Uniting in the Commons, Part 1
Practices for bringing together people of all backgrounds in public spaces
A key goal for Reimagining the Civic Commons is to create places where everyone belongs, and that generate opportunities for shared experience among people of all incomes and backgrounds. We believe civic assets, when designed, operated and managed with intention, can be a place of common ground for everyone, where we can foster empathy and trust across diversity.
Research shows that Americans are increasingly polarized, segregated and isolated from one another, and that economic inequality is increasing. These trends are negatively impacting our health and well-being and the prosperity of our communities.
Today, too many people live in communities where they rarely encounter others from different economic, social or racial backgrounds, precisely the activity we need to grow bridging social capital, improve health, provide economic opportunities and generate trust.
Last week, we released Investing with Intention: Socioeconomic Mixing, a publication that documents the multiple benefits of creating public places where everyone belongs. Today, in the first of a two-part series, we share practices and projects in Minneapolis, Memphis, Lexington and Akron that are bringing together diverse groups of people in public spaces.
Bringing Together Community Through Play in Minneapolis
North Minneapolis is a proud, racially diverse and Black-majority community. Already affected by historic and persistent systemic inequities, residents and businesses in North Minneapolis are bearing an outsize burden because of COVID isolation and its economic impacts, as well as an increase in violence amid the city’s reckoning with safety in public space for Black and Brown people.
Enter Seeds to Harvest, a coalition of community members and organizations led by neighborhood residents, who organized the City of Lakes Summer Games in July and August. Timed to coincide with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the Summer Games was both a community-created response to filling immediate needs in the neighborhood — like fun, supervised activities for kids — and an inspired process for building meaningful connections around and within an important neighborhood gathering place: North Commons Park.
A highlight of the Summer Games included the Sol of the City Futsal League, a “serve-to-play” youth tournament that brought boys and girls from around Minneapolis and St. Paul and surrounding suburbs to North Commons for weekly games. A post-game hour of community service — like tree planting or garbage pick-up — defrayed the fee for each player, helping to ensure that ability to pay wasn’t a barrier for anyone. This approach to programming fees encouraged kids and families of all backgrounds to participate and even increased stewardship of the park among all players.
The three-week Summer Games was capped by a day centered around two official Guinness World Records attempts. Some 350 community members — youth, adults, elders, all races and ethnicities, community organizations, public officials — showed up Sunday, August 8 at North Commons to be a part of “the most people passing an American football” and “the most people simultaneously doing a jumping high five.” Families, friends, neighbors, and strangers came together in the most relaxed way, and while no world records were broken that day, it was a beautiful example of deeply-needed community connection.
Acknowledging the Past, Creating a Joyful Future in Memphis
Public and civic spaces provide an unmatched opportunity to bring Memphians of all backgrounds together, joyfully sharing space with one another. Ensuring that the civic commons sites in Memphis are welcoming and easily accessible from multiple neighborhoods with racially and economically diverse populations is a top priority.
It’s important to recognize that public spaces in Memphis haven’t always been welcoming to all and to actively work to overcome those painful histories. River Garden, a one-acre park on the banks of the Memphis harbor and Fourth Bluff Park were formerly used to commemorate Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. In 2013, both parks had their names changed as part of an intentional redesign effort. In 2017, a statue of Jefferson Davis was removed from Memphis Park (now Fourth Bluff Park) and by the end of 2019, all Confederate monuments were removed from the park and a renovation added new pathways, trees, lighting, and flexible seating areas where the statue had stood.
Throughout the last year, programming in Fourth Bluff Park played a key part in bringing Memphians together in this newly reimagined space. This summer, during an unexpected playoff run for the Memphis Grizzlies, the park was chosen to host the official watch parties and welcomed a large, diverse and joyful crowd to wave their “growl towels,” and dance with the Grizz Girls and Grizz Line as the team upset the Warriors and took one game from the Jazz before eventually falling in Game 5 of the Western Conference First Round playoffs. Memphians from all over the city celebrated together atop a park that once monumentalized division. It was a powerful reminder that the right combination of a beautiful, centrally-located space, compelling event, and fun, shared activity can help to create stronger community bonds.
