Last Chance to Apply for the Great Places Awards | Placemaking Weekly

Posted January 31, 2021 - 09:25

This newsletter from the Project for Public Spaces connects people who share a passion for public spaces to ideas and issues, news, quotes, places, and events from the placemaking movement.

Last Chance to Apply to the Great Places Awards

This Friday, February 5, is your last chance to apply for the Great Places Awards, co-presented by the Environmental Design Research Association and Project for Public Spaces. Award categories include Place Design, Place Planning, Place Research, Place Book, and Place Art. Apply now.

More Events & Opportunities

Feb 4, 2021 • Littering Prevention Through Placemaking, BG Be Active

Feb 10, 2021 • How to Bring Democratic Decision-Making to Authentic Community Engagement, Next City

Mar. 12, 2021 • Request for Applications: Rural Design Workshops & Learning Cohorts, Citizens' Institute on Rural Design

New • Job: Chief Executive Officer, Baltimore Public Market Corporation

New • Tool: Coexistence in Public Space: Engagement Tools for Creating Shared Spaces in Places with Homelessness, SPUR

New • Tool: Enabling Better Places: A Handbook for Improved Neighborhoods, AARP Livable Communities

New • Tool: The Urban Play Framework: An Approach for Understanding the Play Experience in Cities, Brookings Institution

New • Online Resource: Winter Cities Toolkit, 8 80 Cities

From the Blog

Our Top 10 Articles of 2020
December 17, 2020 • by Nate Storring

Winter Placemaking During a Pandemic: Six Ideas from Around Canada
December 11, 2020 • by Alyson Dobrota & Gail Armour

The Power of Placemaking through Corporate Social Responsibility
November 16, 2020

Public Space News

The Prize for Cities. DistritoTec, an innovation district in Monterrey, Mexico, pictured above, is a finalist in the World Resource Institute Ross Center's Prize for Cities. Project for Public Spaces has had the pleasure of supporting Distritotec since 2017 through a district-wide placemaking vision, training, and capacity building. (WRI Ross Center)

Can Vision Zero Go National? A coalition of 74 street safety groups are demanding that President Biden commit to a federal Vision Zero plan. (StreetsBlog NYC)

The Architecture of Covid Vaccine Distribution. Converted bus depots, sports arenas, convention centers, ice rinks, cathedrals, velodromes, stadiums, parking lots, deserted shopping malls—these are the kinds of trusted everyday places that are being converted into sites to deliver the coronavirus vaccines. (CityLab)

The Loss of Our Storefront Social Fabric. Local restaurants can serve as a vital “third place” for people to gather, away from their homes and workplaces. As these spots have closed throughout the pandemic, communities have felt that loss acutely. (The Counter)

A Preview of Climate Change in Places without Environmental Justice. Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-Black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. (Boston Review)

Placemaking Playbook

Here is a roundup of 10 inspiring placemaking ideas from the week:

The bike shop on wheels traveling the Navajo Nation (Outside)
Nine takeaways from a holiday survey of small business owners and Main Street programs (Main Street America)
Seven resources for equitably expanding parks infrastructure (Shepherd Express)
Doughnut economics: Amsterdam's radical approach to equity and sustainability (Time)
A linear park in Turin that started as a temporary reuse of a dead streetcar line (CityLab)
The climate adaptations keeping Africa's largest city afloat (BBC)
A way to think more broadly about human-centered design (Next City)
A multipurpose outdoor venue in Bogotá made of scaffolding (Dezeen)
The thousands of "house floats" keeping Mardi Gras alive in New Orleans (Associated Press)
An intersectional approach to park planning (Parks & Rec Business)