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Owned by the community, built for the future, the Friends of the Village Collective are building an entrepreneurial community hub in the Overlake Village area as part of Bellwether's Prisma, an affordable housing development.

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Cart | Friends of the Village Collective

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A Resting Place: Grief and Loss Cultural Center

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A Resting Place: Grief and Loss Cultural Center

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A Resting Place is a community grief support center located in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, which offers a space for people to explore their grief through cultural work and resources.

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Why have a grief support space? There aren't many places where grief is welcomed in our busy everyday lives. When grief happens, sometimes a griever might feel the social pressures or expectations to "move on", "forget about the loss" or "get over the death".

A Resting Place believes when grief happens, it becomes a part of who you are and how you continue to exist in the world. A Resting Place is intentionally situated in a neighborhood/residential setting - just like a bubble tea shop, a bustling dim sum corner, or favorite mom and pop convenience store, grief is something part of your everyday life.

In a way, grief can be a neighbor - one that shows up in the most expected and maybe unexpected ways!

Perhaps today you find yourself here while exploring the neighborhood, taking a walk after eating delicious food or visiting a historic site. Perhaps you have been feeling the anguish after a recent loss and are searching for a moment to rest your grief.

Wherever or however you are today, A Resting Place welcomes and invites you in.

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Book by Jess Rimington and Joanna L. Crea, and podcast, The Light Ahead

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Seen through the lens of pop culture, the future is looking pretty dystopian: Black Mirror, Westworld, The 100, 3%, and a myriad other shows, movies, and books imagine what will happen if the darkest aspects of humanity win out.

The Light Ahead podcast turns in the opposite direction: what would society look like if we actually manage to get things right? What would life be like in an economy that worked for everyone? In the way Star Trek imagined a future that inspired a generation of scientists, investors, and techies to grow up and create technologies that seemed impossible only decades ago, The Light Ahead offers listeners visionary ideas for a kinder, more inclusive, economic future.

Each episode is a scripted piece of short fiction set in 2030 and informed by the visions of activists and justice advocates. Listen to the latest episode here.

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Seen through the lens of pop culture, the future is looking pretty dystopian: Black Mirror, Westworld, The 100, 3%, and a myriad other shows, movies, and books imagine what will happen if the darkest aspects of humanity win out. The Light Ahead podcast turns in the opposite direction: what would society look like if we actually manage to get things right?

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We advocate for equitable development and the creation of inclusive cross-cultural spaces.

Let's Build for Belonging in East King County for all of us and future generations.

CONNECT IN COMMUNITY

Meet neighbors, exchange ideas, build relationships, and support one another.

Eastside For All believes real change and the ability to build for belonging begins with the small, sincere conversations that happen in informal settings when we come together as community members, connecting around our hopes and dreams.

Cross-Cultural community spaces allow us to do just that.

Community spaces are critical. They make real transformations in equity and social justice possible. Cross-cultural spaces bring people together with the intent to connect people from different races, cultures, occupations, social economic standings and viewpoints.
In these spaces, we do more than talk. We work together on events, community art, advocacy issues, and shared visions.

EQUITABLE DEVELOPMENT
for Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

If you give me a fish, you have fed me for a day.

If you teach me to fish, you have fed me until the river is contaminated or the shoreline seized for development.

But if you teach me to organize, then whatever the challenge, I can join together with my peers and we will fashion our own solution.

GET OUR ANNOUNCEMENTS & STAY UP TO DATE

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Let's Build for Belonging in East King County for all of us and future generations. Meet neighbors, exchange ideas, build relationships, and support one another. Eastside For All believes real change and the ability to build for belonging begins with the small, sincere conversations that happen in informal settings when we come together as community members, connecting around our hopes and dreams. Cross-Cultural community spaces allow us to do just that.

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Transformative Placemaking with Renée Cheng, Dean of the UW College of Built Environments 

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Transformative Placemaking with Renée Cheng, Dean of the UW College of Built Environments 

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Build for Belonging: Transformative Placemaking

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Transformative Placemaking for Social, Economic, and Community Health

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Transformative Placemaking for Social, Economic, and Community Health

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Transformative Placemaking for Social, Economic, and Community Health

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Planning for Just, Sustainable, and Inclusive Communities

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Planning for Just, Sustainable, and Inclusive Communities

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September 2022 community event featuring Dr. Julian Agyeman's "Just Sustainabilities" framework

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Just Sustainabilities: Planning for Just, Sustainable, and Inclusive Communities

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Meet TPL's Community Impact Heroes Meet TPL's Community Impact Heroes

We all have the power to make our communities better. These people are doing it through deep, local engagement to improve quality of life where they live.

Virtual Park Bench Chats Virtual Park Bench Chats

Join us for our Spring Park Bench Chats on park access and community impact.

We Disrupt This Program We Disrupt This Program

In the early years especially and through our first half century, TPL has been comfortable operating outside the playbook, and that has been a key to our success.

Outdoor Spaces for All Abilities Outdoor Spaces for All Abilities

From the Bay Area of San Francisco to the mountains of New Hampshire, Trust for Public Land is working to make parks, playgrounds, and trails more accessible. That means going beyond the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which people in the disability community as well as landscape architects and park planners say don't go far enough toward achieving truly inclusive design.

50 Years of Outside for All

Since 1972, We've Created Thousands of Parks and Protected Millions of Acres of Public Land

We're Leading a Movement of Americans United for the Outdoors

Spending time outdoors improves people's health, nurtures their joy, and strengthens their connection to nature and one another. That's why we're on a mission to create and protect places that bring us outside-parks, trails, playgrounds, and public lands-and make them available to everyone, everywhere.
Learn More About Us Support Our Work

Together, We Can Close the Park Equity Gap

The outdoors are essential to our well-being, but unfortunately, access to green spaces isn't equal. Millions of people in the U.S. don't have a quality park close to home, especially in lower income and minority communities. We're working to change that reality - one park, one trail, one schoolyard at a time.
Learn More

And Restore Cultural and Ancestral Lands

We're committed to advancing our Tribal Land and Black History and Culture work. For decades, we've partnered with tribal and Indigenous communities to reconnect and restore their ancestral homelands. And we've been preserving cultural sites tied to Black American history since our founding. But there's more to do-together, we can build a more equitable and inclusive future-starting with the outdoors.
Discover Our Tribal Land Work Explore Our Black History and Culture Work

Sign one or more of our petitions. Let lawmakers know that our outdoor spaces must be protected and that everyone needs equal access to the benefits and joys of the outdoors.
See All Petitions

We Know Where Parks Are Needed

We've gathered the most comprehensive data on park access in the United States-and we're using it to pinpoint neighborhoods where parks are needed most.

See which cities are highly ranked for equitable access to the outdoors in our annual ParkScore Top 100 list and discover how your own city stacks up.

Our Members Make Our Work Possible. Join Us.

Take a stand for the outdoors and become a member today.

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Trust for Public Land: Connecting Everyone to the Outdoors

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Meet TPL's Community Impact Heroes Meet TPL's Community Impact Heroes We all have the power to make our communities better. These people are doing it through deep, local engagement to improve quality of life where they live. Virtual Park Bench Chats Virtual Park Bench Chats Join us for our Spring Park Bench Chats on park access and community impact.

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Equitable Development Principles and Scorecard

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Equitable Development Principles and Scorecard

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Why Liberatory Design?
We are all living in challenging times that our past experience and training has not sufficiently prepared us for. Too often, well intentioned equity efforts do not succeed-and even produce unintended consequences. This can lead to frustration, hopelessness and cynicism.
It's important to consider why so many equity efforts stall or fail to achieve intended outcomes:

They do not employ a deep enough equity lens-for example, a diversity and inclusion focus as opposed to interrogating deeper causes produced by systemic oppression.

They take the form of traditional linear, hierarchical plans that focus on strategies, goals, timelines, metrics and accountability. These efforts don't recognize the messiness and complexity of the challenge, so they often are ineffective and, sometimes, even backfire.

They are created in the context of dominant white culture, in traditional structures (e.g. committees, task forces), or in teams that don't have an effective approach to the work. Common problems include:

group members unable to engage in authentic critical dialogue;

lack of trust, especially across role/power and identity difference, that undermines team efficacy;

the process doesn't bring forward sufficiently creative thinking;

urgency leads to hasty, misguided decisions;

creative and potentially powerful solutions are not accepted by leadership.

