Public Sphere Projects

Last week, our team spent an inspiring few days at IDA's 2025 West Coast District Forum in San Francisco. This year's theme - Building Blocks for Downtown Renaissance - was all about reimagining the urban spaces we care for. From diving into placemaking best practices to exploring how AI is reshaping urban management, the conference featured innovative ideas and opportunities to catch up with some of our closest friends. PSP's very own Jennie Kovalcik presented with Alex Stettinski from San Jose Downtown Association, Audrey Y. from Moment, and Chris Guillot from Merchant Method for some real talk with urban place managers about the next chapter in the downtown retail revival. ?? Huge thanks to Downtown SF Partnership and The East Cut Community Benefit District for hosting us! We left energized and ready to apply these transformative insights to our own practice.

Earlier this month Philip Barash dropped into LA to help officials, community leaders, entrepreneurs, developers, and artists set the trajectory of The Social District - perhaps the most vibrant cultural and entertainment area in the city. The district is hype: there are sneaker shops and theater marquees, farmers markets and high rises, old school car shops and slick entertainment venues. The district is now reimagining itself ahead of LA28 Olympic & Paralympic Games while still managing the fallout from the pandemic. Our friend Nolan Marshall III is in the middle of this creative maelstrom. The organization he leads has the mandate to make sense of it all: to steward public spaces, to mobilize business owners, to convert skeptics. And through it all, to keep the place navigable, safe, happy. With Nolan’s staff and board, we talked about this mandate - and reflected on how to pick out the golden thread that stitches through it. What’s the wish list? What’s left out? What’s possible? What’s impossible but worth doing anyway? Huge thanks to co-facilitator of this conversation Brittany Delany, and the board and staff of the LA Social District who lent their passion and wisdom to the planning process. #lasocialdistrict #boardretreat #publicrealm

Stretching down from the southern shore of Lake Michigan, Northwest Indiana is a region of contrasts. Along the lakefront, summer cottages snuggle up against steel plants. Interstate highways, some of the busiest logistics networks in the US, exit to scenic byways shaded by oak trees. Northern industrial cities — like Gary, IN — give way to endless prairie dotted with farmhouses in the most productive agricultural region in the state. The Indiana Dunes National Park, a stunning landscape held sacred by native Miami and Potawatomi people, is a stone’s throw from densely populated immigrant communities. And a no-nonsense midwestern ethos, so characteristic of the region, coexists with a strong current of innovation and curiosity. Yet, as our team embedded in the region over the past weeks, no matter where we looked, we found a latticework of arts and culture that overlays this vast and diverse geography. In community meetings and roundtable discussions, in site visits and casual conversations, the region’s culture makers convinced us that Northwest Indiana is stitched together by arts and culture. As we engaged with the region’s varied communities, we heard from photographers, curators, sculptors, actors, chefs, students, builders. We sat with steelworkers and farmers, chatted with philosophers and land stewards, visited muralists and developers. They showed up because they care deeply about arts and culture — about amplifying the identity of Northwest Indiana as a place that not only makes, but one that creates. We at Public Sphere Projects are grateful to the hundreds of Hoosiers who shared their passions and pains with us. We came away from this engagement with an emerging map of the region’s cultural assets, that will inform policy and funding recommendations. And we are grateful to Northwest Indiana Forum, whose leadership made space for community members to share ideas and meals. As this project unfolds, we look forward to serving Northwest Indiana with an insightful and actionable plan for supporting its arts and culture ecosystem. Indiana Economic Development Corporation Indiana Arts Commission #publicsphereprojects #artsandculture #economicdevelopment #northwestindiana #regionalartsandculture #readi2.0

Allentown holds an iconic status as the bellwether of political, economic, and social shifts across the US. Today, thanks to the energies and talents of a majority Latin population — and a cohort of forward-looking business and political leaders — Allentown is reinventing an American dream. PSP has been fortunate to work alongside a diverse, vocal, and exceptionally optimistic cohort of stakeholders on a project to reinvigorate the city’s historic core. Our work supports local entrepreneurs who are building wealth in the community. It spotlights artists and culture-makers. It brings energy to public spaces. It celebrates, above all, the people who continue to make this city a place to find refuge, belonging, and thriving. Read more about our collaboration in Allentown: https://lnkd.in/gBbFQrNH https://lnkd.in/g7qskhDc Thanks to our partners: Allentown Economic Development Corporation, Mayor Matt Tuerk, Senator Nick Miller, Agora Cultural Architects & local leaders.

