Seven Principles for Becoming a Market City [2]

More from the Blog

Toward Market Cities: Strengthening Public Market Systems in Three North American Cities [3]
by Kelly Verel • October 4, 2020

A New Leadership Team at Project for Public Spaces [4]
October 4, 2020

Virtual Walk Audits: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly [5]
by Ian Thomas, America Walks • October 2, 2020

How an Atlanta Park is Connecting People to Housing through Place-Based Social Service Provision [6]
by Elena Madison • August 26, 2020

Sneak Peak: Mobycon on the Dutch Approach to Streets as Places [7]
by Mary Elbech, Mobycon • August 21, 2020

More Events & Opportunities

Nov. 3 • Webinar: Urban Manifesto: Public Markets [9], The Urban Vision, featuring Steve Davies, a partner on the Market Cities Initiative at Project for Public Spaces (live at 5pm ET, no registration required)

Nov. 25 • Request for Nominations: Freeways Without Futures [10], Congress for the New Urbanism

Webinar Recording: How public markets can pump life into regional food economies and forge social cohesion? [11] UN-Habitat, featuring Project for Public Spaces’ Kelly Verel

Webinar Recording: Evaluating public space quality to help unlock great places [12], New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, featuring Project for Public Spaces’ Nidhi Gulati

Webinar Recording: Downtown Rebound: Forecast, Opportunities, and Best Practices for the 2020 Holiday Shopping Season [13], ULI Northwest Arkansas, featuring Project for Public Spaces’ Kelly Verel

Missed any of our past virtual events on placemaking and public space? Watch the videos on our Events page. [14]
 

Placemaking with an Equity Framework: In Portland, Oregon, the city council has approved plans to develop Broadway Corridor, a 32-acre downtown development for which Project for Public Spaces produced a placemaking plan for new streets and public spaces. Perhaps the most exciting part of the project is its “historic” community benefits agreement, which seeks to ensure equity and opportunities for women and people of color through affordable housing and commercial space, prioritizing minority-owned businesses, and meeting high environmental standards in design and development, among other strategies (The Oregonian [15]). 

Park Access in the Bayou City: Houston, Texas, often ranks among the top ten most unequal metro areas in the US, but since 2012, it has been building one of the most extensive and equitably distributed networks of parks and greenways in the country (City Monitor [16]).

How the Coronavirus Works Indoors: El País offers one of the most in-depth visualizations at how COVID-19 spreads in indoor spaces. The risk of contagion is highest in indoor spaces but can be reduced by applying all available measures to combat infection via aerosols. Their story covers three everyday spaces: an indoor gathering, a bar or restaurant, and a classroom (El País [17]).

Secondary Cities: Changing commuting patterns during and after the pandemic could lead to big changes both for big cities and for nearby “secondary cities,” as some workers move further from the office and work entirely from home most weeks. Costs like congestion and benefits like economic multiplier effects could become more geographically spread out, but left unchecked, any new pattern is sure to mirror existing lines of inequality, too (The Guardian [18]). 

Did Quarantine Open Streets Work? It’s hard to know the exact connections between open streets and slow streets initiatives and limiting the spread of the virus, but a new study reveals who has been making use of the programs in five American cities (StreetsBlog [19]).

Endangered Main Streets: Since the pandemic began, America’s Main Street revival has gone into reverse, cutting a small-town lifeline. The challenges faced by businesses in Emporia, Kansas, show how much that revival is now in danger from Covid-19 (Wall Street Journal [20]).

A Flood-Resilient Public Realm: A proposed citywide rezoning would layer resilience in New York City. With 520 miles of coastline, New York City is ready to implement the lessons of Hurricane Sandy in the zoning code for the entire city (Planetizen [21]).

Election Protection: With the threat of unrest and intimidation in public places looming over Election Day this week in the United States, some cities have announced plans aimed at protecting voters (CityLab [22]).

Protest Crackdown: Five months after the killing of George Floyd sparked renewed racial justice protests around the United States, hundreds face trials and prison (The Guardian [23]).

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

1. A new idea book from a design competition for pandemic winter placemaking (Bench Consulting [24]), plus a roundup of even more winter placemaking ideas (Spaces to Places [25])

2. A study that uncovers the ingredients of great partnerships between parks departments and foundations (Parks and Recreation [26])

3. Three ways that city planning could become more like social work (Planning [27])

4. The parking lots that now host haunted houses, bingo games, and COVID-19 testing (Wall Street Journal [28])

5. A new waterfront park in Detroit honors the victims of the Ford Hunger March, a long-ignored milestone in labor union history (CityLab [29])

6. Scenes from four classrooms that moved outdoors to fight COVID-19 (New York Times [30])

7. A guide to helping people keep warm outdoors this winter (The Guardian [31])

8. An initiative that allows all New York City businesses to open up outdoors, just in time for what could be a make-or-break holiday season for many (6sqft [32])

9. A History of Black landscape architecture (Places Journal [33])

10. The community that treats citywide street lighting as an opportunity for public participation, not just a one-size-fits-all utility (Next City [34])