This summer the Memphis team also partnered with The Heights CDC and The Works Inc. to bring Soulin’ on the River concert series by Memphis Slim House to neighborhoods across the city. Created by Memphis Slim House Executive Director Tonya Dyson, the series helped to encourage Memphians to explore and visit different parts of the city including Treadwell Park in The Heights and Renaissance Park in South Memphis.
The Soulin’ event at Treadwell Park provided an opportunity to engage attendees to sign up to be Friends of Treadwell Park, comment on what they want to see in the community and learn more about ongoing community projects. To beat the heat, attendees received free ice cream, soda pop, water and paper fans.
Gwen Ingram, a local attendee, shared, “I think that Memphis has a lot of heart and all different communities that are underused and I think that having something like Soulin’ on the River in different parks throughout the city would bring more people out to parks because the parks are to service the community.”
“Soulin’ at Renaissance Park allowed people of all backgrounds to connect and gave them a reason to get some fresh air, meet new people, enjoy live music and dance their problems away…our families in South Memphis are hungry for events like Soulin’ on the River,” said Tanja Mitchell, Director of Community Engagement at nonprofit community development organization The Works Inc. “Now they’ve experienced our newly renovated park and expect to see more events in the future. Hallelujah!”
In Memphis, the community has learned that to bring people of all backgrounds together, it is not enough to simply remove the barriers to accessing the local parks and public spaces. It takes intentional design and welcoming programming to build trust, create connection and unite in the commons.
Bridging Divides in Lexington
In Lexington’s East End neighborhood, just across the street from a city park undergoing significant transformation and adjacent to the soon-to-be-completed Town Branch Commons, is a newly opened mixed-use development with an ambition to bridge divides.
Led by Community Ventures, a non-profit community and economic development organization, the MET is 75,000 square feet of mixed income housing, restaurant and retail space with artist studios and a retail art gallery. The project’s name, conceived by the community, gives an intentional nod to local history. The three letters of the MET stand for two of the most important roads in the East End: Midland Avenue and East Third. Historically, Third Street served as an essential corridor for the East End neighborhood and Lexington’s African American community. Through the years, this corridor has decayed, and nearly all retail has departed. At the same time, Midland Avenue has acted as a dividing line between two populations of different ethnicities and different economic means. The MET intends to serve as a physical and spiritual “bridge” between these two populations, providing a place where people from all over our community can meet, gather, and learn from one another.
The MET has embraced and incorporated the rich, cultural history of the East End neighborhood into nearly every aspect of the project with the goal of connecting two adjacent, but disconnected neighborhoods. The project began with a 24-month planning process that included listening and dialogue at regular neighborhood meetings. The feedback from residents at these meetings was incorporated into the design of the building, from the pitched rooflines that reflect the architecture of the historic homes nearby to the inclusion of public art that includes East End historic figures, to the layout of the building that will include a welcoming front façade facing the neighborhood as well as one facing the business corridor. To encourage connection, the project includes interior and exterior meeting and gathering spaces, for both informal and formal occasions, that are steps away from the Town Branch Commons. The Town Branch Commons is Lexington’s hub for a city-wide trail system and the urban park system connecting neighborhoods to the city core and beyond. Every element of the design was a deliberate choice to meet the needs and desires of the East End residents and serve as an extension of the civic commons.
