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This week, the Market Cities Initiative at Project for Public Spaces released the results of its three pilot city projects to kickstart citywide market strategies in Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Toronto.
This process, which has taken place over the course of the pandemic, revealed the potential of public market systems to benefit public health, inclusive entrepreneurship, and social resilience—as well as the current gaps in public policy and investment that hold them back. Read more.
Photo by Redbone Photography.
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Events & Opportunities
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The idea of Market Cities does not just apply to North America, but to cities and regions around the world. On October 27th, join Project for Public Spaces, HealthBridge Foundation of Canada, Slow Food International, and UN-Habitat for a virtual forum on how to ensure market systems thrive and grow, even as they adapt to the realities of the coronavirus pandemic in very different contexts, from Bangladesh to Canada to Germany to Ghana to Peru to Tanzania to Vietnam. Register Now.
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More Events & Opportunities
Oct. 20 • Webinar: The pivot toward parks: How can we sustain creative activation of our public spaces beyond the pandemic?, Park People
Oct. 22 • Webinar: Healthy parks and healthy people: A (not boring) conversation about the future of park investment, Park People
Oct. 27 • Webinar: Downtown Rebound: Forecast, Opportunities, and Best Practices for the 2020 Holiday Shopping Season, ULI Northwest Arkansas, featuring Project for Public Spaces’ Kelly Verel
Oct. 27 • Book Launch: The City at Eye Level Asia, Think City, Urban Discovery & STIPO
Oct. 31 • Survey: Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Farmers Markets, Farmers Market Coalition
Webinar Recording: Who Are Streets Designed For?, SPUR, featuring Project for Public Spaces' Nidhi Gulati
New Funding Resource: Equitable Park Funding Hub, City Parks Alliance
Missed any of our past virtual events on placemaking and public space? Watch the videos on our Events page.
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Public Space News
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How Safe Could We Make Halloween? In the New York Times, pediatrician Aaron E. Carroll makes the case that rather than arguing about whether Halloween is safe or not, we should ask, how can we do it as safely as possible? “If I had to design an activity for children that might be safe during a pandemic,” says Carroll, “I’m not sure that I could do a better job than trick-or-treating” (New York Times).
Piles of Punditry: The conversation about how the pandemic might alter the direction of planning and urbanism, unlike the spread of the coronavirus, has remained steady since March (Planetizen).
Place in Indigenous Design: In Azure magazine, Mohawk architect Matthew Hickey argues that designing safer public spaces starts with broadening our definition of inclusivity. “The value of place for Indigenous people is not found in dollars per acre,” writes Hickey. “It is rooted in the understanding that the land is what allows us all to live” (Azure).
American Street Safety Falls Behind: The United States has failed to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities as fast as comparably affluent European nations, a new study finds. Three simple charts illustrate the difference (Streetsblog).
Did Athens’ ‘Great Walk’ Stumble? In May, the Greek capital embarked on an ambitious plan to transform its traffic-clogged downtown with bike lanes and pedestrian walkways. But things didn’t work out as planned (CityLab).
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Placemaking Playbook
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Here's a roundup of 10 inspiring placemaking ideas from the week:
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Three U.S. “highway cap” projects reckoning with urban inequity (UrbanLand)
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Four ideas for post-Covid cities, visualised (The Guardian)
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The case for edible public spaces (Modern Farmer)
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A new book on shade by “Writing the City” author Sam Bloch (Places Journal)
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A visual tour of the East Village, near the Project for Public Spaces offices in Manhattan (New York Times)
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A close look at how the built form of where we live affects how we get where we need to go (Brookings)
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A reflection on making equitable park destinations from the Memphis River Parks Partnership (Urban Observatory)
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The ever-improving city (Strong Towns)
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The winners of a design competition to help Chicago’s restaurants weather the winter (Block Club Chicago)
- A Memphis medical district that turned itself inside out during the pandemic (Public Square)
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Placemaking Week Lives On
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| Leading up to our most recent International Placemaking Week conference in Chattanooga, TN, our local hosts launched PlacemakingCHA.org to organize sessions and placemaking activations around the region. This week, they relaunched that website to serve as an inclusive, virtual hub to share stories, information, and tools to inspire the “new normal” of placemaking and community engagement throughout the greater Chattanooga region. Check it out. |
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