On November 21st we hosted “Promoting equitable change through creative placemaking & Complete Streets” the ninth installment of our monthly webinar series, Implementation & Equity 201: The Path Forward to Complete Streets. A recording of the webinar is now available above. You can also download the PDF of the presentation, or read the brief recap below.
As defined in Transportation for America’s Scenic Route report creative placemaking is:
“In the transportation context, creative placemaking is an approach that deeply engages the arts, culture, and creativity, especially from underrepresented communities, in planning and designing projects so that the resulting communities better reflect and celebrate local culture, heritage, and values.”
Nimotalai Azeez, Program Associate at the National Complete Streets Coalition opened the webinar by introducing each of the San Diego-based speakers, as well as Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, Vice President and Landscape Architecture Practice Leader at AECOM, who served as the moderator for the webinar and is one of NCSC’s steering committee members. Ignacio discussed the importance of creative placemaking as a community building enterprise. Through visuals and recent local and international examples, Ignacio grounded the audience in the idea that streets are the theater stage of civic and urban life and in the same way that a stage can be transformed, streets should also be transformative and flexible. Flexibility is more than dividing lanes by transportation mode, but streets should accommodate all the means of personal mobility, and these means are ever-changing. Technology, more than ever, also plays a key role in how we organize on streets and within urban space.
Following Ignacio’s introduction, Joe Cosgrove, Policy Coordinator at Circulate San Diego presented on a project funded by the Kresge Foundation and Transportation for America. The four steps taken to achieve equitable placemaking are as followed. First, if conducting a pilot/demonstration project, document the process including all successes and challenges. Then, establish a neighborhood placemaking collaborative that includes residents and organizations from various neighborhoods. Next, conduct research from case studies (A Place for Placemaking in San Diego) and use it to guide policy change. Lastly, advocate for and support a city-wide placemaking permit. Joe also touched on some of the barriers they found to success in placemaking, such as complicated permitting processes, inequitable decision-making amongst residents, and difficulty securing funding. A placemaking permit is intended to solve some of these challenges by creating a simpler, cheaper process for temporary installations.