Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s worth remembering how acts of commoning can have lasting consequences, including legacies that we may not even remember. Bernard Marszalek, who has lived in Berkeley, California, since the 1980s, brought to my attention the near-forgotten history of Ohlone Park in his city. The park is a fairly large patch of greenery that a forgotten corps of enterprising commoners in effect gifted to later generations.
Every placemaking project is also a transportation project. Whether you’re improving a park, a plaza, a waterfront, or a public building, odds are that there is a street on one or more sides of your site—and that street can make or break your placemaking ambitions.
Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher from the 20th century, argues that if ideas or values are not physically implemented in space, they become mere fantasies. As such, if degrowth wishes to prevail, it has to leave its mark on space, just as consumerism has successfully done. This article considers ideas of creating space and human-nature connectedness, which in combination, seem to be a perfect match in forming a strategy for degrowth.
A public space is only as community-driven as its process. It follows that public spaces can only exist for everyone if the conversations in which they are envisioned include everyone.
This book is not about pre-cooked solutions. It’s about building on what has already been done, in our various social and cultural histories, and on what’s being done, right now, in diverse contexts around the world.
Raahgiri Day is one of the world’s most recognizable open streets events—a weekly event in which residents of Delhi, India reclaim their streets from cars.
Recently, cities have been rethinking their hard alleys. Montreal has an official Ruelle Verte (“Green Alley”) program encompassing more than 250 back routes that have been turned into gardens, play spaces, and neighborhood gathering spots.
Well, however one construes it, keeping in mind that rebuilding a sense of place will probably also mean rebuilding a sense of mutual obligation between different types of places is an important lesson, I think.
Eugene is charting a new path for community outreach, using its downtown areas as places to address housing challenges, head-on.
Public spaces are where physical and social resilience meet. Looking past levees and seawalls, and even beyond nature-based solutions to climate risks, public space designers and managers have to get people into the picture as we all come to terms with the urban impacts of climate change.
Why are cities like Barcelona and London investing in markets as critical infrastructure? Because they recognize their ability to strengthen local economies, promote physical health and sustainability, and foster deep social connections in the communities they serve.
We took everybody on a journey that said the arts too have their place in the life of a city, and that the city doesn’t just have to be about shopping and traffic, that it’s as important for people collectively to share these moments, moments like this, as it is for them to share or to experience moments in their own life.