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Liberatory Design - National Equity Project

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Addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems with liberatory design. Learn more about this process or register for an upcoming course.

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Build for Belonging hosted guest speaker Jenn Low, Associate Design Director at Openbox

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Build for Belonging: Designing for Equity

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Intercultural Senior Center, Omaha Nebraska

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Intercultural Senior Center, Omaha Nebraska

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Latino/a seniors, refugee older adults from Sudan, Somalia, Bhutan, Nepal, and Burma (Karen population), & native English speakers promoting multicultural learning and understanding

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ISC is a center for older adults ages 50 and older, with on-site activities, nutrition, education, exercise, and cultural events. We provide a light breakfast and noon meal* through the Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging (ENOA). Our center is nationally...

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ISC is a center for older adults ages 50 and older, with on-site activities, nutrition, education, exercise, and cultural events. We provide a light breakfast and noon meal* through the Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging (ENOA). Our center is nationally...

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We seek to celebrate cultural and religious diversity by creating an inclusive environment where residents from all backgrounds interact, share, and develop together

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Village Exchange Center Empowering Change Empowering Community Through Exchange Celebrating religious and cultural diversity The Village Exchange Center is ...

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Spice Bridge is home to FIN’s Food Business Incubator program, which helps South King County BIPOC and immigrants start and grow thriving businesses.

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Spice Bridge is home to FIN’s Food Business Incubator program, which helps South King County BIPOC and immigrants start and grow thriving businesses.

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Cross-Cultural Public Art on the Eastrail

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Cross-Cultural Public Art on the Eastrail

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OPEN ROSTER INVITATION TO APPLY

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Puget Sound Region 2050 Vision
PSRC Planning Resources

City Comp Plan Info:
Bellevue
Issaquah
Kirkland
Redmond
Sammamish

King County

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A hyperlocal model in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, Seattle

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This discussion has brought more awareness of past practices of design and how it is a tool for white supremacy. The discussion was a extremely enlightening.

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Julian Agyeman, PhD is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate at Tufts University. He is the originator of the increasingly influential concept of just sustainabilities, which explores the intersecting goals of social justice and environmental sustainability.

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Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature.

The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love-matters.

Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities.
Reviews
"Creative, hopeful, audacious. Here is a book that the city building professions have been, unknowingly, waiting for. Transcending technical and policy 'fixes', this book addresses the cultural and spiritual dimensions of shaping cities as if people, land, and nature were sacred. An impressive, pluriversal collection of essays, asking arguably THE most important question of our era: what will it take to build seven generation cities?"
- Leonie Sandercock, FRSC, Professor in Community Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

" Sacred Civics offers a forward-looking framework that re-imagines what our cities can be if we change our mindset to a more relational one. Through the voices of scholars and practitioners, the book gives a blueprint for how to put into practice the transformative ideas and principles so well articulated here. A wonderful achievement."
- Sheila R. Foster, Professor at Georgetown University, USA

"The old metaphors for cities have run dry. Cities as machines or technologies or mechanisms aren't getting us anywhere. They aren't computers...they aren't smart. But they are systems that are built and managed by communities of humans and their non-human allies. As such, the values that we bear in mind as we do the work of city-ing matters. The work that we do together matters. It should be seen as sacred. Even the act of figuring out what this means is something that we should do together, and as such is a sacred process. This book ties many of the relevant threads together into the pattern we need for doing the work of cities in the 21st century. It liberates us from the mechanistic models of the past. It liberates us to figure out what's next for cities. Those of us who work to build just cities and communities need this book."
- Nigel Jacob, Co-Chair / Co-Founder, Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, USA

"Nature and the sacred have long been banished from the city. Yet can cities become the site of wisdom, wholeness, and healing? This is the urgent question this unique and wonderfully creative volume tackles by weaving together indigenous ontologies, the relational turn in urban studies, and decoloniality to persuasively develop the principles of "sacred civics" and "seven-generation cities" as the foundation for a substantial rethinking of city building and the democratization of city futures. Chung-Tiam-Fook, Agyeman, and Engle have assembled a truly outstanding and diverse group of indigenous and nonindigenous writers and artists, including some of today's leading scholars in urban studies, to offer us a cogent framework of urban design as a praxis for the just co-existence of all within a living cosmos. Their call for a relational accountability for the urban worlds we design, grounded on a renewed Earth spirituality and a paradigm of interdependence and care, couldn't be timelier. Along the way, readers are invited to inspiring and rigorous analyses on the implications of such rethinking for commons, property, governance, nature, and the economy. The book will be of great value to urban planners and designers as well as to scholars and students in indigenous and decolonial studies and those concerned with urban natures, transitions, pluriversality, and the sacred."
- Arturo Escobar, Arturo Escobar, Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of North Carolina, USA

"Cities need big ideas to fill small spaces. This book reveals how life's details might better correspond with life's broader sources to create healthier urban futures. I am impressed with the rich and varied angles of vision found in Sacred Civics. The book is practical and poetic. It cultivates hope even as it recognizes the significant challenges we face."
- John Borrows, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law, University of Victoria, Canada

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Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities - Julian Agyeman

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Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature.

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coffee house, safe space, community events, mentorship, living wage jobs, and job training; 3 locations in Georgia

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Refuge Coffee Co. - Atlanta Coffee Truck + Atlanta Coffee Shop

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Serving the community of Clarkston, Georgia and beyond. Atlanta Coffee Truck + Atlanta Coffee Shop + Atlanta Coffee Catering.

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Hands on Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places | PlaceIt! Interactive Planning Workshops

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Place It! is an interactive urban-planning organization that uses model-making, storytelling, and play to engage people of all kinds in the urban planning process.

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There have been and are now many paths to achieve Community Stewardship of Land. In this moment, we offer a set up six specific principles that can be used to assess how strategies, development projects, and proposed public policy advance CSL or not.

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SOCIAL HOUSING: publicly owned, permanently affordable, resident led, cross-class community

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What is Social Housing? - House Our Neighbors

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Social housing is available to all, from those with the lowest incomes up to moderate-to-high income households. Rents are designed to match the specific income levels of all tenants. This is crucial given the severe rent burden faced by residents across the income spectrum, especially residents from marginalized communities.

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The Cultural Space Agency is a mission-driven, values-based cultural real estate development company chartered by the City of Seattle as a Public Development Authority (PDA).

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There are many versions of site control that can benefit cultural communities. Initial strategies for the Cultural Space Agency include:

Purchase properties. Own entire buildings, or condominium-sized portions of buildings, and share that equity with community partners to create and preserve destinations, anchors, and powerful assets in the community.

Develop new properties. In partnership with housing providers, create new buildings centered in cultural communities, creating affordable residential, commercial, and cultural spaces.

Master-lease and sublease property. Serving as a leasing intermediary provides longevity, stability, and predictability for both the cultural partners and the spaces' owners.

Manage and curate sites for owners who maintain site control themselves. Provide short-term, quick-access, and popup space for artists, projects, and organizations.

The projects that show up in the spaces controlled by the Cultural Space Agency will be the most important aspect of how this organization shows up in the community. Potential space uses include:

Individual artist studio spaces. This is the highest-demand type of cultural space in Seattle.

Arts and cultural projects. These are short-term shows, screenings, exhibitions, and other

types of art projects and displays.

Arts and cultural organizations. This is long-term space for organizations to either lease or to partner on ownership models.

Community-serving small businesses. Space for small businesses working with and for community stakeholders.

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The Cultural Space Agency is a mission-driven, values-based cultural real estate development company chartered by the City of Seattle as a Public Development Authority (PDA).

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Our equitable development program advances policies that support compact, high-density development and affordable housing along transit corridors to prevent displacement, which is core to healthy, climate-resilient communities.

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A major challenge to creating communities where all people can thrive - no matter the barriers they face - lies in the complexity of urban regions. Where you live relative to good jobs, education and culturally relevant services - as well as you ability to receive them - greatly influence your opportunities.

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Africatown Community Land Trust is working for community ownership of land in the Central District that can support the cultural and economic thriving of people who are part of the African diaspora in the Greater Seattle region.

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I know that Bellevue Library has a makerspace, and I think there are a couple co-working spaces...but I think there's a lot more untapped interest in spaces like this on the eastside, especially as an increasing number of people adapt to home forms that are more compact. https://www.makerspaces.com/what-is-a-makerspace/

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The Center was created in 2004 as a way to celebrate cultural diversity and to combat racism and xenophobia. The nonprofit center promotes civic participation, social entrepreneurship, and cross-cultural projects.

