Case Study: The Lake Wallace Sensory Trail

The community of Belchertown, MA receives an opportunity to take the lead on a public trail designed for—and with—them.

Following careful research of the Belchertown community’s priorities and values, designers from Terra Genesis planned and constructed a sensory trail circumnavigating Lake Wallace. The route and its amenities were crafted to make recreation accessible to people of all abilities, support school field trips, and safely expose users to natural and wildlife features at observation points. We developed effective new strategies for engaging the public as a stakeholder in our design process, which empowers them to act as stewards of their trail’s future.

The population of Belchertown, Massachusetts is growing, and the community has been eager to build new and appealing amenities near the former Belchertown State School.?Given his constituents’ increasing passion for outdoor attractions, town planneDoug Albertson approached TK.designlab (which has since been absorbed into Terra Genesis), with the broad idea of building a trail encircling the 45 acres of Lake Wallace and its accompanying wetlands.

Our team comprised fresh-out-of-school designers who had studied and practiced design principles within the supervised safety of the The Conway School: Graduate Program in Sustainable Planning and Design . This represented a major opportunity for us to distinguish ourselves and our philosophy as autonomous professionals. We were eager to test and apply the concepts of place-based design and regenerative construction—and aware that doing so would require a fair bit of risk and invention.

In order to ensure that our design would be conceived to suit the community and place itself, we engaged the residents of Belchertown in direct interviews, meetings, and a public exhibition in order to identify priorities and values. A careful look at the town itself offered myriad possibilities for the trail to intersect with local interests, leading us to identify several design objectives that would inspire the community’s most generative thinking:

• usability by the broadest possible majority of community members, given the proximity of Jessica’s Boundless Playground, a one-of-a-kind “inclusive and multi-sensory experience for children and families of all abilities”
• opportunities for educational engagement, given the proximity of a public middle school
• demonstrated potential to benefit the local economy, given the public’s concerns about property values
• optimal wildlife visibility, given the popularity of birding and appeal of diverse local species
• minimal long-term maintenance cost, given the public’s wish to avoid dependence on volunteer power or tax increases to keep the trail safe, tidy, and in working condition

Even though we integrated the public’s own priorities and values into the design and construction, we found ourselves fielding restraints and concerns from the community as attention to the trail increased in advance of its “grand opening”. A public forum designed to catalyze excitement about the trail’s future potential was eclipsed by fears about the trail’s potential to lead to wastes in community spending, to impede other community objectives, and to invite crime and litter. This underscored, for us, the importance for continuity in the public’s awareness and engagement of the trail—and exposed that we had more work to do to engender the community’s sense of ownership.

To that end, we developed participatory events and messaging (on social media, printed signs, and informational placards) that cultivated public interest and awareness—and connected the dots between community input and design outcomes. Programming, especially the grand opening event in summer 2022, was a crucial opportunity to do so. In particular, we emphasized:

• The trail’s wayfinding elements support trail use by hikers with disabilities. A cable guidance system helps community members navigate the path and discern their navigational options. Strategically-located signage?indicates the natural features via plain text, imagery, and Braille. The trail itself is designed with ABA guidelines in mind, and is thus stabilized and appropriately graded to support use of wheelchairs and walking aids.
• Nearby public institutions are invited to engage with the trail, especially at designated observation points and an outdoor classroom area, which present explicit opportunities for STEM education and wildlife study. A dock and platform has been constructed extending out over the lake with the ability to support the weight of a classroom’s worth of students.?
• Given that the community overwhelmingly expressed a hope that the natural elements feel undisturbed by the presence of the trail, the design resists noticeable interference when possible, while also including some interventions that engender a sense of flow and conservation. For example, we exclusively used natural and sustainable building materials, and subtly added regions of pollinator flowers.

These efforts helped to impel the public’s sense of pride of the trail, and inspired some community members (especially Belchertown High School science teacher Louise Levy) to crystallize into a Friends Group, which will take the lead on sourcing input from the community, provide opportunities for trail users to channel their energy, and make decisions on behalf of the town. We hope that being able to use and enjoy the trail will prompt Belchertown residents to identify additional potential for the trail to continue embodying the community’s values, and invest in their trail for its ability to serve their community for generations to come.

For our part, we learned to trust our ability to source design principles from the public and apply them to physical design—and to find ways of doing so that invites community leadership from the outset while maintaining visibility and trust. We’re eager to access the potential of sustained community involvement in future projects—and to learn from the Belchertown community’s example.