placemaking

The city of Chicago is accepting proposals for long-term outdoor dining projects to support tourism and activate neighborhood streets.

These instances of road repurposing and placemaking are born from pain and anger, and yet they have brought communities together and created beauty.

Merchants are beginning to understand that their bottom line depends less on the number of vehicles they can park than the number of customers they can accommodate.

Chicago’s newest parklet in front of Intelligentsia Coffee, 2642 North Milwaukee, and adjacent to the Logan Theater, is a great addition to the neighborhood.

The South Chicago Underline Project is a proposal to add facilities for walking, biking, playing, and relaxing under the Chicago Skyway, an elevated highway on the Southeast Side.

There’s nothing more romantic than supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of hardworking Chicagoans, plus the creative reuse of old shipping containers.

[The Chicago Reader recently launched a new weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership allows Streetsblog to extend the reach of our livable streets advocacy. We syndicate a portion of the column on the day it comes out online; you can read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the streets on Thursdays.]

The popular car-free happenings that pedestrianized a Lakeview street on several Sundays last year are returning this month, albeit in a somewhat scaled-down format. But the Lakeview Chamber of Commerce hopes that moving the events from a one-block stretch of Lincoln Avenue to a half-block, narrower stretch of Paulina Street will make these celebrations of art, music and play more intimate, as well as more vibrant.

Last week, Gracen Johnson over at Strong Towns introduced the phrase "places I don't want to sit" to describe the lousy, leftover public spaces where someone has plopped down a bench or two as an afterthought. The seating, in these cases, helps crystallize how unsalvageable our public realm becomes when everything else is planned around moving and storing cars. Who would actually want to sit there?