Placemaking Week

Grassroots organizations led by community residents are often those best positioned to elevate and amplify the history, culture and identity of neighborhoods through inclusive placemaking projects. However, these are often the same organizations that face the highest barriers to access funding or to build the necessary capacity to execute these projects. Sometimes, grassroots organizations are questioned about their capacity to receive grant funding. Others may have a clear vision, but need help planning and executing a project. They may also face barriers to access public sector processes and resources. This panel presentation will discuss how philanthropy and nonprofit intermediaries can work together to support these resident-led, grassroots organizations to implement inclusive placemaking projects that elevate the culture and identity of their community, drawing lessons from Kresge Innovative Projects: Detroit (KIP:D).

See how easy it is to transform a space with a few pieces of plywood, a couple mallets, and a little muscle.

Hear from Better Block Foundation’s founding director Jason Roberts as he leads you through the setup/teardown and discusses the lessons he’s learned in the past 10 years of placemaking all around the world. This workshop will start with a presentation at the Edney, followed by a visit out to Miller Park to see some of the features of the container in action.

The Better Block in a Box is a shipping container that contains all the elements you need for a successful placemaking event (cafe sets, long tables, hammocks, string lights, astroturf, and kids’ toys). Once you pull the elements out, the box itself turns into a coffeeshop, info kiosk, or whatever you may need. After your event is over, you pack it all up, shut the doors, and ship it off.

Throughout the week, Jason will lead a few mini workshops where participants can participate in the set up and tear down of the elements in the box - look for those each morning and afternoon on Sched, and sign up!

It’s no surprise that Tactical Urbanism, or Quick-Build projects, are an effective placemaking tool. However, how can we begin to codify a sanctioned process so that placemaking isn’t a one-off effort, but rather an accepted, if not routine way of delivering cities with a stronger sense of place attachment? This presentation will share examples of sanctioned programs implemented in Fayetteville, AR, Burlington, VT, and Miami-Dade County, FL that cover a wide array of both successful and unsuccessful placemaking projects. The panel will also share their success scaling such initiatives, encouraging a future for how we-- cities and citizens-- might collectively institutionalize the iterative placemaking methodology.

ArtUp uses arts and culture as a tool for fostering robust equitable placemaking through economic development, community revitalization, and entrepreneurship. ArtUp challenges the status quo of traditional arts-based community engagement, in which the goal is simply to expose people in underserved neighborhoods to the arts from more privileged areas of a community. Instead, ArtUp tackles obstacles common in many cities, such as unemployment, crime, disengaged residents, and neighborhood blight through innovative and unexpected uses of arts and culture.  At ArtUp, we make it our business to spur resident-centered, neighborhood-driven, arts- and culture-based community development. We break down barriers. We nurture ideas. We launch creative entrepreneurs. We ArtUp. Are you looking for equitable and inclusive models of placemaking? Are you seeking models that incorporate arts and culture into placemaking? This session is for you.  In this session you will learn the 10 Principles of Equitable Placemaking used by the award winning project, ArtUp, based in Memphis, Tennessee.  These ten lessons are for all stakeholders in that process -- from residents to artists and arts organizations, and from architects and consultants and government officials to funders. Each principle here is also a hard-won lesson, but each is absolutely essential to the success of the work and to maintaining an ethical approach along the way. ArtUp Founder Linda Steele will share these 10 Priniciples and the lessons behind each. She will dive into specific funding strategies, budgets, and community engagement so you will leave with a plan on how to lead your own equitable placemaking project at home.

This hybrid panel-discussion-activity session will explore how placemaking can drive equity within institutions, and will invite practitioners to assess their processes and how they can create work that impresses funders while supporting current residents of a place. We’ll showcase examples of our work done in partnership with local government, corporate real estate, and private foundations, examining how this work opened up conversations about equity within these institutions, driving policy change. Using lessons from our experience with the Civic Center Commons (SF Government), [freespace] and the Hall (private real estate), and 500 Plates (Knight Foundation), we’ll share how information collected at the street level was able to trickle upward and influence institutional change. Embedded in this is a conversation about how we, funded by institutions, and often coming into a community as outsiders - socially, racially, economically, and culturally - can be allies to the people in communities in which we work. How can we shift our projects and outcomes when the needs of the community differ from an original proposal? We will facilitate an honest discussion about bringing integrity and authenticity to our work, asking participants to contextualize their place when they find themselves as an outsider. We will engage in small group discussions about the successes and failures of activations, examining when the lasting impact of an initiative leads to more social and cultural equity, and when the absence of follow-through can have the opposite effect. We’ll also do an interactive exercise on listening and trust building, focusing on social equity within activations. We’ll then walk outside to conduct quickfire interviews with people on the street, experiencing ourselves as outsiders in a new place. We’ll collectively create a list of best practices for engagement based on our experience.

Many communities today struggle with building public places that are welcoming and open to all. Often spaces are dominated by underserved groups such as individuals experiencing homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and public space managers seek ways to dilute their presence, while municipalities spend millions on ineffective outreach and services for vulnerable populations. What if we can transform public space into the nexus where people in need and the programs that are meant to serve them come together? This panel offers an unusual mix of discipline diversity, including an urban planner working in public space and a psychiatric social worker working with vulnerable populations. We also provide a range of perspectives from academic to professional practice. Our panel content directly addresses issues of inclusion and representation in public spaces, and will offer experiences from a variety of places.

Redevelopment can transform a underutilized suburban office area into a vibrant mixed-use district, promoting walkability, incorporating sustainable features and connecting to existing neighborhoods to establish a sense of urban energy and provide amenities for all. Using Hill Center in Brentwood, TN as a case study, we will examine the tenets of creating an "urban suburban" environment and establishing a paradigm shift for suburban communities. We will discuss and explore the horizontal and vertical integration of architecture and landscape in creating a place in a discussion with an architecture and landscape design team.

The topic of the session is the impact that public space has on the surrounding economies and discuss methods to increase the inclusive economic impact. The specific learning objectives of this panel include: How can local economies be engaged in the process, design, programming, and governance of open space? Can we create intentional connections to small business owners in our public space? During this panel, panelists will answer questions that allow them for share their expertise and then time will be provided for attendees to brainstorm specific linkages between placemaking projects and their local economies and share out.

Cost: $20

Sign up here to join a 3-hour hands-on training on placemaking and flexible street design!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/streets-as-places-crash-course-with-mobycon-and-project-for-public-spaces-tickets-68368212163

A hands-on training packed with actionable strategies to transform your streets into places and to reclaim their rightful place as shared front yards in the public realm. The curriculum is jointly created by the Streets and Transportation team at Project for Public Spaces, and the renowned Dutch consulting firm – Mobycon.
This interactive session aims to build a stronger understanding of transportation and its role in creating (or disrupting) community. We will begin with an introduction of core ‘Streets as Places’ principles and move into implementation tactics, followed by an exercise to apply some of the tactics shared. 

The training materials will focus on:
- Transportation infrastructure and its role in enabling livability and placemaking
- PPS's new (in the works) humanizing streets by design guidelines
- A focus on the most vulnerable road users - children and their mobility in the built environment
- Placemaking process and starting with the community
- Designing for flexibility and life in the streets - Dutch tactics translated for global inspiration
- On the ground tools - Placemaking tactics, Place and flow analysis of streets
- Co-creative approach to design and governance of streets