The Placemaking Round-Up
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
The Biweekly Bazaar
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
The 5th International Placemaking Week will take place in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., June 24-26, 2026! We look forward to opening our Call for Proposals in October 2025, but in the meantime, let’s take a closer look at our host city!
We have a lot to learn from Detroit. From its downtown to its riverfront to its neighborhood parks, Detroit’s community-driven projects have transformed vacant spaces into vibrant hubs of culture, connection, and pride. Today, with a growing population and healthy finances, the city is redefining its downtown as a welcoming civic core, while rebuilding infrastructure from landmark bridges to pocket parks. Having worked with multiple sites and partners in Detroit over the years, including Campus Martius Park and more recently, the Joy-Alpine Trailhead on the Joe Louis Greenway, Project for Public Spaces is thrilled to renew our long relationship with this great city and welcome hundreds of placemakers from around the world to explore and learn from its challenges and astonishing comeback.
Detroit is a city that has weathered some of the toughest place-based challenges—economic disinvestment, population decline, vacancy, and even bankruptcy—yet has emerged with unmatched resilience and grit. Just ten years ago, a bustling and vibrant Detroit seemed unimaginable—the city was a national symbol of decline. Between 2000 and 2020, people were leaving in droves and the population had dropped by 33%. In 2013, it became the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy.
Fast forward to today: Detroit is gaining population, its finances are back in the black, and city government, philanthropy, and the private sector are doubling down on the city’s future. Downtown Detroit is evolving to become more than just a central business district—it is transforming into a place that is more representative, inviting, and inclusive than ever before. Placemaking in Detroit is not just about its deep creative and manufacturing history, but a greater reflection of the city’s culture of innovation, artistry, and get-it-done mentality.
Here are three reasons to join us in 2026:
“You can make it in Detroit, if you make it in Detroit."
Detroit’s remarkable recovery from economic decline stands as a testament to the power of placemaking to help cities meet the many challenges of our world today. As many cities and towns around the world face similar obstacles, Detroit’s grit inspires our 2026 conference theme, From Recovery to Resilience through Placemaking.
At the heart of the city’s resurgence is Campus Martius Park, a national model for urban revitalization and downtown's crown jewel, which sparked a 22-year wave of revitalization led by our conference co-host, Downtown Detroit Partnership (DDP), through a public-private partnership with the City of Detroit. Its ability to attract over 4.5 million visitors a year for a plethora of public events like its holiday tree lighting, movie nights, and beach parties earned it recognition as the “No. 1 Public Square in America” by USA Today’s 10Best for the third consecutive year in 2025 and its outdoor ice skating rink as “No. 1 Best Ice Skating Rink” in the country.
In the past 10 years, billions of public and private dollars have been invested in public space in Detroit. One major example is Michigan Central Station, a formerly disused rail station where you’ll now find public plazas, green space, mobility testing facilities, and cultural programming that reactivates the Corktown neighborhood as a new model for civic space that blends adaptive reuse and placemaking. Another example of a major public space investment is the Joe Louis Greenway, a transformative 27.5-mile multi-use trail weaving together over 23 Detroit neighborhoods by knitting together existing paths into a unified loop and unlocking walkable and bikeable access to parks, schools, commercial districts, transit hubs, and historic gateways, creating new opportunities for mobility, recreation, and neighborhood connectivity. From the Detroit Riverfront and Eastern Market to neighborhood parks, Detroit's transformational projects demonstrate how community-centered placemaking turns forgotten spaces into thriving destinations that strengthen community identity and civic pride.
These efforts show how Detroit turned hard times into opportunities for reinvention—putting the city on a path to national competitiveness. Citywide, Detroit earned spots on both The New York Times’ “52 Places to Go in 2025” and Travel + Leisure’s Top 50 Places to Travel in 2025, highlighting its revitalized public spaces and cultural renaissance. More than a reason to visit, the transformation of Downtown Detroit makes it a place to return—it is experiencing a reverse migration in which those who had left for the suburbs are coming back to the city!
Detroit’s remarkable comeback serves as a model for other cities facing similar challenges of shifting population, including those transitioning from office-centric downtowns to vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods. They can look to Detroit as a blueprint for how to turn decline into opportunity by reimagining vacant buildings and fostering local entrepreneurship.
There’s no better place to serve as a model of resilience than Detroit. Placemaking Week participants will see firsthand the power of public space by meeting the people behind the public space transformations that have helped turn the city around.
Third places—cafés, galleries, community hubs, and public spaces—have become enclaves for artists, urban experimentation, and neighborhood engagement where residents, business owners, workers, and visitors shape Detroit’s future. These places are where people have found a sense of belonging and have helped strengthen community identity and civic pride.
Detroit is famous for its do-it-yourself ethos and a penchant for “lighter, quicker, cheaper” placemaking. Communities often experiment with pop-up parks, community markets, and public art before formal city adoption. By demonstrating tangible results and strong community commitment, many of these grassroots projects have later become permanent features, inspiring new interest to create more initiatives.
In the city’s effort to become a more connected city with equitable access to amenities, 84% of Detroit residents now live within a 10-minute walk of a park. Detroit has over 300 parks and public green spaces including Belle Isle, a 982-acre island park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted that is larger than his famous design for Central Park. Recent efforts focus on enhancing accessibility and connectivity, including the development of the “Belle Isle Commons” to create a more pedestrian-friendly environment.
Together, these spaces and efforts reveal a city where community-driven creativity and connection are reshaping the urban landscape—strengthening social infrastructure at a time when cities everywhere are searching for ways to combat loneliness.
For decades, more and more cities have embraced placemaking as a means for engaging communities in the improvement of public space, but in 2025, public funding and other support systems have been disrupted. The onset of these challenges, which public space leaders identified in our 2024 State of Public Space report, will likely worsen. As a result, collective problem-solving and ingenuity through placemaking will be even more essential to tackle urban problems that are growing at unprecedented levels.
Having wrestled with major urban crises for more than two decades, the Downtown Detroit Partnership has helped lead its city’s recovery work, leveraging a proven model of collaboration with the City of Detroit and private sector partners alike. At Placemaking Week, you won’t only learn from your peers in dozens of breakout sessions, but experience these spaces for yourself on mobile workshops. Together, with a global community of placemakers, we will explore how placemaking can address tightening budgets, contentious politics, and the ongoing crises of social isolation and climate change. Placemaking Week is a reminder that we’re in this together, and we can’t do it alone.
If you're passionate about placemaking and eager to learn about the bold, transformative efforts needed to reinvent and revive a city in near financial collapse, we invite you to join us for the most inspiring in-person placemaking conference of the year. See you in The D!
To receive the latest updates regarding the conference, including the Call for Proposals, which will open in October 2025, the event program, and more, subscribe to the Placemaking Round-Up newsletter. Additional information will also be available on the conference website, so be sure to check back regularly at placemakingweek.org.
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