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What Halloween Can Teach Us About Civic Life
On this special holiday, strangers open their doors, kids roam the streets after dark and neighbors actually talk. Why only once a year?
By Ben Bryant and Chris DiStasi
At first glance, monsters, witches and werewolves swarming front porches don’t seem like symbols of safety, trust or social connection. Yet in practice, that’s exactly what Halloween creates. For one evening, neighborhood streets — a valuable but often overlooked type of public space sitting right outside our front doors — become a lively civic commons, a glimpse of what daily life could look like if we reimagined the social norms and perceptions that too often keep us apart.
Halloween is among a small set of holidays that focuses outside the home. Rather than looking inward toward the dinner table or the living room, holidays like Halloween, Mardi Gras and Carnivale send people to the streets. These holidays represent “the world turned upside down,” a spirit that the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalesque: moments when social hierarchies flip, authority relaxes and collective play takes over. These traditions have endured across cultures (including in the United States during events like Mardi Gras or Pride parades) because they give societies a controlled way to release tensions, question authority and symbolically reset — without permanently disrupting the social fabric.
On its face, Halloween seems centered on the things that scare us — ghosts, witches, spiders, skeletons and the dark. But dig deeper, and you start to understand Halloween as more than just the macabre. Halloween is special because it is about seeing the world as fundamentally welcoming. We stay out after dark, we knock on (and open) our doors, and we invite children to take food from strangers. The activity spills onto sidewalks, porches and streets, making it one of the few mainstream holidays rooted in our shared civic realm. That’s why it feels so transformative: it turns the everyday stage of neighborhood life into a collective exercise in connection.
For the past decade, Reimagining the Civic Commons cities have tapped into this same spirit. Their visible projects — parks, libraries, trails — matter, but the real transformation comes from the aspects of the work that flip the script: redefining who the experts are, inviting residents to co-create and using pilots and prototypes to challenge old narratives of place. These efforts prove that the “carnivalesque” doesn’t have to be confined to holidays — it can be woven into our public realm and daily civic life.
Our team at Interface Studio has had the privilege of working with Civic Commons teams in each city to track a set of metrics that help us understand the social impacts of the work: namely, how public spaces can better connect people of all backgrounds, cultivate trust and create more resilient communities, despite the larger forces that often drive us apart. On a personal note, this multi-year effort has allowed us to see our own experiences in the public realm through a different perspective, one that cuts below the surface to better understand the powerful civic impact that public space can deliver if pursued with intention.
Lessons From The Scariest Day Of The Year
For the past several years, Halloweens have come and gone and we’ve always thought of writing this article just a little too late. Just as stores quickly scrap Halloween merchandise for Christmas, so does our collective consciousness. This year, we hope that the insights we have gleaned can help public space practitioners and community organizations apply the lessons of Halloween to the neighborhoods and public spaces they serve.
Insight #1: Don’t be afraid of the dark.
Our research has found that the public realm can be a thriving, safe and inviting civic space even after the sun has gone down. Investments in lighting, changes in policy and innovative programming can help practitioners unlock this underappreciated part of the day to spur public life.
Traditionally, Halloween has been one of the only times when kids can run free after dark. Perceptions of safety at night and a lack of ‘after-dark infrastructure’ to support public life after sunset too often discourage this in public spaces the majority of the year. Before any civic commons interventions started, our Interface team helped RCC cities measure perceptions of safety during the day and at night in both their neighborhoods and public spaces. Not surprisingly, perceptions of safety at night drop substantially in most places.
Yet that fear of the dark can be flipped. In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, where the local RCC team invested in the entire neighborhood as an interconnected ‘civic commons,’ the percent of respondents who say they feel safe in the neighborhood at night doubled — increasing from 35% at baseline in 2017 to 71% in 2023. The share of residents who felt very unsafe walking at night dropped from 43% in 2017 to just 15% in 2023.
Halloween flips the script: it invites public life at night through shared activity and streets filled with neighbors, with a feeling of safety woven into the ritual itself. The same shift is possible in public spaces year-round, even in places where fear and disconnection can feel insurmountable.
Saint Paul’s Little Mekong Night Market reimagines evening streets as cultural stages after dark. Organized by the Asian Economic Development Association (AEDA), the event transforms the city’s Little Mekong business and cultural corridor into a dynamic nighttime gathering space — offering food, art, performance and commerce in a festive street atmosphere.
In late fall and winter, the days become so short that it’s often hard to visit a public space before dark. In the summer when the days are longer, issues with extreme heat are increasingly pushing park use to early mornings and evenings when temperatures are cool enough for play. Yet it is still common in the United States for parks to close after dusk.