The commercial tenants at the MET also aim to bridge divides. Community Ventures intentionally recruited tenants for the MET who not only provide services desired by the neighborhood, but also are committed to hiring and developing talent from within the neighborhood. For example, DV8 Kitchen’s entire business model is built around providing jobs for disadvantaged residents, such as those in the early stages of substance abuse recovery, and it closes the restaurant for one hour every day to provide paid training to employees on various life skills. While Art Inc. Kentucky, a Community Ventures social enterprise, is a business and marketing incubator that aims to help creative entrepreneurs who live or work in the East End to increase their incomes and build long-term sustainable businesses. Along with a gallery and artist studios at the MET, Art Inc. Kentucky has developed an artists’ village on site featuring a live-work community for artists adjacent to an “Art Park” that hosts weekend art fairs, poetry readings and musical events.
Through intentional planning, design and implementation aligned with significant investment in neighboring public spaces, the MET will be a transformative presence in Lexington’s East End neighborhood, bringing together residents, bridging socioeconomic divides and increasing opportunity and prosperity in the neighborhood.
Knitting Together Communities Through Programming in Akron
Programming in public space, done with intention, offers an opportunity to bring people together for shared experience. Even throughout the pandemic, Akron has found ways to foster common ground through programming across Downtown Akron and Ohio & Erie Canal Park.
To promote and build a vibrant Downtown that is a place for people of all backgrounds, Downtown Akron Partnership (DAP) established key metrics of success to track progress, including a minimum baseline of 30 percent minority entrepreneurs hired as contractors to implement downtown programming. In this way, the DAP team supports and promotes local, minority-owned small businesses and artists, while also creating programs that more closely reflect the makeup of the community. Programming is carefully designed to include multiple artists or entrepreneurs, all of whom bring their own diverse audiences together at events by promoting them through their networks. This intentionality has led to the growth of DAP’s network of contacts and talent, increased audience diversity, and led to new partnerships in programming design. This work has begun to build a new repertoire of shared experiences in Akron, things to which the community can look forward to and embrace as a new normal.
For instance, when limited in its ability to bring people together due to COVID-19 restrictions, DAP hosted a socially distant Sakura Festival to celebrate Akron’s cherry trees planted along the Ohio & Erie Canalway Towpath Trail many years ago in collaboration with JANO (Japanese Association Northeast Ohio). While observing safe physical distancing, the event encouraged a thousand people to celebrate the beauty of nature and the connection of the human experience through a moment shared with Japanese culture. The event, which will grow and return next year, also celebrated the physical connection between key locations in the Akron Civic Commons footprint — Downtown and Ohio & Erie Canal Park.
In Ohio & Erie Canal Park, Alpha Phi Alpha Homes, also activated new opportunities for bringing together the community — and adapted to a changing landscape during the pandemic. Alpha Phi Alpha Homes maintains well-run rental and for-sale residential properties that attract renters and buyers from a variety of income levels, but often these diverse residents don’t interact in their daily lives. To facilitate more connection Alpha Phi Alpha Homes co-created and runs the Ohio & Erie Canal Park Summer Concert series.
Over the past four years, the Summer Concert series has proven to be a successful way to bring people together across the income spectrum that live in the neighborhood and beyond. The program was piloted in 2018 with a simple tent and chairs, but because it was such a success, additional public space work took flight. In 2019, the Alpha Phi Alpha Operating Reserve Fund provided $130,000 towards the installation of a permanent stage, Callis Tower Pavilion which now hosts the series.
When COVID-19 hit, overcoming social isolation of residents brought on by the pandemic was a key focus of Alpha Phi Alpha, explains Executive Director Tom Fuller. His team intentionally worked to keep residents and neighbors engaged.
“Last year when we were social distancing, we kept the concerts alive, but made them at-home concerts,” Fuller explains. “We wanted to support the musicians who had been performing for us and also to still bring this experience of live music to residents. And we were amazed by a lot of people listening in from really, all over the world!”
Residents made it clear that when it was safe to gather again, they would be looking forward to bringing the concert series back. The 2021 season returned with 9 consecutive weeks of concerts at the Callas Tower Pavilion, drawing neighbors back together each Saturday evening after months of isolation.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
