Via our Rightsizing Streets Guide, Project for Public Spaces promotes rightsizing as a means of improving streets for all users and creating a sense of place.  Rightsizing improves safety and accessibility for walkers, bikers, and drivers by reconfiguring the street’s space to match the needs of the street’s community. Rightsizing is often critical to the cultivation of streets as places, in which streets provide for safe and enjoyable human experiences and foster inclusive, healthy, and economically viable communities.

The Porch in Philadelphia before and after rightsizing / Photo: University City District

These case studies illustrate that rightsizing can help activate a corner by creating a plaza, transform a corridor for blocks or miles by encouraging pedestrians and bicyclists, and improve access to local businesses, neighbors, and other attractions.

• The Porch at 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia and Broadway Boulevard in New York City transformed poorly utilized road space into active pedestrian plazas.
• When University Place wanted to create a main street in their newly incorporated municipality, their rightsizing effort included installing sidewalks where there had been only road shoulders, improving the ability of pedestrians to cross the street, and beautifying the formerly overwhelmingly car-oriented Bridgeport Way.
• East Boulevard in Charlotte was also rightsized in response to the community’s desire for a safer and more vibrant pedestrian environment with increased opportunities for outdoor dining. They brought the ‘Boulevard’ back to East Boulevard with slower car speeds making for a safer, quieter street, and infrastructure to make that street navigable on foot and by bike. Edgewater Drive has a similar story.
• In Poughkeepsie, rightsizing Raymond Avenue included streetscape improvements that encouraged pedestrian access to local retail and dining establishments.
• Main Street/US 395 in tiny Bridgeport, California was rightsized to increase parking and support pedestrians’ access to local businesses.
• Prospect Park West in Brooklyn was transformed by the inclusion of a traffic-separated two way bike lane and pedestrian refuge islands. The result was a safer street for all users, and much easier access to Prospect Park.
• Rightsizing Nebraska Avenue in Tampa and Stone Way in Seattle reduced traffic crashes, and improved the experience of the street for pedestrians and bicyclists.

East Boulevard Overview / Photo: City of Charlotte

East Boulevard Crossing / Photo: City of Charlotte

Each rightsized street was improved for pedestrians, and most created bike lanes as well, with minimal adverse—and often positive—impacts on vehicle operations. While vehicular transportation is important, our streets should welcome people using many different modes. Youth, some elderly, and many in between are unable to drive, but happy to walk and bike when it’s safe and pleasant. Further, many may prefer to walk or bike for their health, convenience, environmental concerns, or social reasons. By allowing a child to bike to school, a bike lane provides autonomy for the child (and the parent), and improves the atmosphere of that corridor. By calming the traffic next to that bike lane, the street is made safer for all. Of course, street design is not all there is to Placemaking, and not every rightsizing effort is perfectly aligned with its neighborhood’s desires or needs. However, rightsizing is often a critical component of a community’s Placemaking strategy.

East Boulevard Outdoor Dining / Photo: City of Charlotte

Rightsizing projects tend to use before and after measurements of success that come from traditional traffic engineering priorities like reducing injuries, the number of speeding cars, or travel delay. Rightsizing succeeds by these measures, but they only hint at the fundamental place-centered outcomes of such projects: enabling thriving communities. Safety and mobility offer support to, but are different than, our more basic and fulfilling daily activities: shopping, socializing, eating, learning, recreating, game-playing, bench-sitting, people-watching, and all of the many other experiences that are more frequent and better in successful public spaces. We would be well served by more documentation of these activities in addition to the standard safety and mobility metrics. Streets and sidewalks are our most common public spaces. Rightsizing is a major way to activate these spaces and build communities.

Click here to visit our new Rightsizing Streets Guide to learn more about how rightsizing can help a street near you!

A glove washed up on Natalia’s doorstep in Gowanus after Hurricane Sandy flooded the neighborhood / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

Yet, unlike many others, I have been able to return home. In other parts of New York City, such as The Rockaways, Staten Island, Coney Island and Red Hook, some homes are still without power and basic services, with emergency relief needs and the demand for medical and legal services escalating. The crisis has also been met by rapid community mobilization, from Occupy emerging as a leading support, to myriad fundraising activities across the city, and even internationally.

As our daily lives are becoming increasingly destabilized by financial recession, climate change and perhaps political marginalization, self-organizing communities are also becoming a steady presence, from co-ops and community gardens to large-scale political movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring. Our streets and public spaces have become sites that weather (literally, in the case of Sandy) these various challenges, but they are also the sites of protest, green markets, and social interaction. In this way, these spaces are revealing how we might re-imagine the way we live in our cities for a more just and equitable future.

This perspective formed the basis of a recent conference, Urban Uprising: Re-Imagining the City, jointly organized by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY, The Right to the City Alliance, The New School Design and Urban Ecologies Program, and Growing Roots on November 30 – December 1, 2012. The first day featured perspectives from scholars and community organizers, speaking on the theme: ‘In History, In Process, In the Future’. Surveying the legacy of social movements in Detroit, the first panel was an apt reminder that our histories are conduits for learning about our present and future. As noted by Francis Fox Piven (Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, CUNY), “These movements are still with us, they are a part of our genetic heritage.”

Speaking from her own deep wisdom as a long-time civil rights activist, Marian Kramer, (Founder and President, National Welfare Rights Union), added that although “It’s good to always know history… [it’s important] to always understand what you’re up against right now because the strategies and tactics are different from the 1960s. And then you’re gonna get a damn good revolutionary.”

Marian Kramer (third from left): “It’s good to always know history…” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The next panel’s international perspective brought the universality of many urban issues to light, from the way that urban design can deepen existing inequities through spatial segregation in Lebanon and Egypt, to homelessness and migration flow progressively marginalizing displaced populations in Hungary and South Africa.

Hiba Bou Akar, (Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Urban Planning, School of Social Inquiry, Hampshire College), speaking about the ‘War Yet to Come’ in Lebanon / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

As discussion after the presentations turned towards the nuances of culture and context, it became apparent that, although a broad comparison allows us to see problems as global and relating to common human rights, to work equitably we must also think carefully about specific urban characteristics; as Eva-Tessza Udvarhelyi, (Co-founder, The City is for All; Doctoral candidate CUNY Graduate Center) pointedly asked, “How do we define the city, and integrate different kinds of urbanization?”

Tessza Udvarhelyi asks: “How do we define the city, and integrate different kinds of urbanization?” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The day closed with an open plenary, ‘How to Organize a Whole City,’ in which a range of community organizers spoke about the inspiration and hard work of movement mobilization.

Rob Robinson, Special Advisor, Human Right to Housing Program, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative; Co-founder, Take Back the Land Movement (click for link) / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The poetic words of Kazembe Balagun, (Outreach Coordinator, Brecht Forum), perhaps best illustrate that a course of activism and community-organizing requires the sharing of common passions, if to mobilize to any success: “In order to achieve our country, we need to come together as lovers.”

Kazembe Balagun: “In order to achieve our country, we need to come together as lovers.” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The second day, entitled ‘Transforming Demands, Demanding Creativity,’ sought to move the conference’s focus from discussion to action, specifically aiming to create a transformative vision for organizing in New York City, and to commence movement-building by connecting issues to organizations. The day’s aims were simply-stated, but nonetheless ambitious:

“With participation from community organizations across the city, we aim to:

1. Explore a holistic vision for the city we wish to live in,
2. Assess community work currently being done
3. Begin a conversation on the role of transformative demands and alternative institutions in realizing our vision.”

Accomplished organizers and commentators kicked off the day in an open plenary about a grassroots re-imagination of the city. Peter Marcuse (Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, Columbia University), offered a range of friendly provocations about ‘reorganizing, rather than redesigning’ the city, suggesting that a volunteer economy should replace market relations, and that we could re-imagine our cities as places to live, rather than places to work. Matthew Birkhold (Co-founder, Growing Roots) spoke about communities in Detroit having successfully re-imagined the use of vacant lots to combat police brutality. By activating the lots as public spaces for in-community conflict resolution, they became valued as important community assets, and have now also been transformed into markets, urban gardens and community hubs.