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Friends of Waterfront Seattle: Our goal is to continually cultivate inclusive spaces where all people — specifically Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as underserved communities — are invited and welcome to enjoy Waterfront Park.

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The future Waterfront Park will span 20 acres along Seattle's downtown shoreline. A constellation of lush, open public spaces linked together by a pedestrian-oriented promenade, Waterfront Park welcomes and encourages the public to come together.

From dynamic open spaces with free, rotating activities and events, to coastline habitats for learning and exploration, to peaceful landscaped seating areas for a natural respite from the urban hustle and bustle, Waterfront Park has something for everyone. Stretching from the Pioneer Square to Belltown neighborhoods, Waterfront Park reactivates Seattle's exceptional urban shoreline, creating a new public place that reconnects the city to its surrounding natural environment.

Emerging out of 10 years of public comment, the completed design of Waterfront Park emphasizes connectivity - between people and place, past and present, sea and shore. This is a park for Seattle locals and visitors alike, with lively gathering spaces and year-round educational and recreational park programs celebrating the diverse cultures that define the Pacific Northwest.

A salmon-friendly seawall and expansive natural landscaping with biofiltration support a sustainable nearshore environment, building lasting connections between the city and Elliott Bay and creating an accessible and inspired new waterfront district. This extraordinary park is a tribute to the people, landscapes, and traditions that define Seattle.

More details about the park:

Designed by James Corner Field Operations, Waterfront Park stitches together Seattle waterfront landmarks including the historic Pike Place Market, the Seattle Aquarium, Colman Dock, and the Olympic Sculpture Park.

Waterfront Park introduces new bicycle and walking trails along the shoreline, expanding Seattle's robust network of bike- and pedestrian-oriented corridors.

The shoreline ecosystem and innovative, sustainable design is a key focus for Waterfront Park, helping support the environmental health of Seattle's waterfront.

Throughout its history, Seattle's waterfront has been shaped by its uses including ship building, fishing, canning, trading, and transportation. Waterfront Park represents the latest chapter in the history of this working waterfront as it evolves to meet a new cultural need for the larger Seattle community.

The first piece of Waterfront Park, Pier 62, is opening soon. Construction will continue on the rest of Waterfront Park with completion in 2024.

For details on Waterfront Park's project delivery and construction information, visit waterfrontseattle.org.

Railroad Way

A tree-lined pathway connecting the waterfront to the stadiums

Pioneer Square

Lush green east-west connections to a historic neighborhood and a peaceful habitat beach where visitors can touch the water

1. Washington St. Boat Landing

2. Habitat Beach

Transit Hub

A link from the downtown core to ferries, a bus every two minutes, and the bay

1. Marion St. Pedestrian Bridge

2. Colman Dock

Historic Piers

A collection of historic piers continue a 150-year tradition of Seattle's working waterfront, reimagined to present year-round opportunities to eat, drink, and play

Waterfront Promenade

Central Public Space

The cultural hub of the waterfront ties together two iconic waterfront destinations, Pike Place Market and the Seattle Aquarium, with added space for activity and sweeping views

1. Pier 58

2. Seattle Aquarium Expansion

3. Overlook Walk

4. Piers 62/63 Phased Rebuild

5. Pike/Pine Corridor

Belltown

A leafy connection to an active neighborhood brimming with shopping, food, and nightlife

Lenora St. Pedestrian Bridge

Virtual Waterfront Tour

Step into the future park with our virtual reality tour!

Timeline

A New Era For Seattle & Its Waterfront

With Waterfront Park, Seattle's residents are making a conscious choice about how to improve the waterfront to best serve the community and the environment. Shaped by tens of thousands of voices gathered through a rigorous public process, Waterfront Park fulfills the community's vision for a central waterfront for all of Seattle.

The design for this 20-acre linear park responds to the public's overwhelming call for an open, accessible waterfront - one that reconnects the city to its coastline just as it restores the health of the nearshore environment. Through years of unprecedented collaboration between government officials, community leaders, tribes, businesses, and the public at large, Seattle's new waterfront is taking shape to be more than a park. It is a welcoming, engaging framework that can meet the ever-evolving needs of the communities it serves.
For details on Waterfront Park's project delivery and construction information, visit waterfrontseattle.org.

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Seawall construction begins.

2014

2015

2016

2017

Groundbreaking for Pier 62 rebuild.

2017-18

2019

Viaduct closes / Tunnel opens.

2020

2024

What do you want to see, eat, and do on the waterfront?

Want to plan an event? Have an idea for an activity? We want to hear from you! Waterfront Park is committed to serving the needs of its diverse communities through cultural, educational, and recreational activities in a beautiful, welcoming environment.

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The future Waterfront Park will span 20 acres along Seattle's downtown shoreline. A constellation of lush, open public spaces linked together by a pedestrian-oriented promenade, Waterfront Park welcomes and encourages the public to come together.

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One of the struggles of performance groups is finding a place that meets the unique needs for a performance: stage space, audience seating, food/alcohol accommodations, acoustic/amplification features, etc. Similar for rehearsal spaces. I'm surprised that I haven't found an online service that provides this in a useful structure.

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Wanting more opportunity for stopping to interact with fellow citizens. Thinking of thinks like rotating art displays, group games, group exercise, food truck stops, etc.

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I'd love to see '1% for arts' made available for arts venues and nurturing interactive opportunities, as I think it's currently only available for installations of visual art.

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Projects in the High Line Network transform underutilized infrastructure into new urban landscapes. Redefining what a park can be, these hybrid spaces are also public squares, open-air museums, botanical gardens, social service organizations, walkways, transit corridors, and more.

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What I hope the High Line has done is make the impossible possible. The network helps all of us learn from each other so that our spaces can reach their full potential.

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My People's Market in Portland, OR grew from a desire to create pathways for entrepreneurs of color to connect with the travel industry and new market opportunities.

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My People's Market 7 In It Together

My People's Market is back in real life. Join us Friday-Sunday, August 6, 7, and 8 on the North Park Blocks in downtown Portland, for a market experience that only the MPM crew can deliver. Immerse yourself in the vibrancy Portland has to offer at My People's Market. Connect with BIPOC entrepreneurs, makers, artists, culinary wizards, and beverage crafters. And experience the sounds of local Portland artists and performers, curated by YGB.

For three days My People's Market will take over two blocks between NW Davis and NW Flanders
Friday, August 6 - 4-8PM | Saturday, August 7 - 12-6PM | Sunday, August 8 - 12-6PM

Thank you to our sponsors!

My People's Market is made possible by our local partners.

MPM WINDOW SHOP

We teamed up with Window Shop PDX to bring a virtual Pop-up downtown. Check out the 50 vendors participating & shop on-line!

A LOOK BACK

Visit our gallery to discover past shows and events. This is a market you want to to support.

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My People's Market is a marketplace re-imagined as a gathering of Portland's diverse and vibrant entrepreneurs, makers, artists, culinary wizards, and beverage crafters. My People' Market is aimed at being an annual event. The 2018 My People's Market takes place on June 30, 2018 at the Rose Quarte

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Investing in Public Spaces to Achieve Livable Cities for All

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Investing in Public Spaces to Achieve Livable Cities for All

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“Public spaces are especially good arenas for creativity and collaboration between governments, the private sector, and citizens for creating vibrant and inclusive neighborhoods and districts.”

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February 11, 2020, ABU DHABI - There is an enormous opportunity for smarter use of public spaces, to unlock the "hidden" value they create for communities, neighborhoods, and entire cities, according to a new World Bank publication launched today at the World Urban Forum (WUF10).

The publication, The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces, says that

"Globally, about one-third of a city's land area is covered by public spaces-ranging from city streets, neighborhood squares and parks, to public facilities, such as libraries and markets. This is significant," said Sameh Wahba, World Bank Global Director for Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience, and Land. "Sustainably planning, financing, and managing public spaces with a focus on people is key to unleashing cities' potential for building livable, resilient, and competitive cities for all."

According to the book, city governments often do not invest in the creation and management of good-quality public spaces due to poor and ad hoc urban planning, budgetary constraints, and other pressing priorities arising from rapid urbanization. As a result, public spaces often become liabilities, creating a downward spiral that drains public resources and exacerbates various city problems.

