Public Spaces
Public spaces can refer to parkland, sidewalks, alleys, and other connective infrastructure in urban areas. Sometimes managed by a downtown association or a business improvement district in addition to local government.
Newly constructed libraries serve as “third spaces” and offer connectivity and multimedia in addition to community resources.
Two Art in Place roundtables, hosted by the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge and ULI Louisiana in July 2025, set out to reimagine culture as infrastructure—not just a source of murals or festivals, but a cornerstone of downtown’s growth.
A growing body of research indicates that physical space profoundly affects our brain health. The capacity of our buildings and public spaces to be regenerative in that regard remains largely untapped, however. The key resources for developing brain capital are brain skills—cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and critical thinking; and brain health—the overall functioning of an individual’s brain throughout that person’s life.
Curating and creating great spaces is at the heart of what industry players in the built environment sector do every day. Placemaking is the “art and science” of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Can transit-integrated development like RUS Bus in Raleigh, North Carolina, help our cities thrive for the long haul?
Callie Persic is a development manager with the Belfast City Council, leading Belfast’s Connectivity Programme and city center project, “A Bolder Vision for Belfast.”
See how Kartini Omar and the National Parks Board are transforming Singapore into a green oasis by integrating biodiversity and lush natural landscapes into one of the world’s most densely populated cities.
Corey Wilson is superintendent of the Recreation and Park Commission for the Parish of East Baton Rouge. He oversees the more than 170 parks in the system, which includes an observatory, nature center, equestrian park, zoo, performing arts theatre, arboretum, and more. This interview was conducted as part of a series designed to celebrate park visionaries and share inspiring and practical insights into their perspectives, challenges, and advice.
Allegra “Happy” Haynes is the current executive director of the Denver Department of Parks and Recreation. Haynes shares how the city’s leadership can better acknowledge the inequities in the system.
Destination Crenshaw, a transformative 1.3-mile (2 km) infrastructure project scheduled to open in fall 2022, was the focus of a ULI Los Angeles virtual event in July, highlighting plans to boost the Crenshaw community through economic development, job creation, and environmental healing while elevating Black art and culture.
ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT: Since 1997, Pacoima Beautiful has worked with the community to reclaim open areas and create beautiful recreational spaces throughout the historic Los Angeles neighborhood. One of its first completed projects, the Bradley Plaza Green Alley, transforms an underused alleyway into a green public space and reimagines how alleys can be repurposed to best serve the communities in which they are situated.
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Creative uses of transportation infrastructure during the coronavirus pandemic include closing streets and using parking lots to accommodate outdoor activities.
The importance of creative placemaking—the process of intentionally integrating arts, culture, and community-engaged design into comprehensive community development—and the role that artists play in that process have been elevated by both the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice protests in the United States, as people seek places to socialize and connect with others outside their homes, according to participants in a recent ULI webinar.
Two urban parks—Domino Park in Brooklyn, New York, and Trojan Park in Wellston, Missouri—have been selected as winners of the 2020 ULI Urban Open Space Award.
This summer, Urban Land is profiling online and in print each finalist for 2020’s ULI Urban Open Space Award. The winner(s) will be announced in the fall. Learn more about award-winning and innovative open-space projects as part of the 2020 ULI Virtual Fall Meeting.
How can developers create vibrant places that bring people together to live, work, play, and hang out? Members of ULI’s new Placemaking Council discuss the value of bringing the notion of placemaking to development, the strategies for setting up placemaking projects that will thrive, the obstacles that can get in the way of success, common misperceptions about placemaking, and related trends.
A ULI Advisory Services panel toured South Sacramento, California, in September, meeting with more than 75 city and county officials, local business leaders, residents, and other stakeholders. The four sponsors—Sacramento Regional Transit, Sacramento Council of Governments, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District—asked the ULI advisory panel to outline a plan for kick-starting a retrofit of the two transit-adjacent neighborhoods into transit-oriented neighborhoods. Their goals were to promote equitable, healthy, and inclusive community development that fosters job and income growth, housing options, and healthy neighborhood amenities with more convenient access to transit, retail, and services.
Developers are snatching up aging golf course properties—many closed or losing money—with an eye toward combining housing with other uses while often trying to preserve at least some of the greenery for community use.
The following ten projects in the Asia Pacific region—all completed during the past five years—include restored headlands, contaminated canals and marshes cleaned up to serve as wildlife habitats, and a row of parking spaces revamped as a piazza.
Development professionals from Detroit, Houston, Atlanta, and San Antonio discussed how they reclaimed desolate space with art, parks, and public/private partnerships to revitalize riverfronts and neighborhoods.
In early March, the city of San Antonio celebrated the opening of a new park. Named Confluence Park, it sits on about 3.5 acres (1.4 ha) where two major rivers meet. The park—a former construction storage yard—was ten years in the making, costing about $13 million.
In Detroit, as in many cities across the United States, a distinctive type of open space—the urban garden—has emerged as another type of civic asset.
Since 2004, over $1 billion has been invested in redevelopment and new construction in downtown Cincinnati and the adjacent Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Representatives from Erie, Pennsylvania; St. Louis; and Atlanta have visited the city in the last year to see how a combination of nonprofit redevelopment, historic preservation, land banking, and strategic acquisitions, funded by tax credits and corporate investments, have turned things around.
In many U.S. cities, the pressure to attract and retain workers and create a better quality of life coupled with the declining use of waterways for industrial purposes has made riverfront revitalization a cost-effective redevelopment strategy.
Across the United States, a number of cities are attempting to restore and rediscover their urban rivers. One of the most ambitious efforts is occurring in Houston, where Buffalo Bayou Park is undergoing a $58 million redevelopment to be completed this year.
Ten years ago, San Antonio’s bond program dedicated a mere $10 million to downtown improvements. By 2012, that number had jumped to $90 million, and the most recent bond initiative, passed in May, earmarks $170 million for downtown projects.
ULI Sacramento has long been engaged with the issue of revitalizing Sacramento’s riverfront. During a two-day program in March, strategies for success and lessons learned were shared by representatives from four U.S. cities that have created coherent waterfront development programs—Chattanooga, Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Spokane.
For a city with 10.2 million trees, Toronto has a surprising lack of green space in its core. Toronto Mayor John Tory wants to change that with a 21-acre (8.5 ha) signature park. ULI Toronto convened a panel of urban-park and public-realm experts from the United States and Europe to discuss successes and challenges related to legacy parks in their own cities and the achievements the city could build on while incorporating a number of best practices into its approach.
“The story of people can be told through infrastructure,” said author Ryan Gravel at the 2017 Carolinas Meeting in Charlotte. An urban planner by training, Gravel initially proposed the concept of the BeltLine in his Georgia Tech master’s thesis.
Standing out in the urban core of Miami, Wynwood Walls started as a collection of six privately owned warehouses whose exterior walls were transformed into an outdoor “museum of the streets” by visionary developer Tony Goldman. The Walls surround more than 1.5 acres (0.6 ha) of land—former parking lots and junkyards—that now provide multiple areas that the public can enjoy at no charge.