Communities like Suwanee, Georgia are encouraging evening use by families through high-quality lighting and improved visibility throughout their public spaces like the recently opened Town Center on Main. A couple hours’ drive down the road, Macon, Georgia has increased its winter pedestrian activity downtown tenfold through their annual Christmas Light Extravaganza. Even smaller, community-scale efforts can make a big difference. In North Philadelphia, the Village of Arts and Humanities implemented a free porch light program, installing over 400 free porch lights across the neighborhood in response to neighbors’ concerns about safety after dark.
Programming can move the needle on after-dark activity as well. At Memphis’ downtown riverfront, Memphis River Parks Partnership hosts Firepit Fridays throughout the winter months, inviting people to gather around the warmth of a campfire and share s’mores beneath the night sky. When the weather turns warmer, Stargazing with the Memphis Astronomical Society offers a communal nighttime experience that draws people back to the riverfront for a quieter, reflective connection with the city.
Insight #2: Signal invitations to shape public life.
Small, visible signals of invitation and welcoming can make the difference between isolation and connection. These signals set the stage for public life and create an atmosphere that encourages interaction.
On Halloween, every skeleton on the porch and every animatronic witch’s cackle becomes a sign of welcoming. The decorations may look like spooky warnings, but the message is the opposite: you’re invited. For one night, these cues that fill our streets encourage strangers to approach, not retreat. It’s a striking reversal from the rest of the year, when we often close ourselves off behind fences, locks and doorbells that screen visitors. Yet this contrast is precisely what makes Halloween such a powerful civic teacher. It reminds us that signals of openness, no matter how minute or playful, can transform how a neighborhood feels. These small, visible acts of openness can reshape how we perceive public space and the people who share it.
In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, our team conducted a parcel-by-parcel assessment, cataloging building condition, vacancy and land use. But as we drove the streets, we started noticing something else: the subtle visual cues that revealed how residents felt about their block. Some homes displayed signs of defensiveness — bars on windows, chain-link fences, “beware of dog” signs. Others offered signs of welcome: flower boxes, flags and front porches dressed with care. These small details suggested something deeper: not just the physical condition of a place, but the emotional condition of the community. The physical environment was a reflection of how safe people felt, how much they trusted their neighbors and how hopeful they were about the future.
Public spaces can broadcast the same openness and invitation through design. In Akron’s Summit Lake neighborhood, years of disinvestment had left the waterfront inhospitable and stigmatized. Early listening sessions with residents led to a different approach: rather than building barriers, the Akron Civic Commons team started with small, visible invitations, adding a beachhead, swings, shaded seating, grills and spots for fishing and kayaking — cues that informed the neighborhood the lake was theirs again. Those early acts of welcome helped spark a broader shift in perception, transforming the reputation of Summit Lake from a place to avoid into a place to gather.
That same principle extends beyond design to community traditions. In West Philadelphia, neighborhood traditions like the annual Community Yard Sale and the beloved Porchfest turn ordinary blocks into stages for connection. The yard sale, now in its second year, uses a DIY map of participating homes to guide residents into a self-directed neighborhood adventure. Porchfest — now in its eighth iteration — fills more than a hundred porches with live music and spontaneous gatherings. Both events invite family-friendly wandering and a sense of serendipity that echoes Halloween’s spirit of safe exploration.
Local organizations can help these efforts take root. Neighborhood groups like the Passyunk Square Civic Association in South Philadelphia use friendly competitions such as the “Step of the Month” contest to encourage residents to decorate stoops with flowers, window boxes, and seasonal touches. These simple prompts not only brighten the block but also create momentum for social life. Practitioners can amplify this spirit through neighborhood-wide programs that make participation easy, visible and fun, reinforcing that when welcome efforts become a shared project, everyone benefits.
If fear closes us off, invitation opens the door. In communities everywhere, small visible signals such as a light left on, a seat offered, a flower box tended can be the difference between isolation and connection. The lesson is simple: when we make our welcomes visible, we make civic life possible.
Insight #3: Get people talking — and keep the conversation going
Halloween brings people together through candy and costumes, and is a great way to meet your neighbors. But to build connection, we need to facilitate repeated, sustained social interactions. The end result isn’t just friendship — it’s a chance to repair our social fabric and restore our sense of trust.
Halloween does an excellent job of bringing neighbors together but the impact is felt just once a year. At a time when social isolation and disconnection are harming people and communities, the need to connect Americans to each other has grown increasingly urgent. We simply don’t have the same social ties to our neighbors — or to our fellow Americans — that we once did, which has frayed our sense of trust. A March 2025 Pew Research survey found that while 76% of U.S. adults said they would bring in the mail or water the plants for an out-of-town neighbor, only 52% believed their neighbor would do the same for them.