Jon Kher Kaw, World Bank Senior Urban Specialist and lead author of the publication, highlighted the other end of the spectrum, "Cities that successfully create and manage great public spaces and places buck this trend. They reap the rewards from the enormous value that is created, including the environmental and social benefits that go beyond economic gains."

Kaw added that "Public spaces are especially good arenas for creativity and collaboration between governments, the private sector, and citizens for creating vibrant and inclusive neighborhoods and districts."

These strategies should focus on three major areas:

1. Stakeholders and partnerships: create public spaces for and with communities, and recognize the need for strong partnerships between governments, private sector actors, and citizens.

2. Policies, planning, and design: adopt effective planning policies, placemaking approaches, and innovative design solutions that ensure the equitable distribution, inclusion and access, and quality of public-space networks across the city.

3. Management, governance, and finance: implement sustainable financial, management, and governance models across the entire public-space asset life cycle, from their initial creation, implementation, maintenance and to their renewal.

The publication notes that it is through these strategies that public spaces-whether on the streets, within infrastructure spaces and public facilities, or in open and green areas-can yield returns on investment far exceeding the monetary costs.

Building on more than 20 city case studies from around the globe, the publication illustrates how successful public spaces help cities strengthen social cohesion and sense of place; promote urban health and citizen well-bring; build urban resilience; support the local economy and livelihoods; spur urban regeneration and entrepreneurship; and attract further investments into urban neighborhoods.

Download the publication to read the case studies and learn how city leaders, policymakers, and urban practitioners can better plan, finance, and manage both government- and privately-owned public spaces to achieve livable cities for all.
The Hidden Wealth of Cities: Creating, Financing, and Managing Public Spaces received support from UN-Habitat, European Space Agency (Earth Observation for Sustainable Development initiative), Centre for Liveable Cities (Singapore), Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, and Korea Green Growth Trust Fund (KGGTF).

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Investing in Public Spaces to Achieve Livable Cities for All

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February 11, 2020, ABU DHABI - There is an enormous opportunity for smarter use of public spaces, to unlock the "hidden" value they create for communities, neighborhoods, and entire cities, according to a new World Bank publication launched today at the World Urban Forum (WUF10).

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SAFE PLACES, ACTIVE SPACES! A Community Playbook for Transforming Public Spaces in Your Neighborhood  

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SAFE PLACES, ACTIVE SPACES! A Community Playbook for Transforming Public Spaces in Your Neighborhood  

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http://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Safe-Places-Active-Spaces.pdf

Don't let this link title confuse you. Loads of super cool ideas here

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Grant programs, ideas, planning resources for street art that also helps connect communities

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Creative Communities and Arts-Based Placemaking 

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Creative Communities and Arts-Based Placemaking 

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Learn about three examples of the profound and wide-ranging impacts that place-based arts initiatives can have on the social, cultural, and economic life of communities.

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"Culture is not only beneficial to cities; in a deeper sense, it's what cities are for. A city without poets, painters and photographers is sterile." -Rebecca Solnit

‍Harvest Dinner Party, Camden, New Jersey. In October 2014, residents, local artists, community organizations and stakeholders came together for an evening meal featuring the largest tablecloth on record in America, created by Camden Residents. The Harvest is a participatory art and community event made possible by grants from ArtPlace America, The Kresge Foundation, and the Wells Fargo Regional Foundation.

Arts-based Placemaking is an integrative approach to urban planning and community building that stimulates local economies and leads to increased innovation, cultural diversity, and civic engagement. Since creativity fuels place value, the benefits of using arts and culture to tap into a place's unique character extend well beyond the art world. Across sectors and at all levels, today's leaders and policymakers are increasingly recognizing how arts-based Placemaking initiatives can simultaneously advance their missions in transportation, housing, employment, health care, environmental sustainability, and education.

A number of funders, organizations, and federal agencies have been working with cities, planners, developers, arts organizations, citizen groups and other institutional stakeholders on these kinds of Placemaking initiatives for several years, and the collective impact of these efforts has really begun to take hold. Through programs like ArtPlace America and the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design (CIRD), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been a key player in the movement, and The Kresge Foundation's Arts & Culture program has also been a key resource for harvesting best practices and new approaches for Creative Placemaking projects. Each of these organizations works to extend the benefits of place to all stakeholders, focusing in particular on low-income communities.

This is especially important, for just as the barriers to opportunity that many vulnerable or disinvested neighborhoods face do not exist in isolation from each other, neither can we address complex issues-such as discrimination, social inequity, or uneven access to quality public spaces-with a singular agenda in mind. Consider the following three examples of the profound and wide-ranging impacts that place-based arts initiatives can have on the social, cultural, and economic life of communities.

1. City of Asylum, Pittsburgh, PA

‍House Poem, created by Huang Xiang for the City of Asylum project. The project has become such an integral part of Pittsburgh's identity that it was recently featured in the New York Times travel segment, "36 Hours in [Pittsburgh]" (screenshot above).

On a street called Sampsonia Way in the low-income Central Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, writers-in-exile can now find sanctuary and respite at City of Asylum - a hybrid arts and social service organization that transforms vacant and blighted residential properties into homes, venues for civic and cultural programs, and public spaces for arts-based community programs. In exchange for rent-free living and working space, medical benefits, a living stipend, help in securing publishers and long-term employment, City of Asylum's visiting artists can be found teaching creative writing to local school-age children, holding public readings in the adjacent Reading Garden, or joining local musicians in parading down a newly-build trail to the river's edge during the Jazz Poetry Festival. A nearby former masonic temple is currently being converted into "Alphabet City"-a multi-use facility for arts-based programs that will include a bookstore and restaurant.

2. Oregon County Food Producers and Artisans Co-op, Alton, MO

‍Visit the Coop's Facebook page here.

In the small Ozark town of Alton, Missouri, the staff of Citizens' Institute on Rural Design ( CIRD) worked with the Oregon County Food Producers and Artisans Co-Op -a multi-functional organization that operates an art gallery, market space, community center, and education facility. Allowing local farmers and artisans to collaborate and supplement their incomes, the Co-op works to sustain the local communities and economies of Oregon County by tapping into the products, skills, and knowledge of its residents. Along with the market, their building also has a certified community kitchen which is used for business incubation, a pay-what-you-can lunch program, and culinary training workshops, and outside there is a large raised-bed garden, which is both an educational outreach tool and a source of fresh produce for the kitchen. A popular community hub, the Co-op hosts frequent events, from local auctions and film screenings to "pickin' parties" and bimonthly instrumental jam sessions. These programs help to nurture a strong sense of community and place amongst area residents, and there is also an on-site folklife library with a collection of books, art, and music that highlights the cultural history of the Ozark region.

3. REVOLVE Detroit, Detroit, MI

‍In creating a pop-up community hub, the Livernois Community Storefront project in Detroit celebrates local culture and brings attention to local businesses on the Avenue of Fashion.

In the spring of 2013, the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation received a grant from ArtPlace America to display art in vacant storefronts and underperforming public spaces on a stretch of Livernois Avenue, between Seven and Eight Mile Roads in Detroit. The Revolve Detroit program worked with local groups to fill these storefronts with various pop-up shops and art installations. This exciting program engages art and entrepreneurship to creatively reimagine-and sometimes completely transform-the image and potential of Detroit's historic neighborhoods. The Livernois Community Storefront project, for example, serves as a community hub to connect and engage the local community on a regular and ongoing basis, and has hosted theater events, design festivals, an art studio, and an old-fashioned soda fountain, and it has helped business and culture to thrive along this historic Avenue of Fashion, as it was once known.

As these examples show, effective arts-based Placemaking projects go well beyond the idea of art for art's sake. The goal of this work is to build strong, healthy, and resilient cities by integrating the arts into broader community revitalization and Placemaking efforts. It is about leveraging the power of arts and culture to strengthen communities and drive social change. The arts do more than just promote social well-being, as CEO of the Kresge Foundation Rip Rapson has pointed out, they are indispensable elements of it. And because they have always played an important role in the life of our cities and communities, the arts need to be a central component, not an afterthought, in our policy and planning discussions - or indeed in "any public, private, [or] community conversations that seek to bring about change."

