Transformative Ideas - Social Life Project

How Placemaking and Social Life are Helping Win the Climate War

When it comes to addressing climate change in a way that actually moves the needle, the creativity and community-orientation that always defined the global Placemaking movement can be the foundation for the future of communities everywhere--and for our planet.

Great Public Spaces

Catalytic Places: Public Squares

What great squares have to offer their communities is limitless. Above all, it's the social life that works in these squares: What are perhaps the most magical parts about these places are the simple, crucial chance encounters that allow us to have with others.

Climate Change

Throwing (Good) Shade for Placemaking

Shade can become an intentional strategy — developed with communities, led by communities. If we do it right, the addition of shade in all its forms can have an enormous collective impact on walkability, Social Life, and climate resilience.

Transformative Ideas

Reconstruyamos Juntos y Mejor: 11 Agendas Transformadoras Para Restaurar La Vida en Nuestra Comunidad

Salvar el planeta depende de recuperar nuestras comunidades

Great Public Spaces

Kungsträdgården: Stockholm's Square for All

Stockholm's Kungsträdgården has everything one could want in a great square. It is one of the most diverse and important squares in Europe

Transformative Ideas

Build Back Better, Together: 11 Transformative Agendas to Restore Social Life in Your Community

Saving the planet depends on reclaiming our communities.

Neighborhoods

What Happened to Small-Town Life and How to Recapture It

we found and learned from some truly wonderful examples of small-town social life, and it is these glimmers of hope that can lay the foundation for new attention to public spaces in smaller communities.

Architecture of Place

Community Discussion: Creating the Heart of Brooklyn — Brooklyn Borough Hall, Court House, Cadman Plaza down to Fulton Landing

This article is meant to help build a campaign around a concept for a promenade from Borough Hall doown to Dumbo and Fulton Landing — an idea that we first introduced in the New York Times in 2007. The concept has in part been carried forward by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership as

Great Public Spaces

Driving the Local Food Economy with Social Life: Munich's Victuals Market

The Victuals Market (Viktualienmarkt) in Munich, Germany Central "Market Square" is typical of the historic squares around Europe, showcasing the local commerce, culture and diversity in the center of each city.

Transformative Ideas

To Save the Planet, Start With the Social Life of Sidewalks

Rich street life is no frill. It is an expression of the most ancient function of a city—a place for people to come together, all kinds of people, face-to-face. — William "Holly" Whyte

Transformative Ideas

Our Global Catastrophes will be Solved by Local Communities

The problems we face are global in scale. Yet the most effective solutions can be found on the local level. The frontlines for social change today are in neighborhoods, villages, towns and cities.

Sidewalks

Creating the Streets We Want

Rich street life is no frill. It is an expression of the most ancient function of a city—a place for people to come together, all kinds of people, face-to-face. — William "Holly" Whyte

Barcelona

La Rambla: Barcelona's Promenade-to-the-Sea is One of the World's Great Streets

A torrent of humanity, a river of life, a tumultuous flow of people of every imaginable size, shape, age, gender and flavor.

Social Life and COVID-19

Open Our Communities: 10 Ways to Restoring Social Connections and Local Economies

How do we “tip-toe” our way back to a flourishing social life, capitalizing on local knowledge to make sensible choices about how to reopen our communities by involving local people in the decisions.

Brooklyn

Three Iconic Waterfronts—Two of World's Best, and One that Fails Miserably

What Brooklyn (and everywhere else) can learn from Paris and Porto, Portugal