Little Village Web App Wins Key Award

Residents of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood on the city’s southwest side are working to transform a 23-acre capped Superfund site into a vibrant, open green space for all of its residents to enjoy and make their own – and now they have technology on their side: Mi Parque, a bilingual participatory web and smartphone application that helps residents of the community contribute and share their vision for the future of Little Village’s new park, has won the Metropolitan Planning Council’s (MPC) $2,500 Placemaking award, sponsored by IBM, in the Apps for Metro Chicago Illinois contest.

Mi Parque is being developed by an all-women team led by Pallavi Anderson, Motorola Solutions, and Mindy Faber, founder of Open Youth Networks and academic manager, Columbia College Chicago Dept. of Interactive Arts and Media. Students on the team, from Columbia College Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Illinois-Chicago, are mentored by experienced software engineers from Motorola Solutions, Orbitz, Pearson VUE, and Thomson Reuters/Hubbard One. Mi Parque is an all-volunteer effort.

The group is gifting the $2,500 prize to the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), a community organization that has spearheaded neighborhood efforts to remediate the Superfund site at 28th and Sacramento and secure the land as a neighborhood park.