Clearly, re-imagining the city is about systemic change. Nancy Romer (General Co-ordinator, Brooklyn Food Coalition), described how America had become “starved and stuffed” by unjust agreements between the food industry and government. Asking “how do we create a democracy, keep control in the hands of the people, and out of the hands of corporations?” she emphasized that any movement, be it urban gardening, green markets, or co-ops, must consider itself a whole justice movement to have broader political, economic, environmental and cultural impact.

Matthew Birkhold: “Demands aren’t enough.” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The working groups that formed for the remainder of the day dedicated themselves to exploring discrete areas of system intervention: food, jobs and economics, transportation, public space, health care, education, criminal justice, just communities, housing, art, media and communications, environment, and democracy/governance. For this diverse but passionate body of change-makers, finding a common language was often a challenge, although a common vision far less so. Undoubtedly, the coming days, months and years will reveal how this discussion and the early seeds of community mobilization sown over the two days of the conference may grow into a thriving community of practice. And there is cause for optimism. As Marcuse noted, “The experience of Occupy Sandy shows what people will do, voluntarily, [and] what the best in people is [all about].”

I know that, for me, experiences of volunteering in the Rockaways absolutely revealed this fact. Practices of mutual aid feed the common cohesion and transformation that our neighborhoods desperately need, especially in the aftermath of crises. Following Sandy, there is already talk of not ‘if’ but ‘when’ the next climate disaster will hit New York. Social disparities reign, and are being reinforced by consistently volatile economic markets. While these problems are with us every day, so are their solutions, if to follow Birkhold’s galvanizing words: “Demands aren’t enough. We’ve got to begin rebuilding the world we want to replace the current one with.”

Aphrodite interviews a New Yorker on Love TV in front of the city's iconic Flatiron Building / Photo: Love TV

Love was recently high in the air at PPS, as we were regaled with tales of a heartfelt summertime voyage around New York City’s five boroughs, where deeply-held secrets, innermost dreams, and impassioned desires were divulged by locals in the bright glare of broad daylight across public parks, plazas, streets and ferry terminals. Inside a giant pink television…to a golden-haired vixen called Aphrodite…with an Australian accent…

Nope, we’re not losing our grip on reality here in the office. In fact, we had the good fortune to be visited by artist Rebecca Macintosh and creative producer Victoria Johnstone, two Australians who had been touring their urban installation, “Love TV,” around New York City as a part of the DOT’s Summer Streets and Weekend Walks Urban Arts Program.

Describing Love TV as a “bold, fun and innovative public art adventure,” Rebecca and Victoria had been busy sharing the love across nine sites with 19 performances in some of NYC’s most diverse and far-flung neighborhoods. Through an outreach process organized jointly by Love TV and local community partners, people went online to either nominate themselves or their neighbors for an interview with Rebecca—aka the illustrious Goddess of Love, Aphrodite—in her public studio, a cheerfully fuchsia mobile theater shaped like a giant TV set. As local personalities revealed all, the interviews were aired on a screen before an inflatable lounge, allowing for prime public viewing with all of the fluffy comforts of home. Interviews were rapidly uploaded onto the Love TV website and posted to social networks, growing “a lively online Love TV community” across the world.

As happy a spectacle as Love TV is, its aim is far from superficial. As Rebecca explained, the project endeavors to activate public spaces and strengthen community spirit by creating a place for “their stories, by their people, [so that communities can share their] personal love affair with their respective neighborhood or city.” Indeed, Love TV’s five-borough journey collated interviews from a passionate public, from boy wonder drummer Marakai at the Jamaican Music and Arts Festival in Queens, who dreams of “a big pool in the park,” to soon-to-be MTV Superstar singer Ray 6 at the TAMA Summerfest in Brooklyn, who was brimming with pride in Bed-Stuy’s music-filled streets: “Tompkins is it! Brooklyn is the place to be.”

In addition to the nominated guests, Love TV also built up its own merry team of followers, from George the Greek, an Astorian poet who serenaded Love TV at multiple locations, to a group of Italian tourists who simply fell in love with the installation and reoriented their NYC itinerary to follow Aphrodite around the boroughs. So why is Love TV so loveable? What’s the secret to its success?

