This round-up from the Project for Public Spaces [1] connects people who share a passion for public spaces to ideas and issues, news, quotes, places, and events from the placemaking movement.

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Thinking Beyond the Parks Department: A Q&A with Javier Otero Peña [4]

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A park in Javier’s study with handball courts, benches, murals, and astroturf. Photo credit: Javier Otero Peña

New research by social scientist Javier Otero Peña, a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, explores park usage in low-income neighborhoods in New York City. In this interview, he explains how social access is sometimes more important than physical access and makes the case for taking a holistic approach to this complex problem. Read more. [4]

More from the Blog

Our Top 10 Articles of 2021 [5]
December 27, 2021 • by Nate Storring

Catching Up with the 2020 Clarity Parks Project™ Grantees [6]
December 15, 2021 • by Priscilla Posada

Reimagining the Post-Covid Library with CloroxPro: A Q&A with Claudia Strange of the Fulton County Library System [7]
December 1, 2021 • by Priscilla Posada

Events & Opportunities

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Learn How to Create a Successful Public Market [2]

Registration is open our inaugural online version of our How to Create Successful Markets training workshop!

Over four weeks in March, you'll learn the essentials for creating a thriving public market, from engaging your community to measuring your market's value to the brass tacks of market management. Register before February 2, 2022 to catch the early bird discount! Learn more. [2]

Have an event or opportunity you would like to share? Email us at [email protected] [8].

Public Space News

The 15-Minute City Is Coming to America. In a "15-minute city," all the essentials including work, school, culture, and grocery stores are a 15-minute walk, cycle or public transport ride away from people. This concept is gaining traction in European cities like Paris and Utah would be the first in the U.S. to build one of these car-light communities—construction begins in 2024. It's exciting to see that a public engagement process, and not a top-down approach, led to this vision. (S [9]treetsblog USA [9])

How to Design for Social Justice. The New Orleans-based architecture firm Colloqate Design is hiring local community residents as Community Design Advocates (CDAs) to ensure a bottom-up, collective vision. Their design principle Bryan Lee Jr. says, "For every injustice in this world there is an architecture, a plan, a design, that’s been built to sustain that injustice, and for so much of our work power is vested in land." For a project in Dallas on the site of a former jail, his team hired CDAs including people who were previously incarcerated to make its architecture accountable to the local community. (N [10]ext City [11])

A Way to Improve Sidewalks. It's been almost two decades since the Supreme Court ruled that cities must keep their sidewalks accessible to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and yet change has been slow. One proposed solution would require property owners to ensure the sidewalk next to their property is compliant when and if they decide to sell. The city could then provide subsidies for low-income sellers to make sure they are not left behind. (Bloomberg [10])

Placemaking Playbook

As always, here's a roundup of placemaking projects and ideas that inspired us this week:

There's a new biography on William H. Whyte (New York Times [12])
Toronto is considering how to expand the use of its city-owned golf courses (T [13]he Star [13])
Public libraries are hiring full-time social workers to help patrons deal with issues from housing insecurity to mental health (N [14]PR [14])
Learn more about placekeeping—a way to foster "the heart and soul of a place" (M [15]ain Street America [15])
A Quebec City park redesigns a footbridge to highlight the contemplative potential of its waterfall (Azure [16])

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