Since the 1980s, hardworking urban place managers, city officials, and community leaders have constituted a far-flung field. In ways large and small, they have sought to make their neighborhoods more safe, clean, and commercially vibrant. Today, this work is undergoing an exceptional, once-in-a-generation change. Increasingly, it contends with questions not just of safety but of belonging. It attends not only to the aesthetics of city environments but to ethics. It values not merely economic development but economic justice.

The ground that we work on has also shifted. Downtown storefronts that, a generation ago, were depopulated now face commercial gentrification. Infrastructures once designed to move cars out of cities are now recruited into service as gathering places for people. Neighborhoods subjected to strategic disinvestment for decades are now shaken by displacement. And institutions that have traditionally held — and hoarded — power are now challenged to share it with communities.

To us at Public Sphere Projects, these seemingly disparate, turbulent flows do not merely intersect. They form a powerful confluence — strong enough to make our shared places more just and joyous, deep enough to make them better resourced and loved.