A crowd gathers to watch a performance at Fordham Plaza in the Bronx / Photo: Love TV

As veterans of pop-up public space activation (Love TV has been touring the world’s public places for more than five years), Rebecca and Victoria dropped by PPS HQ to share tips and tricks over a brown bag lunch with Placemaking staff. They described how, when new to a neighborhood, city, or country and working on a tight schedule, on-the-ground partnerships and a spirit of collaboration are the absolute starting point for any pop-up event. Community partners are essential for ensuring that work fits within the local context—especially when needing to tap into neighborhood knowledge to select an appropriate site, since poor site location can make or break a performance.

Yet Love TV’s charm swells from something other than good site location and thorough research. This installation creates a public meeting space (often in very limited supply, especially in poorer neighborhoods) charged with a spirit of optimism, and uses a commonly-held human value that spans cultural, social and economic differences—love—to inspire positive community conversations and visions for the future. Every participant was asked what they would do if made mayor for a day and, Rebecca told us, this became a significant moment in each interview. With community organizing so often focused on what people don’t want, it’s rare for communities to have the opportunity to come together to define common values by sharing their hopes and desires in their own local public spaces.

So Love TV’s beauty, on one hand, lies in this curation of shared community experience in public space; but that beauty also, perhaps more strategically, comes from the way the project finds avenues for these aspirations to linger. Rebecca noted that Facebook seems to have become that place where, well beyond Love TV’s departure, participants and communities continue to dwell online to share their urban dreams for the future. Victoria and Rebecca hope that the few hours of rosy fun they bring to neighborhoods will do more than simply bridge off- and online community conversations, but also seeding longer-lasting effects–perhaps as an online archive of community strengths and needs which municipal officials, planners and advocates could use.

Love TV is back home now, resting up with Rebecca and Victoria on Queensland’s Gold Coast. But if the project sparked a little something for you, or if you think your community could use a healthy dose of Australian warmth, community imagination, and/or a whole heap of fun, get in touch with these Placemaking romancers, and see what can come when you “turn on” an intimately good time in your neighborhood.

Audience participation! Dancing in the NYC DOT's Flatiron Plaza / Photo: Love TV

“Place matters, and the first place is your body. We are whole people. We bring that whole-ness to our communities.” –Maria Bauman, leading a “Physio-Expresso” exercise / Photo: @keith5chweitzer via Twitter

What do the Lower East Side’s finest scaffolding, North Brooklyn churches, a chocolate factory, and the Staten Island Ferry have in common with something called Physio-expresso? All were on the roster when artists, art administrators, community leaders, urbanists, researchers and policy makers gathered last week in Fort Greene’s South Oxford Space for the cheerfully dynamic  Spacing Out: A Forum On Innovative Cultural Uses of Urban Space. The event was coordinated by the Arts & Democracy Project, Urban Bush Women, and the Naturally Occurring Cultural District Working Group (NOCD-NY), an alliance of community-based cultural networks and leaders that aim to ‘revitalize NYC from the neighborhood up’.

The aim of the forum was to share best practices (and war stories), to help activate and enhance Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts in New York City. Councilmember Letitia James started things off by explaining why building support for NOCDs is a pressing issue right now, in light of real estate development trends where neighborhood boundaries are hastily redrawn and renamed (DUMBO, Bedford Hill, BoCoCa, anyone?) without appreciating that the community’s cultural workers will likely be priced out, victims of their own ‘success.’ As the morning’s speakers revealed, many communities lack the expertise for navigating arts and cultural resources, and are thus unable to develop the capacity to advocate for themselves and their work.

The morning’s presenters (representing each of New York City’s boroughs) described their own experience spearheading creative re-use of existing urban spaces, and how they routinely navigate issues such as partnership-building, programming and managing spaces.

“Saints of the Lower East Side” is on view through September 5, 2012 / Photo: Fourth Arts Block

Tamara Greenfield of the Fourth Arts Block on Manhattan’s Lower East Side described how art could find an unlikely but happy home within temporary, and typically unsightly structures like the scaffolding at vacant lots and construction sites. While street artists, especially those who are lesser known, relish the opportunity to create work for a new urban platform, the generally brief public life of temporary infrastructure creates huge challenges in terms of rapid project planning, having time to secure adequate funding, and brokering relationships with building owners and the ragtag team of necessary city partners like the DOT and NYPD.

