What If We Built Our Cities Around Pillories and Stockades?

PPS workshop participants suggest "old fashioned amenities" to enliven local town square.

WEST OVERCOAT, ND - Reaching back decades to the era of public humiliation, participants in a local planning effort to enliven Sidney Carton Square, the downtown park that was once the town common, but lately had fallen into disuse, suggested sentencing petty criminals to a stockade. Demonstrating the power of Placemaking, a participant noted that an old stockade was still in the basement of the Town Hall and, in a matter of hours, it was dragged out into the park for a demonstration project.

The stockades in Sidney Carton Square can make even the sunniest day a little brighter for residents of West Overcoat, North Dakota.

Using the PPS Placemaking process, residents were brainstorming ways to increase use in the once-vibrant square. They later used the same participatory process to discuss what sort of crimes deserve the humiliation treatment. Among the leading contenders at presstime were talking too loud in a cell phone at a restaurant or other public place and use of the word "impacted" when meaning to say "had an impact." It was unanimously decided that speeders and people who don't come to a complete halt at stop signs deserve the full brunt of the stockade.

Because Placemaking identifies local partners and resources, a local farmers market in town agreed to relocate to the square, and volunteered to provide crowds with rotten and bruised vegetables and fruit to hurl at wrongdoers.

One workshop participant offered this perspective: "I could stand a few days in jail, but a few hours in the stockade would be horrible. To be there on display in our town common seems like a far, far worse thing than anything I could imagine happening to me in the local pokey."