On this our 5th edition of our grateful for places post, the State of Place family shares why they’re thankful for place this year in particular, and invite you to share your own expressions of gratitude for the places you hold dear.
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TODAY! Catch our panel about how data-driven citymaking can help usher in more livable, healthy, and equitable cities, which aired as part of the Global Smart Cities Week sponsored by Smart Cities Council. I was joined by the City of Philadelphia's Smart City Director (and our customer!), Emily Yates, along with Michael Northey, Project Officer of Place Services for the City of Parramatta, in OZ, and Andrea DiGiovanni, Strategic Projects Lead for Neighbourlytics, another super awesome smart city software focusing on social data (who is also a partner!). The incomparable Lucinda Hartley, co-founder of Neighbourlytics, moderated our discussion!
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Join State of Place’s Founder/CEO, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo’s keynote on Data-driven Citymaking presented at the Smart City, Happy Citizens World Summit at 10:40am EST on November 14th, 2020! She’ll discuss why data-driven citymaking - that allows for evidence-based, community-led, bottom-up approaches to creating more walkable, livable, and sustainable places - is needed to create a more transparent and accountable process that leads to more effective, cost-efficient, inclusive, just, equitable, and healthy places - that embrace all of us.
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Watch State of Place’s Founder/CEO, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo in a panel discussion hosted by AARP, alongside Ifeoma Ebo, co-founder of Black Space and former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, on how to “Enable by Design” and “Drive Informed Demand"(for more equitable places), as part of a 6-part series on Equity by Design.
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Amenities that make communities more attractive, more walkable, and better places to live can also lead to gentrification. Dr. Mariela Alfonzo of State of Place shares why using data to make better decisions—and thus create better policy—can mitigate the perils of rising housing costs and displacement.
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Tomorrow, September 24th at 11am EST, please join our Founder/CEO, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo for a panel hosted by AARP on how to “Enable by Design” and “Drive Informed Demand"(for more equitable places), as part of a 6-part series on Equity by Design. Register here.
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Today, we are honored to welcome a special guest contribution by Miguel A. Vazquez, the chair of the new initiative, PHEAL - Planning for Health Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership. Miguel will tell the story of how PHEAL evolved, what it stands for, and why we must work to power all of its principles and values.
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Please join our Founder/CEO as she moderates a discussion for New Cities’ “New Housing Solutions LIVE” 3-day virtual conference around Millenials and Missing Middle Housing, centered around addressing the need for more affordable, family-friendly housing in an equitable and inclusive way. She will guide her renowned panelists - with backgrounds in academia, the private, non-profit, and public sectors - through a dynamic, candid conversation on tools, strategies and processes that get to the structural issues, exacerbated by a post-Covid world, that have led to significant racial and class disparities and spatial injustices as it concerns Millenials’ access to housing. The conference runs from July 14th - 16th, and her panel is on Wednesday, July 15th at 11am EDT!
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Please join our Founder/CEO as she moderates a discussion for New Cities’ “New Housing Solutions LIVE” 3-day virtual conference around Millenials and Missing Middle Housing, centered around addressing the need for more affordable, family-friendly housing in an equitable and inclusive way. She will guide her renowned panelists - with backgrounds in academia, the private, non-profit, and public sectors - through a dynamic, candid conversation on tools, strategies and processes that get to the structural issues, exacerbated by a post-Covid world, that have led to significant racial and class disparities and spatial injustices as it concerns Millenials’ access to housing. The conference runs from July 14th - 16th, and her panel is on Wednesday, July 15th at 11am EDT!
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Over the past 14 days, we have borne witness to a murder of a(nother) black man at the hands of police. And before that the murder of Breonna Taylor, also by police. And before that the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by white supremacists. And before that the murder of countless other black people tied to police brutality. But before all of that, way before…there have been a devastatingly exhausting litany of “before thats” tied to myriad racist, systemic, structural, spatial inequities that have brought us to where we are today. Get ready. This ain’t gonna be comfortable. But getting uncomfortable is the least you can do.
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The second episode of Covid City Stories features five citymakers from Miami, Minneapolis, Bengaluru, the Emirates, and Bethesda, Maryland. Their collective voices convey a sense of hope in the face of fear, offer light in the midst of darkness, and call on us to take action as we reach the end of the beginning of this global story…Again, we hope these stories inspire you to get into some “good trouble” and compel you to record your own. Please stay safe, well, and in touch.
