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

You’ve heard of placemaking and place branding, but how about “place keeping”?  It’s a strategy being deployed by cultural districts and organizations worldwide, and we wanted to take a minute to zero in on the concept of night markets. It’s one of the successful tactics that NYC-based Think!Chinatown uses to help preserve cultural heritage while building community agency. Night Markets are some of the most popular events for districts that host them, and this recent round-up of the nine best global night markets from Thrillist got our radar pinging. Does your district host one?  Tell us all about it!

Photo credit: Kevin Balingit, Unsplash

Let’s talk about feel-good sea-food. While we prefer our oysters with lots of piquant cocktail sauce, their former homes (the shells) have some pretty amazing properties when it comes to revitalizing natural waterways. We love seeing things like this nascent oyster shell recycling program that aims to put Delaware Valley shells back into the estuary — post-consumer consumption. Both delicious and restorative, shell recycling programs can help rehabilitate ecosystems and return to nature a valuable resource that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Plus, who doesn’t get a rib-tickle from the program entitled “Give a Shuck”?  And that’s why we’re boisterous for oysters!

Photo credit: Philadelphia Water Department

…that the concept of complete streets is about a century old? While many of us think of complete streets as a 21st century innovation, the reality is that an architect with an eye for the sky was envisioning a future with sustainable growth and development, multi-tiered public spaces with parks, public realm, shops and experiential; all existing on top of subterranean motorways and transportation networks ages ago. Harvey W. Corbett was a skyscraper architect, who in 1925 proposed the vision of a future city that could be considered the great, great grandfather of many of today’s best practices for urban planning and community development. Learn more about Corbett’s radical visions dating back nearly 100 years now! What’s old is new again, and if we don’t learn from the past…

Photo credit:  Popular Science 

Repurposed parkelets for placemaking? Absolutely! The old adage, “waste not, want not” comes to mind when considering new uses for parklets in your district. While demand and desire for outdoor dining continues — as we ease to an endemic existence, some districts and restaurateurs are thinking “what now?” when it comes to parklets. Repurpose them, we say!  We loved this piece from MODSTREET showing how some places, like Downtown Grand Junction, CO, are repurposing their parklets as tactical tools for placemaking and activating formerly dead spaces. Noting that their parkelets have legs, they can be easily broken down into component parts (as barricades, stages…etc.) the usefulness of these repurposed parkelets is giving us life!

 Photo credit: Modstreet 

The pandemic accelerated many cultural and behavioral shifts that prove time and again that once the genie is out of the bottle, life will never go “back to normal”. Things like remote work are having profound effects on cities both large and small. While former bastions of the “creative elite” on both coasts saw a decoupling from exorbitant housing costs (and accompanying loss of tax revenue), as workers fled to cheaper pastures — smaller cities are now seeing an uptick in grappling with sustainable growth and urban issues that tend to accompany a boom, like increased traffic, housing costs and even homelessness. This piece from SmartCitiesDive eyeballs the impacts various cities around the nation are dealing with in our “new normal”.

Photo credit: Bruno Emmanuelle, Unsplash