BY NATE BERG

As Las Vegas?s historic Westside faces change, residents ask, who benefits"
From the August 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
At the start of a three-day design charrette in a small Las Vegas community center, one of the first questions Steven Clarke, ASLA, asked the 100-person crowd was how many had participated in a design charrette before. ?About 80 percent of them raised their hands,? says Clarke, a fair-haired 45-year-old from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who was new to this group of people, many of whom weren?t particularly happy to be doing another charrette. The purpose of the current exercise was to focus on the historic Westside neighborhood of Las Vegas, which has been a marginalized African American neighborhood since the early 20th century. Many of the community members who had gathered wanted to know what would be different this time around, Clarke says. The skepticism quickly boiled into anger. Some demanded to know how the charrette process would do anything to create jobs in the neighborhood. Others demanded to know how much Clarke was being paid, and by whom. ?It got extremely tense,? he says. ?It was probably the most challenging charrette I?ve faced in my career.? The Westside was once the healthy heart of the city?s African American community. Today the area is largely vacant, a wasteland of urban disinvestment. The neighborhood?s blocks hold more than 200 empty lots and dozens of abandoned buildings and burned-out houses. The m...