Deborah Cullinan, CEO, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Fransisco, USA

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ “prototyping places for people” initiative addresses the growing issues of disconnection and lack of empathy among the diverse people of San Francisco. In the midst of rapid change, the city’s local media headlines are dominated by battles over public and private space, and questions of whom the city, or any given neighborhood, really belongs to. Traditional urban planning processes have had limited, if any, community input. But YBCA believes that citizens deserve a voice in the transformation unfolding in their streets.

Through an unprecedented partnership with the San Francisco Planning Department, YBCA has launched an open source model that puts the people of the city at the center of, and profoundly influencing, how things grow and shift. They began on Market Street; a major thoroughfare that spans several neighborhoods in the midst of dramatic change. The Market Street Prototyping Festival asked citizens to submit their ideas for making Market Street a more welcoming, inspiring destination for the diverse people that live and work along it’s path. An open call yielded hundreds of submissions, and 50 ideas were selected to become temporary design installations (“prototypes”). Over three days in April, almost one million people visited these installations along Market Street, and it brought connectivity, empathy and inspiration to the city’s streets.

This was the first iteration of what will become an annual endeavor, leading up to and beyond the planned redesign of Market Street in 2018. Over the next two years, YBCA will incubate 100 open-sourced ideas for activating public space, while tackling big questions like: can citizen-driven change achieve equity? Moving forward, the “prototyping places for people” work will grow in new directions and neighborhoods based on learnings.

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