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Listen to the first compilation of stories from citymakers in the trenches of Covid19. They share how they’re feeling, coping, doing, strategizing, raging…. We hope that sharing their stories with you all, our community, our people, will help you commiserate, inspire you, lift you up, spark you to get in some “good trouble” starting now, spread some empathy, spark joy in your hearts and souls. Please stay safe, well, and in touch.
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Last weekend, the New Cities Foundation - where I’m a Placemaking Fellow - asked me to contribute my thoughts regarding the role of placemaking and the public realm in light of Covid19 and the calls for social distancing. I was honored and also relieved to have such a wonderful outlet to finally put pen to paper and make concrete the many thoughts I’ve had about this very topic since leaving Shanghai (my adopted home) two months ago…So I present to you the intro to the piece I wrote for them, and a link to the full article below! Would love your thoughts - please feel free to comment here, or tweet me at @cityfoodlover or @stateofplace! In the meantime, please stay safe, healthy - and sane!
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Today is 2-20-2020 - or better yet, in European format, 20-2-20! It also happens to be the 50th day of the decade. which is insane given how much has ALREADY happened this year! Despite the frenzied start to the year, we’ve had our heads down working on some key partnerships, marketing campaigns, and game-changing technological advances here at State of Place, which we’ll be unveiling throughout the next 50 days! But we’ve also been quite contemplative…You see, we had hoped to have reprised the ever-popular Do This. Not That. blog from 2019 at the start of this new decade, but we’re really taking our time putting together this list, especially in light of ever-important primary season here in the U.S., during which key (urban) policy agendas are taking shape. So we’re asking for one more week to pull this together for you, and in the meantime, we’re inviting you to re-examine our roundup of 12 key citymaking movements that have shaped us to date…
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It’s Valentine’s Day - and we’re feeling the PLACE love!! As per always! So we’d thought we bring you one of our most beloved posts - about a data-driven love story, if you will: how Street Plan’s awesome tactical urbanism “makeover” brought serious love to Asheville, North Carolina. We just nerdified the love a bit with some Os and 1s - but no surprise there. We promise you’ll love this transformation story. This street do-over will not only tug on your heartstrings, it will also show that PLACE love also pays - and quite handsomely at that! So dig in - and fall in love! :)
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So, our Ford CityOne proposal to the City of Austin to use Healthy Placemaking as a “vehicle” to deliver true, equitable mobility - and access to health - to vulnerable communities wasn’t selected. BUT we still fervently believe that “mobile healthy placemaking” is not only a WINNING proposal, but that it is a unique, effective, and necessary way forward to ensure equitable mobility and access for all - while delivering places people love. So we wanted to share our full proposal to create mobile healthy places with you all and start a discussion around how the principles that guide great placemaking and tactical urbanism can (and should) be applied as a way to address the inequitable access to mobility, health, quality of life, and great places…
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It’s kinda hard to believe - actually, it’s mind-blowingly hard - that we are nearing the dawn of 2020! We’re officially back to the future, folks! And boy has the world of planning and development exponentially changed over this past decade. 2010 seems like ancient history - we were knee-deep into the Great Recession, the foreclosure crisis had gripped the entire nation, retailers were just starting to feel threatened by the “internet” age, the polar vortex and snowmaggedons were novel, cutesy phenomenons - in fact (to most) climate change seemed like a far-off reality - and the ubers, weworks, and airbnbs of the tech world were mere babies, while AV connoted the nerdiest of the high school clubs, not the Jetson’s-like driverless-vehicle future. Clearly, urbanism has changed in myriad ways over the past ten years. Here are the top 12 movements we believe indelibly changed citymaking, for better or worse this past decade.
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Last week, we compiled a list of awesome gifts for the citylover and datageeks in your life. This week, we profiled five awesome, walkable shopping districts, where you can actually shop for some of these gifts - or just walk away the calories you’ve already been piling up using our very own State of Place analysis. Check out which places made the cut and how you can use data to make your place more walkable and livable - and maybe even be profiled here next year, just in time for the holidays!
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