Up next was Sheila Lewandowski, director of Long Island City’s The Chocolate Factory, a theater housed in a formerly-industrial home of delicious things. Sheila spoke about adaptive reuse, and her search for an experimental performance and art space which would help preserve the natural character of the neighborhood. “Space matters,” she proclaimed, explaining that many artists want to respond to old buildings in their existing state. In addition to re-use of a physical structure, the Chocolate Factory has also shown how the community surrounding a venue can inform how it adapts to new cultural tenants by partnering with 200 local businesses in an average year. “It’s very important that the community sees that you’re a part of it,” Sheila said. “You don’t do anything alone.”

Monica Salazar’s presentation about cultural use of religious spaces turned an eye toward the economics of re-use. In 2009, inspired by a New York Times article about local North Brooklyn churches renting out space for rehearsals (and with her own band needing a music-making place), Monica contacted Most Holy Trinity-St. Mary’s in East Williamsburg/Bushwick, Brooklyn with a similar suggestion. Her initiative rapidly developed into The Trinity Project, a bartering program with a membership structure that allows artists to teach classes in exchange for space, while also offering the church a ready army of caretakers. Said Monica: “I was amazed to see how valuable trade is…once the dollar is removed from the equation.’

Visitors explore The Point’s Bronx facility during the “Key to the City” project / Photo: Shelley Bernstein via Flickr

Carey Clark of The Point in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood illustrated that while some neighborhoods may not have high levels of cultural traffic or city investment, they nonetheless house communities craving the same opportunities and advantages. The Point is an organization which formed in 1994 to strengthen the South Bronx in partnership with local residents through programming, facilities, and resources, including the wildly successful Hunts Point Riverside Campus for Arts and the Environment, a permanent open public space for the arts and environment. “You need to have a vision,” she explained, “but be prepared to be flexible.”

Sometimes strategic flexibility means saying “no,” as highlighted by Prerana Reddy, Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art, who spoke about the QMA’s current work supporting the Heart of Corona.  The QMA has a well-deserved reputation for working with the local community by seeing ‘the museum is a production partner’ in a community ‘full of cultural workers.’ The museum declined the DOTs invitation to take on full management responsibilities for a re-designed Corona Plaza, arguing successfully that maintenance and upkeep should be handled by another organization while the QMA focuses on what they do best: programming. “We have broad cultural networks,” she explained. “How do we use these to co-produce with the neighborhood?” The QMA is now working with several partners on a series of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper activations of the space.

COAHSI’s “Culture Lounge” will encourage visitors to Staten Island to linger in the ferry terminal / Photo: COAHSI

Turning challenges into opportunities was a necessary philosophy, if not working method, for Melanie Cohn, director of the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island. COAHSI received a Rockefeller grant to create a new cultural space at New York City’s third most visited site – the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, where 75,000 people pass through every day. For this new space, COAHSI had to balance the needs of local artists, who are feeling the squeeze of a growing lack of cultural space as the borough booms, with the DOT and Homeland Security, organizations that prioritize moving people through the terminal as quickly as possible. The solution? “You talk a lot,” according to Melanie, and invest in outreach about how to engage with influx of population coming into the space.

With presentations over, the room broke into a series of rapid-fire discussion groups to delve further into the topic areas, share our own experiences, and explore common challenges. The room rejoined to share key take-outs. Here, a few of the questions most pertinent for Placemakers looking to bring cultural activity out into streets & public spaces:

• How can cultural workers arm themselves with ‘the right questions’ to ask?

• What is the process for acquiring space, and where can we access the technical expertise to manage and use it?

• How can cultural workers develop effective relationships with host organizations such as museums and libraries?

• How can cultural workers help expedite the sharing of a common vision with project partners?

• How can projects be made more sustainable in the short and long term?

Ideas, tactics, experiences, strategies and indeed, the entire morning, passing by with blistering speed and spirited enthusiasm. Many thanks to the organizers and The South Oxford Space for their initiative and planning, and creating the opportunity to develop some new practitioner working methods.

