We’ll be joining forces with Vickie Brent-Touray @ Kukkendoke, and with the Pontiac Regional Chamber to co-create a Community Design Charrette for our 8th annual Earth Day Pontiac celebration. Topics our planning team has identified are: 

• Community “Revitalization and Placemaking” RAP Grant Development component

• Future of the Kukkendoke Neighborhood and Clinton River Trail Alternative “Place Meandering” Routes

• Connected Regional Design & Learning Exchanges via Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, Southwest Greenway & West Riverfront Parks, etc. 

• Collaboration with the #PlacemakeEarthChallenge & Placemaking US @Hidden River Place KABOOM!

We’ll be utilizing and sharing our open source “Digital Visual Design Co-Creation & Sensemaking” platform process to create an evolving interactive community archive.

As suggested in last year’s Earth Day Pontiac event we will be thinking through the hyperlocal and regional “Hot Spots” for our project-driven development efforts and “Experiencing Design” orchestrations up and down the Woodward Avenue Corridor.

Here is a question we asked at the PlacemakingUS forum on Majora Carter’s new book, “Reclaiming Your Community” You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One. Hosted brilliantly by Madeleine Spencer, this book and video in its entirety should serve as a blueprint for “Co-Designing” ALL American Rescue Plan, IIJA & eventual Build Back Better funding, including “Opportunity Zone” funding still on the table.

“Your book is a clarion call for how we MUST address the unprecedented federal investment funding. How do we ensure that the funding meets your criteria vs. the Non-Profit Industrial Complex? (Who will be sure to have their hands out.) And without newly informed communities of practice, they may be receiving inappropriate funding given the granting guidelines.”

Similarly for the “blueprint,” we asked Bruce Katz, author of “The Rise of Innovation Districts” (May 2014) more recently, co-author of “New Localism” (2017) while also serving as Director of the Nowak Finance Lab, how we might go about “learning” from and recreating the spirit of the digital technological innovations in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that drifted out of focus leading up to the recession of 2008. Additionally, we posited that “[communities of citizens are now the experts, yet have not previously experienced productive and generative capital, while also being the core of the intentional funding focus?]” His positive affirmation and additional insights are not to be missed! (See below)

Some of you have been participating in the PhD thesis being written by Lindsay Oluyede, AICP, “Design Thinking for Place-Based Transportation Innovation: A Study of Early Adopters.” It has been interesting reflecting on these events from 2016, and the presidential elections when the vote for the Regional Transportation Authority lost by 20,000 votes and then in 2018 the SMART Bus system eked by in Macomb County with a margin of only 39 votes. It’s on the ballot again, and in the wake of one more city opting out…(Serendipitously the move toward more microtransit and their adoption of the SMART Flex, is exactly what was the core of our successful SMART Community Partnership Program (CPP) STOC funding initiative (although the funds were diverted somewhere else)…makes one ask, what might go missing now, that impacts our region’s ability to create, retain and attract talent?

“Power belongs to the problem solvers. And these problem solvers now congregate disproportionately at the local level, in cities and metropolitan areas across the globe.

New Localism embodies this new reality of power. It is the twenty-first century’s means of solving the problems characteristic of modern life: global economic competition, poverty, the challenges of social diversity, and the imperatives of environmental sustainability.”