[Creative Placemaking] describes projects in which art plays an intentional and integrated role in place-based community planning and development. This brings artists, arts organizations, and artistic activity into the suite of placemaking strategies pioneered by Jane Jacobs and her colleagues, who believed that community development must be locally informed, human-centric, and holistic. -ArtPlace America

To ensure the success of these projects, there also needs to be a tacit understanding amongst everyone involved that the community is the expert. Indeed, unlike other projects labeled "Creative Placemaking," where artists themselves take the reins, or where the ultimate outcome is a completed work of public art, arts-based Placemaking from our perspective is fundamentally collaborative, engaging the community and stakeholders from the very beginning. The community itself is both the driving force of the project and the key measure of its success.

This emphasis on process over outcome is crucial. At PPS, we believe that for any place to be truly successful, people must not only feel like they belong, but also that they can play an active part in the creation, management, and continued success of that place. And while the place, the physical product itself, is certainly important in this process, it is the focus on making -on community engagement and empowerment-that is perhaps even more vital for sustainable and lasting change.

Given the increasing role of innovation and collaboration in today's urban economies, the flourishing of arts-based Placemaking projects is both timely and essential. As Rip Rapson has so eloquently explained: "Cultural creativity may well be the driving force of community revitalization in the 21st century. It promises more adaptive ways of seeing, understanding, experiencing, and transforming where we live, how we work, and what we dream."
For more ideas and examples of successful Arts-Based Placemaking projects in cities throughout the country, watch this inspiring webinar, presented in July 2015 by PPS Senior Vice President and Creative Placemaking expert, Cynthia Nikitin.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0-XRkplGV4[/embed]

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Creative Communities and Arts-Based Placemaking

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"Culture is not only beneficial to cities; in a deeper sense, it's what cities are for. A city without poets, painters and photographers is sterile." -Rebecca Solnit Arts-based Placemaking is an integrative approach to urban planning and community building that stimulates local economies and leads to increased innovation, cultural diversity, and civic engagement.

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Interculturally Inclusive Spaces as Just Environments

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Interculturally Inclusive Spaces as Just Environments

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Julian Agyeman’s contribution to the “Just Environments” series calls for the planning, design, and maintenance of culturally inclusive spaces, highlighting the ways in which the built environment can facilitate spatial justice.

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"We are in a spatial moment." Around the world, there has never been a time when the role and possibilities of public space have been so prominent in the news and on social media as now. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to SlutWalks that originated in Toronto, new spatial imaginaries are opening up. New spaces are being created and used as sites of recreation, such as New York City's High Line, a disused elevated rail bed that is now a highly used urban park. Other spaces, such as Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, represent "cosmopolitan canopies," as described by sociologist Elijah Anderson, where there is racial, ethnic, and class intermixing in civil and friendly ways.

Road spaces around the world are being reimagined. In Copenhagen, as in the Dutch woonerven, and in streets such as London's Exhibition Road, the concept of "shared space" removes the usual separation of cars, pedestrians, and other road users and devices so that curbs, road lines, signs, and signals are woven into a "cities for people" narrative of public space. In this way, walking, cycling, shopping, and driving cars are integral to the "livable" or "complete" street.

"I argue it is possible to plan, design, and maintain 'culturally inclusive spaces,' but this necessitates, among other things, a paradigm shift in our thinking from multi- to interculturalism."

Yet, designing inclusive, or at least nonexclusive public space faces many obstacles and challenges in engaging with difference, diversity, and cultural heterogeneity in creative and productive ways. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris argues that many public areas have "reinforced divisions based upon class, race, age, or ethnicity."Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, "Children's Common Grounds: A Study of Intergroup Relations Among Children in Public Settings," Journal of the American Planning Association 69, no. 2 (2003): 130-43. Low et al. are even more forthright: "In this new century, we are facing a different kind of threat to public space-not one of disuse, but of patterns of design and management that exclude some people and reduce social and cultural diversity." I argue it is possible to plan, design, and maintain "culturally inclusive spaces," but this necessitates, among other things, a paradigm shift in our thinking from multi- to interculturalism.

Interculturalism

Multiculturalist discourses have fallen short in considering the broader impacts of culture on planning and sustainability. James Tully has noted in his 1995 book Ash Amin, "Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity," Strange Multiplicity that multiculturalism, as it has been conceived, does not require any fundamental change in thinking. Our societies, he argues, are intercultural rather than multicultural because of cross-cultural overlap, interaction, and negotiation-the "politics of recognition"-that occur out of necessity in the formation of our society. Ash Amin calls this the "negotiation of difference within local micropublics of everyday interaction." Environment and Planning A 34, no. 6 (2002): 959-80. An acknowledgment of this dynamic cultural nature of society-both the "politics of recognition" and "negotiation of difference"-is a key distinction between intercultural and multicultural theory, demanding a culturally competent and inclusive approach to both planning and policymaking.

Jude Bloomfield and Franco Bianchini make perhaps the most eloquent argument, the full implications of which should be fully understood by politicians, planners, and policymakers:

The interculturalism approach goes beyond opportunities and respect for existing cultural differences, to the pluralist transformation of public space, civic culture and institutions...city governments should promote cross-fertilisation across all cultural boundaries, between 'majority' and 'minorities', 'dominant' and 'sub' cultures, localities, classes, faiths, disciplines and genres, as the source of cultural, social, political and economic innovation.Jude Bloomfield and Franco Bianchini, Planning for the Cosmopolitan City: A Research Report for Birmingham City Council (Leicester: Comedia, International Cultural Planning and Policy Unit, 2002).

Leonie Sandercock, however, appeals to our emotions: "I dream of a city of bread and festivals, where those who don't have the bread aren't excluded from the carnival. I dream of a city in which action grows out of knowledge and understanding." This city, Sandercock explains, would value social justice over balanced budgets, neighborhood discussion before decisions, and its very possibility should seduce.

Imagine, for a moment, a mayor or city leadership group who had the courage to move in these directions; to contaminate and hybridize across cultures; to feel seduced by the city-a mayor or leadership group that refused to go with the status quo, with what is probable, but instead focused on what is possible. The transformation of Broadway and the High Line under Mayor Michael Bloomberg are small but highly significant examples of possibility, as was the more ambitious development and implementation of London's congestion charge under Mayor Ken Livingstone, or the "Copenhagen Miracle" under a succession of mayors since the 1960s and the iconic urbanist Jan Gehl. However, the only citywide, culture-shifting examples that even come close to intercultural urban planning are the double acts of Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa who literally performed (in the case of Mockus) the most celebrated of urban transformations in Bogotá, Colombia, and more recently the social urbanism- inspired transformation of Medellín, Colombia.

Designing, planning, and maintaining culturally inclusive spaces

The uneven development of many public spaces is a classic case of spatial injustice. Most public spaces serve as meeting places for people who already know each other, and many open spaces are sites of tension and racism that reinforce intergroup separation. Certain subgroups express additional difference-based barriers that concern language, disabilities, gender identity, and religion.

"How, then, do we get to Anderson's 'cosmopolitan canopy' or Bloomfield and Bianchini's intercultural dream where 'different cultures intersect, "contaminate" each other and hybridize?'"

How, then, do we get to Anderson's "cosmopolitan canopy" or Bloomfield and Bianchini's intercultural dream where "different cultures intersect, 'contaminate' each other and hybridize?"Bloomfield and Bianchini, Sandeep Kumar and George Martin, "A Case for Culturally Responsive Urban Design," Planning for the Cosmopolitan City, 6. These observations and ideas underlie Gordon Allport's "contact theory," which posits that interactions between members of different groups can reduce intergroup prejudice under the right conditions. Clearly, parks, public spaces, markets, and streets have a role to play. Unfortunately, culturally inclusive spaces-those designed intentionally around intercultural engagement, the recognition of difference, diversity, and cultural heterogeneity-have not been a major focus of study in the planning literature, nor are they well understood by practicing urban designers, planners, and policymakers. Ontario Planning Journal 19, no. 5 (2004): 5-7.

Public spaces can be sites of huge intercultural opportunity. Organized events, such as football matches, festivals, or youth group activities, may offer important opportunities for intergroup contact and for generating shared experiences. People who have emigrated from one country and culture to another tend to use public open spaces, community gardens, and parks to gather and congregate in ways that are reminiscent of their home country, transforming the parks of their adoptive community into familiar spaces, creating an "autotopography" that links their daily practices and life experiences to a deep sense of place. In effect, they are writing their cultural stories on the land- or cityscape. This is a type of Teresa Mares and Devon Peña, "Environmental and Food Justice: Toward Local, Slow and Deep Food Systems," in cultural place-making and is commonly done in community gardens through the growth and celebration of culturally appropriate foods. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability, ed. Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 197-219.