The breathtaking central hall of Cleveland's West Side Market, a major hub in the host city for this year's International Public Markets Conference (Sept. 21-23) / Photo: PBS NewsHour via Flickr

Picture yourself at the supermarket, awash in fluorescent light. You’re trying to stock up for the next couple of weeks, since it’s a busy time of year. You grab some granola bars (and maybe even a box of pop tarts), some frozen dinners, a box of macaroni with one of those little packets of powdered cheese stuff. And oh, they’re running one of those promotions where you can get ten cans of soup for, like, a dollar each. Perfect! Dinner for the next two weeks. On the way to the register, you swing by the produce aisle to grab a bunch of bananas. Like many people these days, you’re trying to eat healthy, and breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Now imagine that your neighborhood had a public market–the kind of place that’s easy to pop by on the way home from work to grab fresh food every couple of days. Before you reach the open-air shed, you’re surrounded by produce of every shape and color; you can smell oranges and basil from half a block away. As you follow your appetite through the maze of bins and barrels, you bump into your neighbors, and make plans to head downtown to the central market over the weekend to take a cooking class and pick up some less common ingredients. You may even make a day of it and check out the new weekly craft fair that takes place the next block over.

A boy and his mother examine produce at a farmers market in East New York / Photo: PPS

The contrast is stark. In most places today, at least in many Western countries, shopping is a chore; our food system has stopped being about food, and has become entirely about convenience. Food spoils, meaning that we used to have to shop at markets every few days; freezers and preservatives have freed us from those constraints, but in the process food has become disconnected from the natural cycle of daily life–and, thus, the communities of people that we shared our markets with. “There’s a lot of talk about food deserts today, but what many neighborhoods really have are place deserts,” says PPS’s Steve Davies. “As a result, we’re seeing a movement back to this idea of the Market City, with markets acting as catalysts for creating centers in neighborhoods that have lost their sense of place.”

Market Cities (and Market Towns) are places with strong networks for the distribution of healthy, locally-produced food. They have large central markets that act as hubs for the region and function as great multi-use destinations, with many activities clustering nearby; moving out into the neighborhoods, these cities contain many smaller (but still substantial) neighborhood markets that sell all the necessities for daily cooking needs; in between, you’ll find small corner grocers, weekly farmers markets, produce carts, and other small-scale distribution points. Market Cities are, in essence, places where food is one of the fundamental building blocks of urban life–not just fuel that you use to get through the day.

Today, Barcelona is often held up as one of the truest examples of a Market City system in action. “They have an incredibly thriving network of around 45 permanent public markets,” notes PPS’s Kelly Verel, “because when they planned out the city in the late 19th century, they considered markets the same way that you consider all utilities–like, where does the water go, the power, the garbage, etc.”

A map showing the locations of public markets around Barcelona, and the areas they serve.

Barcelona’s markets, many of which now incorporate modern grocery stores, prove that contemporary urban food systems do not necessarily need to use the big box supermarket as their base unit, and that markets are more than just nice extras or luxuries. In fact, with people growing increasingly suspicious of modern agricultural practices, the idea that the paradigm could flip is looking less and less far-fetched. “Markets are viable,” argues PPS’s David O’Neil. “They’ve always been viable, but their viability is especially apt today because the global economy has skewered our sense of being able to support ourselves. Markets are very reassuring places, because they give you a sense of responsibility for your own health. People are experimenting, and reinventing what it means to have a good life.”

According to O’Neil, there is Market City ‘DNA’ still hidden around most cities. Our cities grew up around markets and, while many of the old buildings have been dismantled, inexpensive and lightweight farmers markets have been making a comeback. By 1946, there were just 499 markets left in the US; that number rose to 2,863 by 2000, and then shot up to 7,175 by 2011. Many of the great public markets we know today started out as nothing more than roadside exchanges, so there is reason to believe that some of these new markets could very well put down more permanent roots if they become reintegrated into the life of their surrounding neighborhoods.

Up in Nova Scotia, where Davies and O’Neil have been working with the Halifax Seaport Farmers’ Market, Operations Manager Ewen Wallace notes the importance of his market (which does have its own permanent building) in the local community. “Throughout my involvement in this project and spending so much time face-to-face with the community at large” he says, “the thing that’s really hit home is that the people of Halifax really do consider this their market.”

