President of ASH+LIME, Downtown/neighborhood planner, public speaker, city coach. Strong Towns Founders Circle. Ask me about Third Places.
This, more than anything, is the keystone of the #StrongTowns message: There is a timeless set of principles that informed the way cities were built and developed, created by trial and error over millennia. The US (and Canada) leveraged vast land and unprecedented wealth to abandon those principles and create entirely new ones on an enormous scale. Unfortunately, we are now experiencing many negative, unintended consequences of this multi-decade experiment. Virtually everything else the Strong Towns movement advocates is an offshoot of this idea. I’ve been researching ancient and medieval cities and how they evolved through techniques we now call placemaking. What I’m finding is astounding, far beyond even my expectations. Have no doubt - we are not inventing new principles. We’re simply rediscovering them and figuring out how they apply to our current age.
What would happen if we built our communities around places? 📍🗺️ Placemaking can help transform public spaces, inspiring people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. But what is placemaking? Placemaking means “strengthening the connection between people and the places they share" and refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm to maximize shared value. It's much more than just promoting better urban design. Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution. In short, by designing cities for people and prioritising our public spaces, placemaking can have the most transformative impact on our cities, including equity and inclusion, sustainability and resilience and health. (Source: Project for Public Spaces; https://loom.ly/dVEXRC8; Picture credit: European Prize for Urban Public Space)