When planning and (re)designing inclusive spaces, it is useful to understand both Doreen Massey's point that places and spaces are "constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time"Doreen Massey, "Places and Their Pasts," Julie Guthman, "'If They Only Knew': Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions," History Workshop Journal 39, no. 1 (1995): 182-92. and, related, Julie Guthman's question, which is not "Who is at the table?" but "Who is setting the table?" The Professional Geographer 60, no. 3 (2008): 387-97. The first principle of culturally inclusive practice is therefore recognition that "community" is a fluid notion, constantly in flux. It is critically important to draw from different cultures and subcultures and to include a variety of user-derived options. It is also important to focus efforts aimed at designing inclusive spaces on places that accommodate meaningful interaction among users, rather than simply on areas with the greatest number of people crossing paths.

But, Ali Madanipour cautions: "If public spaces are produced and managed by narrow interests, they are bound to become exclusive places." Therefore, the planning process must be inclusive. Planners are advised to heed Massey and forget about a monolithic "public" or the "average" user and instead begin the open space planning process with "deep knowledge" of the preferences of the actual communities who are likely to use those spaces. Yet, Yasminah Beebejaun reminds us that "complexities exist both within and between cultures. One issue for planning in culturally diverse contexts is that different cultures, subcultures, and generations have different assumptions and conventions about who uses public space..."Yasminah Beebeejaun, "The Participation Trap: The Limitations of Participation for Ethnic and Racial Groups," International Planning Studies 11, no. 1 (2006): 3-18.

Generating deep knowledge may involve ethnographic work to learn about the cultural backgrounds, perceptions, and needs of those in the local community regarding open space use.Ashley Graves Lanfer and Madeleine Taylor, Lownsbrough and Beunderman, Immigrant Engagement in Public Open Space: Strategies for the New Boston (Boston, MA: Barr Foundation, 2005). Equally important is an understanding of how users' past experiences in public spaces have shaped their use of or aspirations for the space now and in the future. Equally Spaced? Fred Kent and others believe the best ideas for the future come from the community, and they should be actively engaged in creating public spaces at every stage of the process.Fred Kent, "Place Making Around the World," Urban Land (August 2008): 58-65.

Following good design principles is fundamental in creating high-quality open space but not sufficient in ensuring inclusivity. A culturally inclusive space should offer amenities, rules, and landscapes that accommodate people of all ages and backgrounds. Designers can create spaces that resemble "home," such as the Ryerson University student-led designs based on Bollywood for the Gerrard India Bazaar, an ethnic business enclave in East Toronto.Kumar and Martin, "A Case for Culturally Responsive Urban Design." Officials can also assign culturally relevant names (toponyms) in order to promote a specific sense of identity.Two examples of toponyms are Mount McKinley in Alaska, renamed Denali, and Ayers Rock in Australia, now Uluru. For more on this application of toponyms, see Blake van Velden and Dory Reeves, "Intercultural Public Spaces" (presentation at the International Planning Conference, Christchurch, New Zealand, April 20-23, 2010). Inclusive spaces must provide appropriate seating (not the "standard" park bench) for individuals or the nuclear family, and also for extended families and groups of individuals simply hoping to socialize. Safety is a major barrier to park usage: people report feeling unsafe in spaces with overgrown vegetation, insufficient lighting, and high walls.

Design and utility blend easily. Sometimes simply better design and/or maintenance of existing facilities can resolve problems instead of building new facilities.SeeMargaret Arnold and Kimberly Shinew, "The Role of Gender, Race, and Income on Park Use Constraints,"
→Low et al., Journal of Park and Recreation Administration 16, no. 4 (1998): 39-56. Rethinking Urban Parks.
→Out and About in Penrith.
→ Equally Spaced? Therefore, the "use" stage of open space development must include proper maintenance and management. Additionally, open-space management and programming staff must adopt new, culturally competent approaches to interacting with diverse users. Hiring staff who resemble users or who speak the language of diverse users can go far in reducing perceptions of discrimination, which has been shown to be an important deterrent. Targeted marketing strategies could also be used to respond to the diverse needs of various groups in order to re-establish a park as a welcoming place for all.

Accessibility depends not only on the location of parks, but also on the built environment that surrounds them. Good street lighting, adequate sidewalks, street interconnectivity, local land use, infrastructure, and facility maintenance-the so-called "whole journey approach"-all influence when and how urban residents participate in outdoor recreation.→Emily Talen, Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighborhoods (Boston, MA: Architectural Press/Elsevier, 2008).
→Juan Sanchez, "An Assessment and Analysis of Issues and Patterns Associated with the Utilization of Open Spaces by Latino Immigrants in an Urban Neighborhood in Boston" (unpublished master's thesis, Tufts University, 2010). Numerous studies, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, have shown that there are fewer accessible parks and public spaces in minority and economically disadvantaged areas. In addition, the parks and spaces in these neighborhoods also tend to be of lower quality, making quantity and quality especially important in low-income communities. If the community is not helping "set the table" during the design process, spaces attempting to cater to everyone can tend to be impersonal.

Cultural competency: Toward culturally inclusive practice

What is the role of the planning and urban design professional in the shift toward interculturalism? It is important to note that the placemaking professions most closely associated with the policy, planning, design, and development of public and open spaces are not known for their tolerance of difference, diversity, or cultural heterogeneity. There is a solid case to be made that the training, recruitment, and retention of professionals who more fully reflect the makeup of our "cities of difference," as Ruth Fincher and Jane Jacobs called them in their 1998 book of the same title, would help speed the production, quality, and maintenance of culturally inclusive spaces, and, critically, the embedding and mainstreaming of culturally inclusive practice within those professions. Until that mainstreaming happens, current professionals must take added care to ensure they embark on culturally inclusive practices where difference and diversity are intentional and are represented throughout the design process.

"Here, I am adding another layer by arguing that the provision of high-quality, culturally inclusive spaces is essential in any society that 'embodies a dynamic and multi-faceted culture.'"

The move toward more just environments will require rethinking our paradigms, policies, and plans for public spaces. Elsewhere, I have taken a necessarily broad look at what these plans might look like through the lenses of space as Clare Rishbeth, "Ethnic minority groups and the design of public open space: an inclusive landscape?" security, resistance, and possibility. I argued that the sense of possibility and hope that was emerging in democratic and democratizing projects, spaces, and places around the world could serve as models to inform the creation of new spaces along lines more befitting the notion of just environments. Here, I am adding another layer by arguing that the provision of high-quality, culturally inclusive spaces is essential in any society that "embodies a dynamic and multi-faceted culture." Landscape Research 26, no. 4 (2001): 351-66.

However, we must not fall into a deterministic trap: we must recognize the limitations of design to solve deep social injustices. There are two aspects to this. First, as Phil Wood and Charles Landry point out:

The intercultural city depends on more than a design challenge. It derives from a central notion that people are developing a shared future whereby each individual feels they have something to contribute in shaping, making and co-creating a joint endeavor. A thousand tiny transformations will create an atmosphere in public space that feels open and where all feel safe and valued. Routledge, 2008 More Info →

Second, as Jason Byrne and Jennifer Wolch note: "The cultural landscape perspective shows us how landscapes can become racialized, shifting the scale of environmental injustice from the home, the factory, or the neighborhood to entire landscapes."Jason Byrne and Jennifer Wolch, "Nature, Race, and Parks: Past Research and Future Directions for Geographic Research." Progress in Human Geography 33 (2009): 743-65.

In addition, community-based planning processes surrounding open space may foster collaboration during planning sessions, but may not radically alter the lack of power of disadvantaged participants after the process has concluded. Similarly, there is a threat that residents engaged in planning for open space may create more exclusive, rather than more inclusive, spaces. Clearly, there is a role for the planner to advocate on behalf of inclusivity, recognizing that this may require different treatment of individuals and groups based on need.Beebeejaun, "The Participation Trap."

Let's start from a position of humility. Do we want to live in a world where we tolerate the tedium and misery of cities of in difference, or do we want to live in cities where we recognize, understand, and engage with difference, diversity, and cultural heterogeneity that could transform civic institutions, the public realm, its discourses, and city management practices? As Wood and Landry argue: "If we want the intercultural city, we cannot leave it to chance."