Shoppers peruse the booths at the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market / Photo: Nicole Bratt via Flickr

And while the market is truly a stalwart (they’ve never missed a Saturday in 262 years!), the role that it plays in the regional economy contributes greatly to the sense of community ownership, since most residents of Atlantic Canada are just a generation away from a farmer or fisherman. “At the end of World War II,” Wallace explains, “we had around 35,000 independent farms in Nova Scotia. Now we have around 3,800. This market is intended to serve as a hub from which money in the urban core is being channeled back into rural areas around the province. This is all tied to food security.”

In Portland, Oregon, Director Trudy Toliver’s Portland Farmers Market benefits greatly from  a strong local food culture. “In Portland, for the most part, we really care a lot about food,” Toliver says. “It’s just important to us; the population has strong values about eating healthy food. We also don’t have many commodity farmers in Oregon–we grow food here. In a way, we’ve hit on the perfect storm.”

When food and agriculture play an important role in local culture, a market becomes an easier sell. But with many cities disconnected from the greater food systems that serve them, ancillary uses become important for longevity. This bodes well for places; as Davies explains: “Great markets are created through the clustering of activity. They require the intentional aggregation of local food production, but also of other services and functions. The food is the central reason for why people gather, and that gathering creates a hub for community life.”

Since markets are centered on the sale of nutrient-rich, natural foods, one smart way to add value to these locations is to focus on creating “healthy food hubs,” which cluster health-related activities around markets to encourage visitors not just to eat more fruits and vegetables, but to take a more proactive approach to their own well-being. Some markets include things like health clinics, fitness classes, nutrition information, or classes that teach healthy living principles. Healthy food hubs are especially useful in low-income areas where the need is more acute because of the high cost of regular preventative medical care.

Markets can also serve to amplify cherished aspects of local culture. Says Verel, “The idea of a marketplace is pretty open to what the talents and interests are in a given region. Food will always be the core, but how you build off of that depends on local needs. What if one of Detroit’s markets was for classic cars? Every Saturday you could set up the food stands in a parking lot, and line classic cars for sale up along the edges. If you’re open to it, a market can be anything.”

Relaxing with a view of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene / Photo: Eli Duke via Flickr

For a success story of a market not only building off of, but strengthening local identity, Verel taps the Brooklyn Flea, which has served as a major driver behind Brooklyn’s well-documented boom in artisanal food and craft goods. “The Flea gave all of these people who had ideas for a product a market, when they couldn’t have gotten it into a store because they were too small. There are so many permanent businesses here that started out of the Flea, and together they give Brooklyn this interesting character.”

This hits on one of the major strengths of the Market City in today’s economy, especially in down-at-heel cities where the things that they used to be famous for making are no longer made. Along with industry, many cities have lost their sense of identity. Markets offer a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper way to start rebuilding some of that identity and economic activity (as some of our recent work in Detroit has shown). Food is something that every city and town has the resources to produce locally–if a place as densely-built as New York can become an urban agriculture leader, any city can.

In Halifax, Wallace can rattle off a long list of activities that the Seaport Farmers Market has added to its programming, from a library book-drop to serve far-flung farmers, to student art exhibits, to community org booths. These efforts are all aimed at turning the market into a “modern agora,” in his words. Most exciting are the partnerships with businesses in the surrounding area that highlight the market’s vendors, hinting at the potential for markets to serve as economic anchors.

“In the community,” he explains, ” our landlord has put together a committee to get neighbors involved to promote the area as a district. In August of 2011, the market partnered with the Westin Hotel across the street, and they built the concept for their restaurant around the idea of a 100-mile diet–now they’ve got it down to a 50-mile diet. They are sourcing as many ingredients from the market as possible. They’re listing all of the producers from around Nova Scotia on their menus.”

Seattle's Pike Place Market is the hub of a model market district / Photo: PPS

In a Market City, the most vibrant places are these types of market districts: places where market activity spills out into the surrounding streets and businesses. Using the Power of 10 framework, we can identify market districts as neighborhoods with at least ten market-related activities all within close proximity to each other. Zooming out, a great Market City or Market Town needs at least ten market districts, where local activity spreads out from the neighborhood marketplace.

