A CentreWorks Urban Innovation team is working with the City of Danville to help create a long term solution for downtown parking.

The team is made up of Centre College interns Isaiah Arroyo, Kali Hernandez Fraire, and John Bingaman. They will be conducting interviews with anyone in the area who wants to share their experience with downtown parking.

In upcoming downtown construction, the City of Danville is adding more pedestrian sidewalk space. But they will lose 11 on-street parking spaces.

While Danville has a parking garage, it is not as convenient as on-street parking; and a significant number of its spaces are reserved for downtown employees, which City Engineer Josh Morgan said are not always utilized on a regular basis.

Citizens have expressed concern about the loss of on-street parking and other parking issues; so these interviews with the Urban Innovation team will help make a community-supported solution to parking.

All members of the community have the opportunity to directly participate in addressing the challenge. Conversations with the Urban Innovation team will be kept confidential.

CentreWorks uses a model that Directors Anthony and Andrea Margida call “The Human Centered Approach to Innovation.” The problem-solving process gathers a deeper level of community input in creating solutions.

The process starts with empathy interviews. The team will ask citizens what their downtown experience is like, what’s important to them, and what makes downtown valuable.

The in-depth interviews will allow the team to empathize with what people in the community actually want and need. From the interviews, the team will be able to define a clear and collective problem. They will brainstorm ideas to solve the problem, then conduct more feedback interviews to test their ideas. Then they will finalize a prototype.

Team members said they want to hear from everyone, whether or not they go and park downtown.

People may sign up for interviews by emailing cwurbaninnovation@gmail.com or by clicking here.