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Interculturally Inclusive Spaces as Just Environments

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"We are in a spatial moment." Around the world, there has never been a time when the role and possibilities of public space have been so prominent in the news and on social media as now. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to SlutWalks that originated in Toronto, new spatial imaginaries are opening up.

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Leading Urban Change with People Powered Public Spaces

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Leading Urban Change with People Powered Public Spaces

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The history, and new directions, of the placemaking movement

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‍ This article is adapted from an article originally written for The Journal of Public Space Vol 4 No 1 (2019).

Successful urban development is usually anchored around vital public spaces where people naturally want to gather: a crossroads or a main street, third place business, public market, waterfront wharf, library, rail station, campus, or civic square. These spaces become truly magnetic places as they provide purpose and meaning for broad groups of people they serve.

Public places are most dynamic - and most enduring - when they showcase and boost a community's unique public life, economy, and culture. This is especially true when the people using them are involved in their creation, continual re-creation, management, and governance. This is the essence of placemaking.

Great public spaces happen through community-driven placemaking and place-led governance. These great places are the foundation of great communities, which in turn are the building blocks of a prosperous, equitable, and resilient society.

Planning Out Of Place

For many decades, the city-building professions have generally overlooked the role of public space as the fulcrum of great cities. Instead, they've trained their focus narrowly on buildings, businesses, roadways, monolithic infrastructure, and rigid zoning. From traffic engineers to economic development specialists, these professions have retreated into silos that can blind them to the overall needs of cities and their citizens. Each specific field perpetuates myopic, unsustainable goals that add up to far less than the sum of their parts.

While progressive practitioners within each discipline have become more sensitive in recent years to the importance of places, people, and public life in fostering strong communities, they still usually speak to their own crowd, ignoring and dismissing the capacity of other disciplines, sectors, and communities themselves to collaborate in the process of making a better community.

As public spaces and a sense of place have fallen between the cracks of professions, placemaking and place governance have emerged out of those cracks to offer an innovative and more successful way to achieve collective impact in community building.

The Roots of the Placemaking Movement

at Placemaking Week Europe in Valencia.Sharing the timeline of the placemaking movement at the launch of PlacemakingX

Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte were among the first to call out the wrongheaded ideas that still dominate how we shape our cities. In 1956 Whyte, then Managing Editor of Fortune Magazine encouraged Jacobs to write " Downtown is For People" in the magazine, one of the first major critiques outlining the failure of mega-scaled urban renewal and redevelopment projects. Two years later Whyte sounded the alarm about the consequences of suburban sprawl in the introduction to his anthology TheExploding Metropolis. Both of them continued to document the ill effects of top-down decision-making on the quality of life in American communities and articulated the importance of small-scale planning that enhances human interaction. Together, they laid a strong foundation for what became the placemaking movement.

In the early 1970s, William Whyte's Street Life Project pioneered tools for observing and analyzing comfort and sociability in public spaces. Fred Kent joined the Street Life Project after previous work founding the Street Academy for Black and Latin Education in 1968 (with funding from Michael Bloomberg), organizing the first Earth Day in New York City in 1970, running Mayor John Lindsay's Council on the Environment, and co-founding the activist group Transportation Alternatives.

The Founding of Project for Public Spaces

In 1975, Fred founded Project for Public Spaces (PPS) as a non-profit to popularize Whyte's ideas and put his tools into practice around the country with a grant from the Rockefeller Family Foundation. For its first two decades, the group successfully focused on fixing dysfunctional public spaces and developing place management plans, reversing patterns of disinvestment and hostile architecture in American downtowns. Iconic early projects like Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, and New Haven's Chapel Street, helped set new standards for downtown public space design and management.

Building on the success of these approaches, PPS in the 1990s developed placemaking as a public space planning process to support communities getting it right from the start. PPS increasingly applied this process to projects like Detroit's Campus Martius and broader downtown, Houston's parks, and the transformation of New York City's streets.

Through its study of what makes great places, the organization discovered that many of the best public spaces have a self-organized and self-managed quality, as people gathering there unconsciously contribute to everyone else's experience. To achieve this level of interaction, of course, usually requires lots of carefully coordinated organizing and management behind the scenes - in other words, proactive placemaking.

The Pioneering of Placemaking

Around 1997 PPS started using " placemaking" to describe this new approach. Central to this phrase is that the planning of public spaces is not just about doing something for the people who will use it, but with, or by, those people. The primary principle involved is that " The Community is the Expert" on places in their own backyards. By 2003, PPS started thinking and talking about community-driven placemaking as a movement, which led to placemaking conferences in the Pacific Northwest to explore the possibilities. By 2006 the word was entering the language, and the idea of placemaking as a movement was starting to get traction globally.

Trying it "Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper"

The placemaking process always emphasized starting with short-term, low-cost experiments with design, programming, and management. In 2010 PPS launched a campaign around mainstreaming this focus, calling it " Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper." The campaign highlighted a broad range of such projects from the do-it-yourself street reclamations to interim development, complete with a database and strategies from around the world.

Launching a Movement

With this grassroots foundation and interest it became time to launch placemaking as a global movement. To highlight and support the movement PPS debuted the Placemaking Leadership Council at a Placemaking Leadership Forum in Detroit in 2013. To help build the movement for placemaking and public space in global development, we also kicked-off our Future of Places program with UN-Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation of Sweden the same year. This "quiet movement" soon began to take root. In 2016 the placemaking movement truly went global with the first International Placemaking Week in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and participation in the UN's Habitat 3 Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in Quito, Ecuador.

After " getting organized" in a series of international meetings and regional conferences, 2018 was the year that the placemaking movement started to self-organize, with global networks growing organically around regional leaders and locally defined sub-networks. The year kicked off with the first World Urban Forum (WUF9 in Kuala Lumpur) since the UN's Habitat 3 conference made public space and placemaking principles central to the goals of the New Urban Agenda. Placemaking was featured in WUF9 as an organizing principle for facilitating the New Urban Agenda's implementation.

The year continued with a number of dynamic Placemaking conferences across six continents:

Cities for All, European Placemaking Network, Stockholm

Crowdsourcing the City, New Cities Foundation, London

Place Week Victoria, Placemaking Leadership Council, Melbourne, Australia

Humanizing Cities Conference, Medina, Saudi Arabia

Placemaking, Strelka Institute, Moscow, Russia

WeMakeThe.City summits on Making Places and Co-Creating the City, Amsterdam

Walk Bike Places, New Orleans, Louisiana

Art of City Building, Placemaking Canada, Halifax, Canada

New Zealand Placemaking Week, Auckland, Palmerston North, and Christchurch, NZ

Nairobi Placemaking Week, Nairobi, Kenya

Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking, Brookings Launch Event, Washington, DC

Placemaking Week Israel, Jerusalem

The year culminated with Placemaking Latinoamerica in Mexico, and Placemaking Week Wuhan in China in partnership with UN-Habitat and the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP). The Wuhan conference welcomed placemaking experts from 41 countries and launched a Chinese placemaking network and a strong placemaking declaration, defining placemaking for the first time in a UN document.

Along with regional campaigns, placemaking continues to drive change on many scales, including city-wide campaigns in communities around the world, like Madrid, Spain; Brisbane, Australia; Monterrey, Mexico; Singapore; and Auckland, New Zealand.

The placemaking movement's founder Fred Kent also marked an important milestone in 2018, with a long-planned transition from the organization he founded and led as president for 43 years. Early PPS hires Stephen Davies and Kathy Madden, who are now recognized as co-founders, also stepped down. This leadership team left PPS in strong shape, securing a multi-million dollar grant from the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Foundation for PPS's role in a partnership they developed with the Brookings Institution and National Main Street, plus generous support for the transition and a beautiful new office space, with former long-time PPSer Phil Myrick taking over as CEO. They also published a second edition of How to Turn a Place Around, the book that inspired the placemaking movement almost 20 years earlier.

The founders now work to support the broader placemaking movement - and the network of placemaking organizations that are leading the movement - through the creation of The Placemaking Fund and its programs The Social Life Project, and PlacemakingX, a network to accelerate placemaking for global impact.

What's next for the placemaking movement?

With increasing capacity, interest, and support, the Project for Public Spaces and the many leaders and organizations making up the placemaking movement continue to grow stronger than ever. Just as it takes a place to create a community and a community to create a place, it takes a placemaking movement to support placemaking organizations, and many placemaking organizations to support a movement.