If you want to see a Market City in action, you may want to consider attending the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland this September. Chosen as the host city because of the role that food is playing in its remarkable turnaround, Cleveland illustrates many of the aspects of a Market City, according to O’Neil.

The West Side Market tower, seen from the nearby Ohio City Farm / Photo: PPS

“From agricultural production areas, to smaller markets, to bigger markets, you can really see things changing in Cleveland,” he says. “For a long time, Cleveland was a Market Town, and now institutions like the West Side Market are leading its post-industrial revival. The WSM isn’t a suburban market, but it’s not right downtown–it was always a neighborhood market. It’s a good lab for seeing the power that a market can have on its town or district. The Ohio City district has become an attractive place to open up a business because of the market. The effect is becoming so positive that it’s affecting the larger city of Cleveland, itself. The market is becoming a sun, and the city is leaning toward it for oxygen, light, and life.”

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Richard Serra

An enormous blinking eye stared down from the underside of a long-unused water tower. People disembarking from the NY Waterway Ferry were greeted by a soothing but slightly suspicious voice purring, “Hey, you….” Buskers performed under a twinkling canopy of sound-responsive light bulbs suspended from the 50-foot ceiling of a turn-of-the-century factory. Dozens of other projections and installations brought beauty, surprise, and a sense of community to a long-dormant area of post-industrial decay.

Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York 2011 from Nuit Blanche New York on Vimeo.

Bring to Light is an annual free public art event, an immersive nighttime spectacle on New York City’s waterfront that presents site-specific installations of light, sound, performance, and projection art. Occurring simultaneously with Nuit Blanche events in cities around the world, Bring to Light (now in its second year) activates underutilized spaces, creates imaginative outlets for civic engagement, and reconfigures public space to showcase possibilities for change.

The festival, which is co-curated by PPS’s Ken Farmer, lives on beyond this ephemeral evening of illumination. Organizers advocate for increased public space accessibility on the Brooklyn waterfront, work to reinvigorate historic warehouse spaces for public programming, and seek to expand the audience for this contemporary art platform.

At the intersection of art and activism, events like Bring to Light challenge visitors to reimagine the potential of their public spaces. Just as pop-up parks can transform abandoned lots into convivial gathering spots, Bring to Light illuminates the potential of underutilized areas and neglected historic structures, inviting people to imagine them as reanimated places.

A core element of Bring to Light’s mission is improving public accessibility and activating underutilized portions of the waterfront. New York, like cities around the world, is in the midst of rediscovering its waterfront. Mayor Mike Bloomberg refers to the waterfront as the city’s sixth borough — a frontier for which Bring to Light envisions a more imaginative future.

A panel at the New Museum called “Illuminating the City: Site-Specific Art as Urban Activator,” explored this potential through the eyes of curators, architects and city officials. When asked about the city’s perspective on events like Bring to Light at that panel, Stephanie Thayer, NYC Parks Department supervisor for North Brookyln and Executive Director of the Open Space Alliance, had this to say:

“Our waterfront is private factories — abandoned and working — where the entire neighborhood is denied access,” said Thayer. “The city’s long-term vision is to create a public esplanade and piers, as promised with the 2005 rezoning. In the meantime, the community is cut off from that waterfront…. Bring to Light brought our neighborhood into these very private spaces, creating a sense of adventure and ‘lighting up’ spaces that are in the dark for our neighborhood.

“More than that, they pushed through a lot of very challenging barriers. For example, we have been fighting with developers since 2004 to create public access on the India/Java street waterfront. Bring to Light wanted to activate this space for the event, which I felt was impossible on their timeline. But they were committed to making this happen, and after negotiating what needed to be negotiated, they were out there with shovels and rakes themselves — physically making it happen….

“The neighborhood is surrounded on two sides by waterfront but has very little access. Bring to Light was able to blow that open for everybody.”

Putnam Block Party from adele pham on Vimeo.

Earlier this year, one resident at a public meeting about the project asked, “What if people don’t want this thing?” Well, we’d say it looks like they do.