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Reparations Can Start with Urbanism: "Municipal placemaking has long been an active effort to displace and erase Black people," writes anthropologist-planner and Walk/Bike/Places plenary panelist Dr. Destiny Thomas (StreetsBlog USA). The urbanist fields of architecture, city planning, transportation planning, and placemaking have all played a role in upholding the legacies of slavery in the United States. But as Thomas argues in this article, every urbanist organization also has the power right now to make "a unique, proportional and contextually appropriate contribution" to reparations. She offers 14 ideas of where to start.
For more historic background on the case for reparations, Julian Agyeman offers an overview of the racist policies of segregation and disinvestment in Minneapolis, MN, that set the stage for the police killing of George Floyd and the recent uprisings around the country (The Conversation).
A Walk/Bike/Places to Remember: Our conference next week comes at an unprecedented time for the field of active transportation. On one hand, the pandemic has unleashed an "open season" of reckless driving, with traffic fatalities surging (Smart Cities Dive).
On the other, it has also prompted an overdue reconsideration of the way we allocate street space—but often in a way that has mirrored pre-existing inequities. What if this same urge could become part of the call for reparations, dedicating more public space to high-quality buses routes (TheCityFix), for example, or demolishing and repurposing highways that destroyed and divided Black neighborhoods (Pew)?
Investing in Public Spaces for Recovery: This week, representatives from the JPB Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation made the case for why philantropic organizations interested in supporting a safe recovery from COVID-19 should invest in public space (The Chronicle of Philanthropy).
If you care about political and social polarization, public health, inclusive economic development and opportunity, or democratic participation, they argue, you should care about public space, too.
Back to School? Teachers unions in the U.S. are considering going on strike, caught between inadequate precautions against COVID-19 in schools and the prospect of another round of ineffective virtual classes (New York Times).
But as New York Magazine reports, a movement is gaining momentum to reopen schools outdoors (New York Magazine). Taking inspiration from the city's restaurants reopening on city streets, New York City is considering using schoolyards and adjacent streets to hold classes outside, and a handful of schools and school districts around the country are considering similar plans.
The logistics of outdoor learning may not be simple, and they will only get worse by wintertime, but the alternative is an impossible standoff between a spike in coronavirus deaths and stunted learning outcomes for an entire generation of students.
How Public Spaces Become Public: While parks are often celebrated as places for "everyone," in colonial societies they almost always required the direct or indirect displacement of Indigenous peoples and others in order to carve them out as spaces for leisure (The Tyee).
Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC, offers a particularly clear example, where two Indigenous villages, X̱wáýx̱way (Whoi Whoi) and Chaythoos, as well as other working class people, were removed to create a place of respite for white settlers. Today, this history continues to play out partly in what officials and residents consider inappropriate uses for the park—particularly living.
Placemaking Playbook: Finally, here's a roundup of 12 recent innovative placemaking ideas and projects making headlines:
- A design element that can be both an accessibility feature and hostile architecture (Azure)
- The pandemic boom in labyrinths (CityLab)
- The saddest pandemic dining experience in America (Curbed)
- An ill-advised trip to Disney World (The Atlantic)
- A low-traffic neighborhood plan in London, UK (CityLab)
- The 16-year fight to win landmark status for a Black abolitionist's home in Brooklyn, NY (CityLab)
- A new national government organization for biking and walking in Britain (CityLab)
- A demographic study of community planning groups in San Diego, CA—spoiler: they're richer, whiter, and older than the general public (Voice of San Diego)
- A story of how climate change is changing plant life in New York City (New York Times)
- A park project to reconnect a neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN, to the Mississippi River (Next City)
- The potential of Accessory Commercial Units to bring businesses back to residential neighborhoods (Fast Company)
- A closer look at racist enforcement of public drinking laws in New York, NY (Gothamist)
- Elon Musk's increasingly disappointing "public transit" experiment (Curbed)
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