There is leadership and collaboration now from every corner of the globe. In 2019, locally organized placemaking conferences will occur on all six inhabited continents including Stockholm, Melbourne, London, Valencia, Lima, Perth, Kuala Lumpur, Halifax, Auckland, and a PPS Placemaking Week in Chattanooga, TN, USA. Each conference is part of regional and city-wide networks and campaigns for systemic change and on-the-ground impact. We look forward to further growing support for leaders and organizations around the world to keep building the potential, inclusiveness, and capacity of placemaking.

Placemaking Week Europe included a panel of regional network leaders.The launch of PlacemakingX

Theories, practices, and patterns of urbanization have been shifting greatly, from a focus on the housing unit, to the building and block, and most recently to the street and the public space. It is time now to reinvent the shaping of cities from the place up. The movement is demonstrating how to turn the shaping of cities upside-down to start with places, and in the process, invent crucial new scalable place-led models for governing, financing, and designing our cities. As leadership towards this goal emerges globally PlacemakingX will work together to highlight, connect, and support these people, their ideas, and their projects. It is now these leaders that are poised to further define, defend, and grow the cause of public spaces and placemaking.

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Leading Urban Change with People Powered Public Spaces

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‍ This article is adapted from an article originally written for The Journal of Public Space Vol 4 No 1 (2019). Successful urban development is usually anchored around vital public spaces where people naturally want to gather: a crossroads or a main street, third place business, public market, waterfront wharf, library, rail station, campus, or civic square.

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Resource Library - articles, videos, frameworks, and inspiration to Build for Belonging

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"a site activation tool that harnesses the power of design to catalyze the magic that emerges when people and programs come together in public space"

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The Pop-Up Village harnesses the power of design to catalyze the magic that emerges when people and programs come together in public space.

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"A sensitive update to a historic public square delivers on community priorities of cultural heritage, flexibility, and safety."

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For over two centuries, Moore Square has persisted as an urban green space of tree canopy and turf providing a mix of shady and sunny places to gather and recreate, to see and be seen. Like all great public squares, the 4.5 acre park has evolved over time to fulfill the changing needs of the City of Raleigh. Its character of continuity lies in its persistent use as a public space.

In 1792, the same year Raleigh was founded as North Carolina's capital city, the General Assembly chose Senator William Christmas, a surveyor, to envision the lots and streets of the new capital. Christmas laid out 400 acres of city fabric through 1,000 acres of woodland, in a geometric grid which emulated the plan of Philadelphia. Moore Square, along with Nash Square and Capitol Square, is one of three remaining squares originally planned by Christmas and, as such, it is a significant example of early American town planning.

While an enduring greensward, Moore Square's landscape forms, spaces and surfaces have evolved over time. This evolution has occurred in response to changes in the character and use of the urban context-the surrounding blocks and buildings. As the area evolved from a residential to a commercial district, from an agricultural trading center to a vital business and commercial district including Raleigh's African American main street during the Jim Crow era, the Square transformed the way vernacular landscapes do-incrementally, gradually, and often through a series of ad hoc measures.

In recent years, frequent large scale events and daily use have taken their toll on the parks vegetation, soils and paving. This pressure, combined with the planned development in the surrounding neighborhood, has prompted the City to renovate the square to meet the changing needs of its users. Sasaki has worked with the City, public stakeholders and a team of technical experts to develop a consensus-driven plan for the square.

The proposed design protects and strengthens the square's historic configuration: a frame of large shade trees enclosing an open, sunny central space. At the street edge, where users requested greater connectivity to the adjacent blocks, the design features a "dignified frame" of widened sidewalks, granite seat walls, and spacious entry plazas. On-street parking has been removed along the square's southern edge to create a wide linear plaza that will host future farmers markets and other community events. Bump-outs have been added at all crosswalks to make pedestrian access to the square safer.

The grand oak trees surrounding the square, some of which are over 200 years old, are the park's defining feature. The design protects the trees by limiting foot traffic within their critical root zones. This achieved through judicious placement of pedestrian paths, and a combination of low rails and groundcover planting to dissuade people from leaving the paths. Where gaps in the tree perimeter exist, or will likely develop in the next 30 years, new trees will be planted to ensure the frame remains intact.

In the interior of the square, circulation follows an historic X pattern, with a new perimeter path creating a promenade encircling the central lawn. The lawn has been engineered to meet the community's demand for flexible open space, as well occasional need for larger gatherings. The entire lawn has a gentle pitch from northwest to southeast to create an amphitheater effect. Three small gathering spaces, nicknamed "Grove Rooms," are tucked within the tree frame. These feature stone seating elements designed by artist Brad Goldberg.

The southeast corner of the square is home to a constellation of public amenities anchored by a flexible civic plaza. The plaza features an interactive fountain which faces west to capture afternoon sunlight. The plaza also includes flexible seating and shade trees to address the neighborhood's need for flexible outdoor social spaces. The sense of social space is reinforced by an open, airy trellis which frames the plaza's southern edge. A small pavilion at the center of the trellis contains a café, public restrooms and storage. Inspired by the vernacular architecture of the region, the pavilion façade foregrounds three native materials: stone, wood and metal. Lastly, the square includes an accessible play area designed to evoke the materials and topography of the broader piedmont region.

For more information contact Zachary Chrisco.

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For over two centuries, Moore Square has persisted as an urban green space of tree canopy and turf providing a mix of shady and sunny places to gather and recreate, to see and be seen. Like all great public squares, the 4.5 acre park has evolved over time to fulfill the changing needs of the City of Raleigh.

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A strategic action playbook from the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking

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Learn about models where physical spaces were built with the intention to foster understanding and positive relationships between people from different racial and cultural backgrounds.

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Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking

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Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking

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Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking

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The Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking aims to inspire public, private, and civic sector leaders to make transformative place investments that generate widespread social and economic benefits.

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https://www.pps.org/

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"Using Design to Activate Spaces and Bring People Together"

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Wikiblock : an open-source design library for building better blocks.

This toolkit includes designs for benches, chairs, planters, stages, bus stops, beer garden fences, and kiosks. Design files can be downloaded for free and a CNC router can cut them out of a sheet of plywood. Most products can then be assembled without glue or nails, and used instantly to make a block better. Learn more here .

"We're trying to lower the barrier to entry on fabrication," says Jason Roberts , founder of the Better Block. "We're realizing the potential for the everyday man and every woman. Before, it required an architect, a carpenter, renderings, and contractors. At this point, you no longer need all that. You just need your local makerspace."

In 2016, the Wikiblock library launched with 30 products, and has continued to grow as community partners and creators from all around the world have provided input. Elements of the Wikiblock library were first tested at the Cuyahoga Falls Better Block in Ohio in partnership with Brian Peters' College of Architecture and Environmental Design class at Kent State University. Students Tyler Lunevich, Kelsey Atchison, Ethan, Rothermel, Danielle Jones, Benjamin, Schanfish, and Zachary Forney were partnered with local vendors to create kiosks for the two-day event-elevating the idea of a booth from a tent to a semi-permanent/moveable structure.

Wikiblock has helped us to elevate our design and create elements that last longer than the typical two-day demonstration. The Wikiblock elements created during the Better Block process stay behind in the community to be continually used. This was the case when Wikiblock elements were introduced during Kenmore's Better Block. The pieces were later repurposed for ongoing Busk Until Dusk events to provide continued activations on Kenmore Boulevard in Arkon, Ohio.

" Wikiblock offers a fun, fast, effective path to get people involved in shaping their community and create spaces where people can connect with their city and each other."

- Benjamin de la Peña, Knight Foundation Director for Community and National Strategy

From print-outs to popping the furniture together.

Wikiblock elements can be downloaded from our library for free, taken to a local maker space (often found at colleges, libraries, or in business districts), and cut with a matter of hours for rapid urbanization projects, community events, small business use, and even for personal homes and gardens.

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Gather the materials listed in download

Use a Maker Space to cut designs

Assemble design with hands and a mallet

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Wikiblock : an open-source design library for building better blocks. This toolkit includes designs for benches, chairs, planters, stages, bus stops, beer garden fences, and kiosks. Design files can be downloaded for free and a CNC router can cut them out of a sheet of plywood.

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Creating healthy, inclusive, and beloved communities

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PlacemakingX - A Network to Accelerate Placemaking for Global Impact

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A global network of leaders who together will accelerate placemaking as a way to create healthy, inclusive, and beloved communities. To make the spaces we live into places we love.

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neighborproject.org