Opportunities to Start 2021 Off Right | Placemaking Weekly

Posted January 24, 2021 - 10:24

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.

Opportunities to Start 2021 Off Right

This week brings a bevy of new ways to up your placemaking game in 2021, from funding and technical assistance for rural communities to a webinar on a placemaking-friendly approach to research. Take a look below!

Events & Opportunities

Jan. 27, 2021 • Webinar: Using a Community-Based Participatory Research Approach, CCPH, featuring Project for Public Spaces' Cailean Kok

Jan. 27, 2021 • Webinar: Equitable and Inclusive Engagement: Creating an Accessible Virtual Meeting Space, Public Agenda

Jan. 27-28, 2021 • Webinar Series: The Future of Monumentality, Next City

Jan. 28, 2021 • Webinar: Placemaking for Better Neighbourhoods, BG Be Active

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

Feb. 5, 2021 • Call for Proposals: The Great Places Awards, EDRA & Project for Public Spaces

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

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

Placemaking for the Future of Workspace. While many people are craving the human contact that office life helped fulfill before the pandemic, work life is likely to change moving forward. Priti Patel, Program Manager of Placemaking at Project for Public Spaces, helps explain how placemaking offers a framework for how companies can adapt to these new realities. (EQ Office)

A Bigger, Bolder Union Square. The Union Square Partnership has unveiled a plan to expand the park by 33 percent by taking back roadways that currently fragment this major New York public space and divide it from the buildings along its edge. The plan promises to make room for everyday activities, as well as activism that Union Square is known for. (StreetsBlog NYC)

What Will President Biden Mean for Cities? City Monitor offers a very comprehensive policy guide for city leaders. The laundry list of items that placemakers should read up on includes highway removal funds, new public housing development, school buildings, smart cities, police reform, neighborhood reinvestment initiatives, and of course, sustainable and equitable recovery. (City Monitor)

Rebuilding the Borderlands. Another place that will deeply affected by the changing of the guard in Washington is the U.S.-Mexico border zone, and the binational communities around it. With former President Trump's border wall half built and construction halted, will Biden reconnect the people and ecosystems that have been divided? (CityLab)

As a symbol of what is at stake and what is possible, an installation by architecture studio Rael San Fratello that connected children in the U.S. and Mexico via a trio of seesaws slotted into the countries' border wall, won one of London's Design Museum's Beazley Designs of the Year awards. (Dezeen)

A Deadly Design. The Vessel, a controversial viewing platform at the equally controversial Hudson Yards development in New York, has closed after a third suicide death in two years. Mocked as "the Shawarma," accused of privatization, and described as a monument to inaccessibility, this is just the latest and most serious blow in a design dogged by disaster. (Dezeen)

Where Do We Draw the Line? Saudi Arabia plans to resurrect the utopian concept of a "Linear City," except bigger, techier, and without learning a damn thing from history. As author Aaron Gordon points out, this is part of a broader trend in the smart city world. "If techno-futurism has perfected anything," writes Gordon, "It is the art of unwittingly re-inventing old ideas, inflating them to a scale so epic that it accentuates all of the idea's flaws, and presenting it in a slick hype video as the Only Way Forward." (Vice)

Placemaking Playbook

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

An impressive DIY winterized park in Winnipeg (PlaceMakers)
A guide to finding and bugging the right local politician to actually get stuff done (Vice)
A farewell to the clickety-clack of Philadelphia's train station display board (CityLab)
The case for "rewilding" our environment (Fast Company)
A Wishing Tree with 10,000 wishes for a better 2021 at a Los Angeles public garden (Planetizen)
A massive field of flags to mark the pandemic inauguration of President Joe Biden (HuffPost)
A traditional South Indian welcome for Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden (NPR)
A park under an overpass in Calgary that sprung from a student-driven vision (Globe and Mail)
A new book from the pioneers of retrofitting suburbia (CNU Public Square)
California's plan to combat the coronavirus—with a corps of artists (Datebook)
Bonus: NASCOW, which is exactly what it sounds like (Parks & Recreation)