Interactive Indianapolis at Walk/Bike/Places [2]

More Events & Opportunities

August 2-8: National Farmers Market Week [5], Farmers Market Coalition

Streets as Places Training Survey: This fall, Project for Public Spaces and Mobycon are teaming up to offer a virtual multi-day Streets as Places training! Let us know what you'd like to see in this training to receive a 10% discount. Take the survey. [6]

Missed any of our past webinars on adapting to COVID-19 in public space? Watch recordings for free on our Events page. [7]
 

The Great American Outdoors Act: First, let's start with a little good news. This week, Congress passed the “Great American Outdoors Act,” which permanently dedicates $900 million per year to the Land & Water Conservation Fund (City Parks Alliance [13]). This fund can help reduce the maintenance backlog on public lands, and also expand equitable access to communities with poorly maintained parks or without parks at all. 

Federal Power in City Streets: This week, the federal government deployed unidentified officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to shoot teargas and "less lethal" rounds at protestors in Portland, OR, and apprehend them in unmarked vans (CityLab [14]). While many lawyers believe these actions to be unconstitutional, the way the Trump administration has justified them reveals how our rights can change in a public space, depending on the level or agency of government responsible for it.

Prior to the Portland incidents, a recent executive order gave the DHS the power to protect federal statues, memorials, and property, which the agency has interpreted broadly. To give a sense of the scope of this executive order, the federal General Services Administration alone owns or leases 8,700 buildings in cities around the United States, while federal property in general accounts for over a quarter of all U.S. land.

Democracy ≠ Equity: At Project for Public Spaces, participation is one of our core values, but as Emily Badger writes this week, "In city planning, participatory democracy has largely increased inequality, not lessened it" (New York Times [15]). That's not to say that participation is hopeless, but who gets to participate in our mainstream "public consultation" system centered around public meetings mirrors other inequalities of like wealth, leisure time, mobility, and technical jargon, among others.

As anthropologist-planner Destiny Thomas argues in the article, municipalities could do a better job of meeting people who have been shut out of the process where they are through strategies like funding existing community health clinics or food banks to incorporate engagement into their work, or hiring local residents onto city staff. But more fundamental than any one strategy is shifting the perspective of city agencies from equal (read: one-size-fits-all) engagement to one of equitable engagement that intentionally redistributes power to communities of color and low-income communities.

Is "Out of Scale" Garbage Language? One way in which majority white and wealthy communities wield power in traditional community engagement processes is claiming that any new development would be "out of scale" with the current built form. But as Daniel Herriges argues, this rhetoric is often little more than subjective ammunition in a culture war between urbanists and suburbanites (Strong Towns [16]). What it overlooks is an issue of scale that shapes our communities more than perhaps any design standard: the scale of investment.

Gentrification, Overcrowding, and the Coronavirus: Although it is tricky to measure, since the beginning of the pandemic public health experts have argued that overcrowding—that is, many people living in the same residential space—may be a major spreader of the coronavirus. However, a new study of the gentrifying Mission District in San Francisco, CA, may reveal a new element to that equation: Gentrification in the priciest U.S. cities may be exacerbating overcrowding, as displaced households double up with neighbors instead of leaving the neighborhood (CityLab [17]).

A Street by Any Other Name: The saga of the debate over Black Lives Matter murals and the renaming of streets across the country continues. Deirdre Mask, author of The Address Book, argues that while naming and aesthetic statements are not enough, "Street names are one way to pin down the present and preserve it for future generations"  (The Atlantic [18]). To Mask, the struggles to rename streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. over the past fifty years offer a benchmark for how much political leadership and white public discourse has changed. The speed, certainty, and centrality of this new wave of symbolic acts stands in stark contrast to the stalling, hesitance, and marginalization of efforts to honor King.

Placemaking Playbook: Finally, here's a roundup of 13 recent innovative placemaking projects and ideas making headlines:

1. An initiative to help school administrators move classes outdoors during COVID-19 (Green Schoolyards America [19])
2. A day in the life of the crisis responders that replaced police responding to "quality of life" calls in Olympia, WA (The Marshall Project [20])
3. Tips on making Main Street more accessible, even during COVID-19 (Main Street America [21])
4. A program to embed hyperlocal food production in everyday rural community spaces (Brookings [22])
5. A floating cinema on the Seine in Paris, France (Euronews [23])
6. 100 reopening ideas for small businesses (Jaime Izurieta [24])
7. Free "transportation libraries" that repurpose 3,000 e-bikes from Uber's failed bikeshare venture in Buffalo, NY (The Buffalo News [25])
8. The gentrification process, a short story in three acts (Azure [26]).
9. A weekly COVID-19 block party in Brooklyn, NY (Intelligencer [27])
10. Idle restaurants repurposed as meal providers for hunger relief in California (Brookings [28])
11. The case for better integrating GIS data into park planning (Apolitical [29])
12. A reassessment of John Muir, conservation hero and racist (LA Times [30])
13. A new report on why social capital matters and how to build more of it (Brookings [31])