Inspiration

Placemaking

A Playbook for Inclusive Placemaking: Community Process

By Katherine Peinhardt, Nate Storring, Project for Public Spaces

This article is the first in a four-part series on equity in public spaces. Read part two, which focuses on programming, and part three, which focuses on design. When New York’s High Line opened in 2009, it was hailed as both a landmark in landscape architecture and a grassroots success story. The project began in 1999, when two strangers sitting next to one another at a community meeting, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, began lamenting the planned destruction of a privately-owned elevated railway in Manhattan. They mounted a successful five-year campaign to save it, and then started the design competition that would later transform it into one of the country's most visited parks. Crowds on the High Line. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons But the story doesn’t end there. In the decade since it opened, prices in the neighborhood around the High Line have soared. “Starchitect” buildings sprung up along the disused rail tracks, and most recently, its northern...

  • July 31, 2019
Rockaway Youth Task Force

5 Communities Building Resilience to Thrive in an Uncertain Future

By Aditi Malhotra, Shareable

In the fall of 2012, when hurricane Sandy made landfall in the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, New York, the Rockaway Youth Task Force (RYTF) was ready to lead rescue and recovery efforts. Remarkably, the volunteer group was less than a year old. But members of this youth-led task force were reportedly among the most efficient responders to the crisis that followed Sandy. The group was ready because earlier that year, Milan Taylor, the 21-year-old founder of RYTF, and friends, started mobilizing young people in Rockaway’s neighborhoods to get them more involved in local politics and civic life. Taylor had been appointed to a community board in 2010 and the lack of representation of people his age unsettled him. There were many problems such as inequity in schools, discriminatory practices in the criminal justice system, and low voter turnout in Rockaway that needed young people to engage and lead solutions, Taylor said. Far Rockaway in...

  • July 25, 2019
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bakery

Are Community Land Trusts a Way Out of the System?

By Hazel Sheffield, Red Pepper

This autumn, builders will start work on Oakfield Road in Anfield. Many houses in this part of Liverpool have remained empty since the government’s failed ‘housing market renewal’ policy shipped people out, then stalled in 2008. Seven years ago, a group of residents formed a community land trust to bring nine terraces on Oakfield Road into community ownership. Now, instead of being demolished, they have been reimagined as cosy, energy-efficient homes, with space for local businesses, winter gardens, a market and a cafe.

  • November 14, 2019
resilient communities

Gathering in Groups as Society Falls Apart

By Vicki Robin, Jem Bendell blog

“Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, it involves other people.” I used that line in lectures on frugal living when talking of the loneliness of consumerism and the benefits of sharing resources. We idealize the good old days of people helping people out. But can we live them, given who we have become?

  • November 14, 2019
Lyla June

Kelp Gardens, Piñon Forests

By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project

It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.

  • November 13, 2019
Tooting Twirl

The Tale of the Tooting Bus Turning Circle

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

This chapter is about how we can start asking different questions – specifically questions that begin with ‘What if . . .’ and that help us unlock the imagination in service to the big challenges we face. It’s about more than the question per se, however.

  • November 13, 2019
Native American Heritage Month

Beyond November, Indigenous Communities Honor Culture and Heritage Year-Round

By Debra Utacia Krol, YES! magazine

“[Native American Heritage Month] allows for us to remind [non-Natives] that we are still here, living here, despite their attempts to make us like them,” says Redner, the Phoenix Indian Center CEO. “We will continue to survive, but it’s our time to thrive now; it’s time for the seventh generation to use our knowledge.”

  • November 12, 2019
Stone Steps Farm

Fine Fleece at Stone Steps Farm

By Amanda Fisk, Fibershed

The small goats and sheep are very easy on the land. Stone Steps Farm is participating in Fibershed’s soil sampling protocol, and the family hopes to implement grazing practices that sequester carbon and increase soil organic matter. They also aim to decrease wildfire risk by using their goats to clear brush that provides a fuel ladder, and by using their sheep to keep grasses down during fire season.

  • November 11, 2019
silvopasture

Silvopasture: The Benefits of Integrating Livestock and trees

By Ben Raskin, Sustainable Food Trust

We are now starting to learn from other countries – and from an increasing body of research – the numerous benefits of silvopastoral systems. There is also an urgency that climate change brings for an uptake of these systems. Project Drawdown, a climate mitigation project, identified silvopasture as one of the top ten climate solutions.

  • November 8, 2019
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