Place-Lifting Policies
Preamble: You may have heard the term “place-making” before. We’re experimenting with a different term to describe this—“place-lifting”—because, well, place already exists; we’re not making them. Instead, what we’re doing, essentially, is elevating and celebrating place through activities, expression, and co-creation. Join us!
Cities across the country are establishing policies that make it easy and straightforward for neighborhoods and districts to transform their own streets into inclusive community spaces. In addition to our Tucson’s First Parklet initiative, we’re pushing for public policies here in Tucson that will make it easy to do things like create street murals, install traffic calming using affordable, colorful, semi-permanent materials, host a block party, and more.
Neighborhood Traffic Calming Lending Library
Many Tucson neighborhoods struggle with dangerous, speeding traffic in residential streets, and thankfully there are a number of street modifications that can be built/installed to calm, deter, and slow traffic. This includes things like traffic circles, chicanes/bulb-outs, speed tables, and more. Unfortunately, these changes are costly, so it’s important to get them right. To that end, LSA is working with the City of Tucson Dept. of Transportation & Mobility to create a Neighborhood Traffic Calming Lending Library that will provide neighborhoods with light-weight equipment to experiment with different shapes and sizes of traffic calming. This temporary measure is a way for neighbors to observe traffic behavior and make decisions together about what permanent changes to make.
Street Murals
Streets are public spaces and the perfect place to create meaning and elevate community voice and culture. Having now implemented four different street murals in different parts of town, we’re working to help identify and streamline the public process to make it straightforward and easy for different neighborhoods and communities to conceive of and implement asphalt murals themselves.
Support our place-lifting policy efforts, and make it possible for more people to transform their own streets:
