of the stations in the shape of a star, so that planes flying overhead could "see how special the neighborhood is," he said.

Most teams suggested redesigning Jackson Square, calling it bleak and ugly. They had chosen the station for symbolic reasons: Last January, 13-year-old Luis Gerena, a student at the Citizens Schools' program, was fatally shot standing outside the T station.

Luis Castro, age 12, said he thought building a community center on top of the station would make it safer by drawing in more people and bringing in more activities. He suggested a movie theater on top of the T facility.

"Now you don't have to travel downtown," he told one of the judges. And "it's safe."

Raenelle Teesdale said she also wanted to see a T-station community center, one that offered day-care services to the community. She also thought it was important to create a walkway created between the station, a nearby public housing development, and the Stop & Shop.

The idea caught the attention of Ted Landsmark, one of the judges and the president of Boston Architectural College, who nodded in agreement, saying he lived in nearby Jamaica Plain and thanking the students for their thoughtfulness.

"These kids are able to relate directly to all the urban planning problems we face because they're living those issues," Landsmark said later in an interview.

Kairos Shen, a judge and director of planning for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, said the city is expecting millions in federal funding for Orange Line upgrades, so some suggestions from the contest could become reality.

"One of the biggest problems is we don't get young people involved in discussions about the transformation of the community," he said, saying he hoped the event would change that.

Participating firms included the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which worked with students from the Eighth Grade Academy; Shepley Bulfinch, which paired with the Patrick F. Gavin Middle School in South Boston; and ICON Architecture, which teamed with students from William Barton Rogers Middle School in Hyde Park.

Students from the Washington Irving Middle School in Roslindale working with Gund Partnership, the firm currently designing the Newton North High School, which is expected to cost over $170 million, won the contest and the audience with the mayor.

Casey Cottone, an urban planner at the firm Cubellis in Boston, said she felt like she won too. She formed a bond with one of her apprentices, 11-year-old Samuel Peguero. He wants to become an architect, and even though the contest is over, "We're going to stay in touch," she said.

Megan Woolhouse can be reached at mwoolhouse@globe.com.