Meanwhile, our neighborhoods are increasingly segregated by income, meaning that households of different incomes are more likely to live apart than in previous decades. This growing income segregation means many people rarely share public spaces with those whose economic circumstances differ from their own — making the kinds of repeated, casual encounters we aim to design for all the more essential. Decades of social science research show that stronger social connectedness — the subjective sense of belonging, trust and mutual support — is linked to better mental health, greater resilience in times of stress, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and even reduced mortality risk.
Connection matters for economic opportunity, too. In the work of economist Raj Chetty and colleagues, economic connectedness — the extent to which low-income individuals form friendships across class lines — emerges as one of the most powerful predictors of upward mobility. When people regularly form ties with those from other economic strata — when norms of success, ambition and trust cross class boundaries — their worlds expand and the possibilities they see for themselves shift. Designing our public spaces so that they nurture this kind of cross-class interaction isn’t just a nice idea, it may be a key lever in unlocking opportunity.
The lessons of social connection become even sharper in disasters. In Black Wave, researcher Daniel Aldrich showed that the survival and recovery of Japanese communities during the 3/11 triple disaster depended not only on how well people knew each other (horizontal ties), but also on how well communities were linked to local, regional and national institutions (vertical ties). Communities with dense horizontal networks and strong vertical links to government and resources recovered faster, coordinated better and were more resilient.
If we overlay these interrelated insights on civic practice, the implication is clear: public spaces shouldn’t just put people near one another, they should scaffold relationships across socioeconomic lines that form a more socially connected world. To do this, we need both spaces and rituals that help neighbors become friends, and neighborhoods become part of broader civic networks.
Public spaces that succeed in this way act less like stages for one-time events and more like the settings of an ongoing story, where small, ordinary interactions accumulate into a sense of community. Designing for this kind of continuity means creating reasons to return, patterns that anchor people in place and moments that repeat often enough to make strangers feel known.
A powerful and replicable illustration of this idea comes from the Memphis River Parks Partnership, which created a rhythm of regular connection through its Grizzlies Watch Parties. During the NBA season, the riverfront becomes a free, open-air living room where residents from every part of the city gather to cheer for their team. What might otherwise be a solitary or private experience of watching a game at home or in a bar becomes a recurring civic ritual that connects people across income, neighborhoods and backgrounds. By anchoring the seasonal programming in a shared local passion and holding events regularly, the Partnership built familiarity over time: strangers who sat side by side one week were likely to see each other again the next. Consistency mattered as much as the content, as a public park became a predictable meeting ground where belonging grew through repetition, joy and the steady presence of community.
Ultimately, the lesson is that connection isn’t spontaneous, but cultivated over time. Public spaces can create the conditions for encounters to persist by investing in spaces and rituals that invite people to show up again and again, rebuilding the social infrastructure that holds communities together. Every recurring event, familiar face or casual conversation adds another thread to the civic fabric, transforming proximity into participation and neighbors into networks.
Replicating The Lessons Of Halloween Year-Round
Halloween offers a glimpse of what our civic life could be if we designed for connection year-round. For one night, the barriers that normally separate us — fences, fears, habits and hierarchies — fall away. The street becomes a shared stage, the porch a point of welcome and the neighborhood a web of trust. The challenge is how to carry that spirit forward: to turn fleeting moments of collective joy into durable habits of civic life.
Public space professionals don’t need costumes or candy to recreate that feeling. By designing rituals, creating soft invitations, flipping roles and making social life visible, we can turn sidewalks, plazas and parks into places that encourage connection the other 364 days of the year. In doing so, our interventions become driven by the outcomes of socioeconomic mixing and connection, and we create the social conditions that allow those places to work — not only as amenities, but as engines of belonging.
When we design and program spaces to encourage people to linger, return and recognize each other over time, we strengthen the foundations of civic trust. And when we nurture visible signs of welcome, light up our streets after dark and give people reasons to gather again and again, we build the kind of infrastructure that is absolutely foundational to the future of communities — and our nation.
Ben and Chris are both Senior Associates at Interface Studio and together have been leading measurement for the member cities of Reimagining the Civic Commons for the past ten years. This Halloween, Chris can be found sharing candy and wine-pops (for the parents) on his small South Philly street, and Ben will be trick-or-treating with Buzz Lightyear, a Frog, and Ghostface from the Scream movies.
Learn more about Interface Studio’s work with the Reimagining the Civic Commons here.
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.
