The Placemaking Round-Up
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
The Biweekly Bazaar
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
This year will be one of those that sticks in our collective memory as a watershed moment. In the United States over 300,000 people died this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Renewed calls for racial justice emerged after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and more people and organizations seem to be listening this time, even if not nearly enough has been done yet.
And the places we share have also undergone a transformation, as cities have admitted that their streets have more flexibility than they have allowed in the past, and organizations have done the same with their remote working policies, too. Many have speculated that these trends could lead to a whole new way of organizing our cities—a "15-minute city" where most of what we need is located a short walk from our homes.
In 2020, Project for Public Spaces has aimed to contribute to these important debates through our projects, events, trainings, and of course, our blog. Below we offer you a tour of our 10 most popular articles of 2020, which explore what this watershed year has meant for public space and placemaking.
By Phil Myrick • May 16, 2020
This first article was written at a turning point for the pandemic here in the United States. Lockdown orders were being lifted, and everyone was wondering what the "new normal" was going to look like. Only a handful of cities were experimenting with expanding outdoor dining and opening streets to pedestrians and cyclists, and research about the difference in transmission between indoors and outdoors still was not being heeded.
In this article, our former CEO Phil Myrick seized this moment to make a call to action for cities to think bigger about what could happen in public spaces to support a safe and equitable recovery and to work more directly with communities that had been hit worst by the pandemic. Read more.
BONUS: Another popular article on this topic was our very early advice to public space managers about how they could help fight COVID-19. Thankfully, this article reads more like a dated time capsule of our limited understanding of the virus, and we now know that outdoor public spaces pose a much smaller threat than shared indoor spaces. Read more.
By Nate Storring • June 12, 2020
Like many nonprofits, this year Project for Public Spaces saw a booming demand for webinars, and some of our most popular articles this year summarized the big ideas that emerged from those presentations and panel discussions.
Just days after the police killing of George Floyd that sparked protests for racial justice across the country, Project for Public Spaces convened a panel of leaders in equitable development to discuss the barriers that face communities of color in retail, real estate, and public space—which have only been magnified by the pandemic—and how to begin breaking them down. Read more.
An Interview with Warren Logan, City of Oakland • June 26, 2020
In the middle of the summer, some mobility equity advocates were rightly asking tough questions about how departments of transportation were responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Why were they prioritizing recreation and restaurants over the needs of Black and brown communities that had felt the worst effects of the virus and its economic destruction?
In response to this question, we were inspired by the work of Warren Logan, Policy Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations for the City of Oakland, California. While early headlines about their Slow Streets initiative focused on the scale of their effort, we sat down with Logan to talk about their approach to equity in the process. Read more.
January 31, 2020
It’s eerie to see an article on this list from "the Before Times,” but our guide to integrating road diets and placemaking still managed to be one of our most popular articles of the year. And as it turned out, it ended up being quite prescient for our current need to move life outdoors.
As our program staff often remind me, every placemaking project is also a transportation project. Adjacent streets and how people access a public space are vital to its success. That's why we created "A Placemaker’s Primer on Road Diets," an accessible walkthrough for non-experts on how to make the case for traffic calming and repurposing road space, including 10 case studies of successful rightsizing projects around the United States. Read more.
(You can also see us toying with our then-unannounced rebranding in some of the illustrations.)
November 16, 2020
Last month, we announced a new brand and a new direction for Project for Public Spaces. In order to ensure that more people have access to the widespread benefits of using, stewarding, and shaping public space, we decided to shift our focus to develop corporate social responsibility partnerships that offer more communities that chance opportunity.
To mark this shift, we also unveiled our new brand, which was created with the help of Big Duck and Bruce Mau Design. Read more.
By Mary Elbech, Mobycon • August 21, 2020
Another first for Project for Public Spaces this year was Reimagining Streets as Places training, our first foray into publicly available online trainings which attracted over 100 participants from around the world.
We were excited to partner with the Dutch-Canadian mobility firm Mobycon on designing and delivering this training, and in this guest post, Mobycon Integrated Mobility Consultant Mary Elbech provides an overview of their approach and how it contributes to successful placemaking. Read more.
By Nate Storring • April 24, 2020
Planetizen described homelessness as the "crisis within the crisis" of the pandemic, and we couldn't agree more. We also firmly believe that public space managers can play a role in connecting people experiencing homelessness with the resources they need, rather than displacing them from the places they spend time everyday.
In this article, we summarized the takeaways from our two-part webinar series on the subject, "When “Stay at Home” Isn’t an Option: Public Spaces and Homelessness During COVID-19." Read more.
BONUS: As part of our partnership with the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Institution, Elena Madison, our Director of Projects, also took a popular deep dive into how our clients at Central Atlanta Progress have collaborated with HOPE Atlanta to help connect people in Woodruff Park with housing and social services. Read more.
By KangJae “Jerry” Lee, PhD, NC State University • January 27, 2020
Like many historically white-led organizations, we have also spent time this year reflecting on our history and practices, and educating ourselves about how to make our work more equitable.
When we were putting together our Playbook for Inclusive Placemaking, our most popular article of 2019, we found the research of KangJae "Jerry" Lee invaluable for understanding the ways that decision-making, design, programming, and management can make public spaces into "white spaces," even unintentionally. In this article, Lee expands upon his research and the history of racialized public spaces. Read more.
By Kelly Verel • October 16, 2020
While the pandemic drastically changed how we work, our efforts to kickstart citywide market strategies in Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Toronto continued to completion. In the process, the pandemic revealed both how invaluable markets can be to our resilience and how vulnerable they are due to poor public policy.
In this article, our Co-Executive Director of Programs Kelly Verel synthesizes some of the key insights that emerged from our research in this unprecedented time. Read more.
BONUS: As part of the Market Cities Initiative, we have also been working with HealthBridge Foundation of Canada and Slow Food International to refine these seven principles for becoming a Market City, which also made a splash on our blog this year. Read more.
Interview with Zheng Yue, Wuhan Planning & Design Institute • May 29, 2020
When we first heard that a novel coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan, China, it hit close to home for us. In 2018, Project for Public Spaces worked with UN-Habitat, Isocarp, the Wuhan Planning & Design Institute, and several local partners to host a regional Placemaking Week in Wuhan, China, which resulted in the launch of a nationwide Chinese placemaking network.
In this article, Ethan Kent, one of the organizers of the conference, interviewed Zheng Yue (郑玥) of the Wuhan Planning & Design Institute, about her experience in the city, from lockdown to recovery. Read more.
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