– Your Bright Brothers Team
David Romako / Josh Yeager /  Brandi Walsh

Drum roll please!  BIG CONGRATULATIONS to our client Robbie Silver on a number of recent accolades! Silver, who previously worked for the City of Riverside, CA, as well as Union Square district in San Francisco, just hit his one-year mark at Downtown San Francisco as one of the youngest executive directors of an urban place management organization. His exuberance, vitality and big picture thinking are propelling this district to undertake myriad placemaking, public art, beautification and streetscape initiatives on top of their full docket of clean & safe and ameliorated municipal amenities.  Looking to revitalize the downtown (the CBD’s purview consists of a 43-block footprint in San Francisco’s financial district and Jackson Square), Silver has also assembled a whip-smart arsenal of organizational professionals to battle-axe the tasks at hand. As Robbie leads the charge in efforts to reverse the pandemic-fueled damage on one of the city’s hardest hit districts, he’s looking at destination marketing and placemaking best practices among other strategies to revitalize this once-vibrant core. Cheers and kudos to Robbie and the entire team!

You know we love a good “instant placemaking” proof-of-concept, and this week we’ve got two inspiring scenarios to share with you. In the past, we’ve covered innovative engagement solutions from Dallas-based Place Fab, and Philly-based Tiny WPA – and here are two more. First off, we feature, yet again, those crafty masters of the compact “Block in a Box” by Better Block Foundation, who are currently retiring their two-year old shipping container concept and teasing us with the lure of an October reboot. We cannot wait to see what it will bring! And again, out of the City of Brotherly Love, this Next City piece addresses green space development couched as “IKEA but for Parks”, and we’re so here for it!  Do you have examples of pop-up placemaking and park activation you’d like to share with the UPMO community? If so, shoot us a line and send us your best so we can share it far and wide!

Photo credit: Thomas Jefferson University 

The concept of a 15-minute city has been around for years now, and we’re fascinated with it. Most of our clients are walkable downtowns and districts that nearly tick all the boxes for a seeming utopian municipal design. However, there are still questions to be asked, and serious strategic planning to make sure they don’t develop into vogueish, gentrified neighborhoods that further increase economic disparity.  Fortunately we have working playbooks, luminaries and pioneers like Paris’ Mayor Anne Hidalgo leading the charge, and over a decade of insights from real life working examples including Portland, OR here in the States to study. Urban studies theorist, Richard Florida said in a Downtown Partnership of Baltimore address that, “We are seeing the death of an old central business district, but out of the ashes the creation of a new one,” and believes that one-fifth of office space in a central business district will be repurposed – less for downtown commuters, and more for socially-interactive residents and part-time suburban visitors. The stanchions of a 15-minute city have been in place for a while now, and the pandemic has fueled growth and change. Madrid, Milan and Edinburgh are examples of cities moving in this direction. What is needed in your district to create these sort of changes?  Does your city even want to evolve in this manner?

Photo credit: Benjamin Rascoe, Unsplash 

If you think that e-bikes, scooters and mopeds are a fleeting fad, perhaps think again. The big box, big data, big retail smarty-pants over at Best Buy have committed to the micromobility trend and announced this month that they’re jumping on board the nearly $70 billion dollar-projected bandwagon of electric transportation. Again, the pandemic is fueling shifts in consumerism, mobility and transportation that were already underway, and are bubbling up to the forefront now. This Business Insider article noted that, “As more Americans push to find eco-friendly ways to get around, electric bikes are an increasingly more attractive price-point than electric vehicles with prices of e-bikes ranging anywhere from $900-$5,000,”. Getting a share of this market seems like a clean, green dream – and we don’t just mean dollars here folks. According to location-based data and technology company INRIX, the top U.S. cities poised for the highest micromobility potential include, and in order: Honolulu, New Orleans, Nashville, Chicago Charlotte, NYC, Portland, Pittsburgh, LA and San Francisco. Are wheels up where you are?

Photo credit: Gotrax, Unsplash

Boy howdy, did Hurricane Ida do a number on us this month! Unless you were hiding under a rock, or digging yourself out of a catastrophic flood, you probably witnessed horrific images of our nation’s largest city suffering under a deluge of post-apocalyptic proportions. Water teemed into subways, flooded roads, surface-level transport halted; crippling the Mid-Atlantic. Despite nominal progress deployed to bolster NYC’s defenses in the wake of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy (which resulted in $70 billion in damage and 233 people killed across eight countries), Ida’s impact has already cost an estimated $50 billion and at least 109 deaths globally so far. Plans to improve the city’s emergency management and transportation infrastructure exist, but have not yet been funded. Prompted by Ida’s destruction, some in New York are calling for more immediate action, including a proposed road tolling program to cover part of the costs. Controversial as it is, congestion pricing (charging a fee or tax to drive through specifically-restricted neighborhoods and districts) has been on the table and in discussion for years in the Empire State, and critics argue funding is needed now before another substantial storm hits the Big Apple. In this race against time, Next City also noted that we’re now in “bold new era of ruinstorms” and that groundwater management and street design are going to be necessary to mitigate future issues. With 6,300 miles of streets and an estimated 8.8 million inhabitants depositing drain-clogging garbage directly on the streets, “absorbency” seems to be key to protecting NYC’s future. While we probably can’t preclude additional storms like these from happening anytime soon, whenever street designers mention the word “bioswales” we sit up and take note.

Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash