2021 Year in Review
"City Thread" Sports Collaborative, Greg Curso & Molly Hunker. Chattanooga, TN
The Future of Small Cities Institute had quite a year, despite all of the tumultuousness and uncertainty that surrounded our cities.
JANUARY
We began the year with Part 2 of our Recovery and Resilience Series on “Pathways to Equity” featuring four dynamic community leaders from across New York State, all of whom are tackling systemic inequities from a variety of angles. One of the ongoing tenets of our work at The Future of Small Cities Institute is a belief that creating a network of knowledge-sharing across cities is critical to establishing long term, resilient communities. Good work is being done everywhere—we just need to link up the stars into a constellation.
We heard from RAHWA GHIRMATZION, Executive Director of PUSH Buffalo, who described the incredible work her organization has done over the last fifteen years around improving affordable housing, expanding local hiring opportunities, and actualizing racial and environmental justice in Buffalo's West Side. WADE NORWOOD, CEO of Common Ground Health in Rochester, narrated a complex pattern of socioeconomic disenfranchisement in the Finger Lakes Region that included plenty of both rural and urban poverty that crossed color lines. Dr. JUHANNA ROGERS, VP of Racial Equity and Social Impact at Centerstate CEO in Syracuse, described role at Centerstate as "working to challenge our business leadership within Central New York to think about the intentional ways to disrupt systemic injustice and racial inequities. How to dismantle the existing systems and recreate them." ADAM ZARANKO, Executive Director of the Albany County Land Bank, presented the unique toolkit that a Land Bank offers to addressing vacant and abandoned properties and both the direct and indirect costs on a community's wellbeing.
You can read a recap of the event here and watch a video of the event here.
FEBRUARY
We hosted our Inaugural Winter Dialogue “The Promise of Small Cities: Gateways to the Future” between ALAN BERUBE, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director at the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institute, and BEN FORMAN, Research Director at MassINC.
Mr. Berube described how about 1 in 10 Americans (32 mil) lives in a legacy county. Legacy infrastructure is both ripe for further smart urbanization and also represents a robust sustainability opportunity. There's also great potential for strides in the struggle for equity in small legacy cities—these cities were the traditional end points for much of the great migration and the site of decades of ongoing systemic racism.
Mr. Forman talked about how of MassINC's research work is on the relationship between satellite gateway cities and the workforce being siphoned into larger urban centers like Boston, what's called "an agglomeration shadow." Yet he pointed out that work patterns are changing in Massachusetts—workers are increasingly utilizing commuter rail and subway infrastructure to get to and from work. Mr. Forman proposed a new way of thinking of the commuter rail as a "regional rail" system—not just as a mode for the traditional commute to-and-from the large city, but as an interchange between smaller cities, creating the European model of the "polycentric region." MassINC has thus done a lot of research around "transit-oritented development" including the potential sustainability and equity outcomes of such design.
You can read a recap of the event here and watch a video of the event here.
MARCH
We concluded our Cultivating Recovery & Resilience series with the “Translating Talk to Action” event, featuring DAVID DIXON, Vice President and Senior Urban Fellow at Stantec, who opened the conversation by making a case for the great potential of a "robust post-Covid urban recovery" in small and midsize cities like Morehead, MN, Reading, PA, Buffalo, NY, and Memphis, TN. NADINE MARRERO, Director of Planning for the City of Buffalo, talked about how the pandemic has forced city governments to be adaptive and lean into community partnerships in order to meet the series of social and economic crises with flexibility and common sense. JEFF MIREL, Vice President of Rosenblum Company, laid out some of the challenges that developers face when trying to move their building and operations towards a low carbon model and how there is a path forward in small and midsize cities. ALEXANDRA CHURCH, Director of Planning & Development for the City of Newburgh, took us through the frantic early months of the pandemic, dominated by “Community-Focused Incident Command” meetings and the parallel crisis of addressing systemic racism in the city. Despite these difficult realities, the pandemic also offered a lot of positive opportunities for urban design and innovation.
You can read a recap of the event here and watch a video of the event here.
APRIL
We co-hosted (along with RPI and UAlbany) the big momma, THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURES CONFERENCE, a four-day extravaganza featuring16 keynotes speakers, over 32 community-led breakout sessions, walking audits of our neighborhoods, and an Innovation Salon of sustainable tech, design, and community projects. A parallel Youth Congress for Climate Justice heard from their own set of speakers, organized, and made their own plans.
Each day featured a different theme— “The Sustainable City: A Green Urban Economy,” “The Sustainable Community: Housing & Wellness,” “The Sustainable Network: Energy & Transportation,” and “Sustainability = Equity: Justice & Resilience in Cities.” Our speakers included Enrique Penalosa, Joe Martens, Janet Joseph, Paul Tonko, Leah Penniman, Julian Agyeman, Peter Iwanowicz, Basil Seggos, and many others.
You can read a recap of the conference here and see a searchable video database of all 77 sessions here.
MAY
FoSCI hosted the webinar “On the Road to Nowhere: The Future of Urban Highways in Upstate NY” where we heard from representatives from Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, cities which are reconsidering the legacy of their urban highways—and coming up with plans to ameliorate the catastrophic consequences these hulking piece of misplaced infrastructure have laid upon their communities.
PAT FAHY, NYS Assemblymember from District 107 and longtime champion of reimagining I-787, opened our event with a tone of optimism, after several ongoing years of frustration. BEN CROWTHER, of the Congress for New Urbanism and project manger for the Highways to Boulevards and Freeways Without Futures initiatives, provided some national context behind this watershed moment for transforming urban highways. STEPHANIE CROCKATT, Executive Director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, described the amazing coalition work happening in Buffalo around confronting the destructive legacy of its urban highways and envisioning a brighter future, including the Scajaquada Corridor Coalition. ERIK FRISCH, Manager for Special Projects for the City of Rochester, narrated that city's incredible progress towards transforming its inner loop highway section by section, including the completed Inner Loop East and the upcoming Inner Loop North. JAY ARZU, Ph. D Student at UPenn's Stuart Weitzman School of Design and former Transportation & Equity Research Fellow for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, addressed both Rochester and Syracuse in his presentation, focusing on issues of racial equity and community inclusion in the design and vision process. SCOTT TOWNSEND, a principal at SWBR and one of the founders of the Albany Riverfront Collaborative, described how the city was at the "raw beginning of their journey," in grappling with its waterfront but that there was plenty of community support and that the collaborative was working on plans to create a community vision for the a waterfront without the overbuilt and destructive I-787.
You can read a recap of the event here and watch a video of the event here.
SEPTEMBER
Future of Small Cities Institute founder Reif Larsen gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts as part of the Zube Lecture series entitled “The Future of Main Streets in Small Legacy Cities: Flexible Storefronts & the Experiential Economy”—you can watch the lecture here.
This work would be later turned into an article for The Globe & Mail called “The Death & Life of Small North American Cities” that focused on the Main Streets in the Hudson Valley cities of Troy, Hudson, and Kingston.
The Storefronts of Troy, NY.
OCTOBER
The Future of Small Cities hosted a webinar “The Artist is the City: Public Art as Community Activation” that looked at ways artists and the creative economy help shape the narrative of a city. How public art make us rethink and deepen the discussion about equity, inclusion, hope, resilience?
We heard from some of our leading public arts programs and projects, including JANE GOLDEN and NETANEL PORTIER Mural Arts Philadelphia, the nation’s largest public art program; JERICA WORTHAM from the Greenwood Art Project, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was formed on the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre as a community-driven artist collective that explores the history of the 1921 Massacre and the rich legacy of the city’s “Black Wall Street”; KATELYN KIRNIE, who worked on both the Passageways Project and Ed Johnson Memorial in Chattanooga, TN; and BARB NELSON, one of the brainchild behind the Capital Region’s own Breathing Lights project, which transformed the landscape of vacant properties into an illuminated life form that catalyzed the region’s awareness around disinvestment, poverty, and structural racism.
You can read a recap of the event here and watch a video of the event here.
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FoSCI also interviewed SCOTT KELLOGG, Education Director at The Radix Ecological Sustainability Center about his new book, Urban Ecosystem Justice Strategies for Equitable Sustainability and Ecological Literacy in the City. Merging together the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and urban environmental education, Urban Ecosystem Justice promotes building fair, accessible, and mutually beneficial relationships between citizens and the soils, water, atmospheres, and biodiversity in their cities.
You can read the interview with Scott here.
NOVEMBER
The Future of Small Cities is honored to be a part of the Albany Riverfront Collaborative—a diverse coalition of engaged citizens from a variety of sectors—who would like to see Albany reconnect with its waterfront using an inclusive community visioning process that allows the city to achieve its great potential. The Albany Riverfront Collaborative's website includes helpful renderings, a documentary film, a petition, a blog, strategies for engagement, and a bunch of information about urban highway reimagining: www.albanyriverfrontcollaborative.com
Follow the ARC Facebook page here.
And watch the ARC's documentary film, "Reimagining Albany's Waterfront":
DECEMBER
To finish the year, we hosted an exciting virtual event “Our Future Main Streets: Inclusion, Flexibility, Experience” in which we asked what is the future of storefronts, sidewalks, and public spaces in these small, urban ecosystems and explored how ground floor occupancy models are shifting towards experiential programing and community spaces, with a particular emphasis on looking at projects that center around diversity and inclusion.
We heard from LINDSEY WALLACE of Main Street America, who provided us with some national trends in Main Streets across the country; ZORAIDA LOPEZ-DIAGO of the Scenic Hudson’s River Cities program, who discussed Main Street community collaboration across cities in the Hudson Valley; Mayor STEVE NOBLE of Kingston, NY, who talked about the challenge of nurturing sustainable and equitable Main Streets in a post-industrial small city landscape, and what city officials can do to encourage community development ; RUSUL ALRUBAIL of the Parkdale Centre for Innovation in Toronto, which has done a bunch of innovative work in establishing inclusive Main Streets and encouraging BIPOC business ownership and entrepreneurship; and KRISTIN DIOTTE, Director of Planning in Schenectady, NY, who located the different kinds of Main Streets we see in our cities, from heavily trafficked downtown corridors, to neighborhood streets, and how we can repair and maintain these corridors. Main Streets are changing alongside our cities and the possibilities are exciting.
You can read a recap of the event here and watch the video here.
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Finally, during the fall the Future of Small Cities had been working with Professor Michael Oatman’s design studio at the RPI School of Architecture to create the first exhibition in a pop-up space in Downtown Troy that we are calling the FOCUS (Future of Cities and Urban Sustainability) Lab, which will showcase sustainable urban design solutions. We're exploring the idea of manifesting a living room for the city, in the tradition of the "Urban Rooms" that are appearing across the UK. The FOCUS Living Lab is an ongoing partnership between The Future of Small Cities Institute, RPI, Siemens, the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology, and the City of Troy.
The FOCUS Lab will he housed in an unused storefront that was once a jewelry store in a building that was formerly a Masonic Lodge and has future plans to become an Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence.
Professor Oatman’s class worked hard all fall to research, design and mount the first exhibition, “To Flow Both Ways: The Past, Present, and Future of Hudson Waterfronts.” Their final review was in December and the show will open to the public in March 2022.
Here’s to another great year ahead!