A Playbook for Inclusive Placemaking: Community Process
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.
Placemaking
How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Preface to the Chinese edition
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.
A Revolution on the Streets of India
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.
The Softening of Cities
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.
Bringing Wendell Berry (and Business) to Sterling
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.
Community-Led Solutions in Housing Crisis
Eugene is charting a new path for community outreach, using its downtown areas as places to address housing challenges, head-on.
Resilience Roundup: Public Spaces Fighting Climate Change
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.
How London is Setting a New Standard for Market Cities
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.
Helen Marriage on The Sultan’s Elephant and Large Acts of Public Imagination
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.
Losing (Some of) the Local Commons
Like Wendell Berry, Bollier sees commons-thinking as a push-back against “inevitability,” and as an invitation to hold fast to our ability, as human beings, to imagine an alternative to simple acceptance when we see, as he said in Salina, something “rooted in an ecosystem is redefined as a market commodity.”
A Rising Tide of Climate Resilience
Climate challenges do not affect all people equally. House by house, block by block, there are huge differences in vulnerability based on geography, health status, income level and other factors. Such differences are not always visible to decision-makers. F
Hilary O’Shaughnessy on the Playable City
For us a Playable City is specifically a human-led response to challenges for cities that are using technology in a way that connects people to each other.