We care a lot. Not just in the sense of taking our work seriously, but as an animating force—the heart of what we do. Stewarding shared spaces, expressing culture, strengthening communities, illuminating choices: in these ways, and countless others, we make care a practice—and a purpose. Wishing you good care in the year ahead. ??

“The government charge to facilitate social cohesion among residents needs to be framed as a municipal goal.” - Roberto Bedoya Roberto Bedoya, the recently retired cultural manager for the City of Oakland, has long been a voice of inspiration, dissension, and imagination in our field. He’s a both a poet and a self-professed policy wonk, who smuggles into the apparatus of municipal governance a focus on shared beauty, on belonging. In a recent piece for SPUR, Roberto rearticulates his commitment to the “civic we” — rather than some bureaucratic?abstraction, he sees it as the first principle of municipal policymaking and investment. It should be made required reading for all of our hardworking public-sector clients who grapple with the complexities of culture and policy across the US. We at PSP are fortunate to count Roberto among our friends. And we are fortunate to have his voice guide the work of the cultural planning sector. Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/ga3fxYyk #artsandculture #grantmakinginthearts #civicwe

Earlier this month, some of our team members met in the great city of Chicago to discuss our goals and aspirations for 2025. We are excited about the coalition of creative and collaborative folks who have joined our team this past year and look forward to the work we will do together, falling in love with every new place we visit along the way. Happy holidays from the PSP team. #publicsphereprojects #chicago #retreat ??: Philip Barash, Dillon Goodson, Kate Reese, Michelle Woods, & Jennie Kovalcik

Both urban planning and poetry are representational practices. They help us imagine what doesn’t yet exist, to bring forth a different reality. Yet where planning is literal, poetry can be powerfully figurative. Where planning is linear, poetry finds wormholes through history. Where planning proceeds with certainty, poetry attunes us to the ambiguous, the uncanny. At a symposium on cultural policy at Universidad de Puerto Rico, Philip Barash delivered a keynote talk about these representational and epistemic overlaps. He spoke about a project that PSP helped to envision, at the edge of the Boston Waterfront - Lot Lab - that revealed how poetry and planning tangle up in a deeply significant space. The talk emphasized the complexity of the Atlantic world — shuttling of ideas, people, and words across eras and continents. The talk culminated with a reading of Federico García Lorca’s towering poem, “An Ode to Walt Whitman,” both in the original Spanish and in translation. #placemaking #urbanplanning #artsandculture ?? (1): Charles Mayer Special thanks to Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mellon Foundation, Historic Parks of Boston, and the Boston Art Triennial.

We’re back from Allentown, Pennsylvania, where our team is working alongside Allentown Economic Development Corporation, Mayor Matt Tuerk, Senator Nick Miller, and other leaders on ideas for reenergizing the downtown core. We were smitten with the city’s historic streets and booming new developments; with its gentle hills and packed restaurants. And we couldn’t feel more warmly welcomed by the city’s majority Latinx community, with whom we celebrated Dia de los Muertos. In the coming weeks, Public Sphere Projects, alongside our partners, Agora Cultural Architects and Michael Berne, will finalize a downtown activation strategy that establishes placekeeping principles, elevates cultural assets, structures public finance, and brings together an inclusive coalition for long-term stewardship. ??: (1) City of Allentown / Marco Calderon Photography #cities #downtowns #placemaking #economicdevelopment #allentown #allentownpa #diadelosmuertos #publicsphereprojects

Thanks for rocking & rolling with us at the International Downtown Association's 70th Annual Conference & Marketplace in Seattle!???? Friends and colleagues from around the world dropped in to listen to music, share songs to a mixtape, and, of course, geek out on all things creative placemaking and place management. Special thanks to our west-coast crew for making our Mix Tape?afterparty a huge success, featuring KEXP's DJ Alex White.? If you missed out on the action, sign up for our newsletter and listen to our shared Spotify Playlist. #IDASEA24 https://psp.city/