For community members, a listening session about the recently axed Parcel 3 development project was a chance to question the city’s process and call for new economic development plans for the site.

About 50 attendees braved the cold, with more watching virtually, to voice concerns on Feb. 9 at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. The two-hour public session was hosted by My City at Peace (MyCAP) and HYM Investment Group, the two companies that had, until the end of January, been the designated developers for the almost 8-acre parcel on the edge of Nubian Square.

The listening session came weeks after Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration announced it would not redesignate MyCAP and HYM as developers of the site, opting instead to construct an updated campus for Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, another longstanding community priority.

At the listening session, Rev. Jeffery Brown, co-founder of MyCAP, said the development team was in “beginning conversations” with Wu about how to move forward with the site.

But in a Feb. 10 appearance on the GBH’s Boston Public Radio “Ask the Mayor” program, Wu said that both projects couldn’t happen at the same time and said, with seemingly little uncertainty, that the Madison Park project was the one that would happen first. She said the decision was largely due to an infusion of state funding through the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which the city scored in December.

“We cannot have two entities both holding legal designation or jurisdiction over the same parcel of land and making key decisions about how that will be used; something has to be prioritized first in just the timeline of it,” Wu said on the GBH program. “Because we now have the funding and the state partnership … we moved quickly to let that economic development parcel’s designation expire to start the planning process for the school.”

The development team and community members, in the wake of the city’s decision, said they would like to see the P3 project and Madison Park campus proceed in tandem rather than being pitted against each other.

During the radio interview, the mayor described a process under which the city would move forward with the Madison Park project and subsequently, with “a slightly different set of boundaries,” the city would reopen the P3 development process.

Wu again pointed to the slump in the state’s life sciences industry, which the city has identified as another reason to ax the P3 project.

MyCAP and HYM had proposed anchoring the project’s benefits, particularly its affordable housing, to life sciences lab space, which would have served as an “economic engine” for the parcel. The proposal was drafted at a time when the biotech industry was booming and lab space was a strong prospect for funding other elements of the project.

In the years since, labs have fallen vacant, which Wu said was one reason the city was not redesignating the team.

At the listening session, the development team said that the project didn’t hinge on the life sciences and rather just needed some prominent economic driver to anchor the project.

“We still believe that this community deserves these kinds of jobs and this kind of opportunity, whether that’s a life science company — a Pfizer, or a Sanofi, or something like that — or it’s a hospital-related project,” said Tom O’Brien, CEO at HYM Investment Group. “That economic engine alone could drive this community and can help us create those jobs and those homes.”

For many, the listening session was a moment to call for community unity in response to the city’s actions.

In remarks at the listening session, James Hill, host of the online community interview show “Java with Jimmy,” said that this was a moment to push back and make a statement about how the neighborhood wants to be treated.

“What we want to do is make it so that this does not happen again and demonstrate that no one — a mayor, a developer, a corporation, whoever — can come into our community and tell us what it is going to be,” he said.

Dianne Wilkerson, a former state senator, and others at the listening session said they were frustrated with the city’s process and how it seemed to disregard the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan, a 2004 agreement between the city and the neighborhood that governs how future development in the area, especially in parcels like P3, was expected to take place.

Wilkerson said that considering the Strategic Master Plan, other steps should have been taken before the city could pivot to developing a school campus on the parcel.

“There’s no process that says the mayor can wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to do it differently,’” Wilkerson said in remarks at the listening session.

Karilyn Crockett, an MIT professor who has studied the 1960sera movement that stopped the highway for which the P3 land was seized by eminent domain, said she viewed the current P3 conversation and advocacy as a continuation of the same challenges.

Sixty years ago, the city and state land seizure led to homes and businesses on the P3 site being demolished.

“That fight actually is not over,” Crockett said. “We are still in this fight against the highway.”

Speakers at the listening session also highlighted the opportunities they said the project that MyCAP and HYM had proposed would bring to the community.

Ricardo Louis, CEO of Privé Parking, said the development would have meant major progress for his company, which would have had an equity stake in the development. Under the recently de-designated plan, his company would have developed the parking garage at the site, which he said would have been the first garage in the city owned and operated by a Black resident. In the parking industry, Louis said, the real power is in owning parking lots and garages.

“For most people, it’s just another contract — we’ve seen this before, history repeats itself,” Louis said. “For me, it wasn’t just a contract, it was a legacy project.”

The listening session also marked a break within the ranks of the development team. In an open letter to the community, OnyxGroup Development announced it was “in fundamental disagreement” with pursuing the listening session and instead believe the option of the updated Madison Park campus should be explored. The OnyxGroup team had been attached to develop commercial space in the P3 project.

“We must speak the truth about the project’s current reality: the economic landscape has changed, life sciences investment is not coming, and there is no other single vehicle willing to make the investment necessary to truly develop P3 as originally envisioned,” the OnyxGroup team wrote in the letter.

Officially, the event held little weight. By the time it was held, the designation of HYM and MyCAP as developers of the site had lapsed. Brown said that for the team, the purpose of the meeting was to show the city how the community felt about the Wu administration’s choice.

“We feel that this session is not so much to argue with the city so much as to get the city to listen,” Brown said. “To listen to us, to listen to voices so that they would understand how people feel about what we were trying to create.”