My Path to Placemaking

Sharing the Personal Journey Behind My Approach to Placemaking

Learning by doing: me at a pumpkin-carving event our firm helped organize for Living Room Station — a pop-up bus shelter in Minneapolis.

After posting for over a year on strategies, frameworks, tips, tricks, patterns and maneuvers that I’ve found actually work based on my experience, maybe it’s high time to actually talk about that experience. My journey filled with the highs and (far more educational) lows that has brought me to where I am, what I believe, and what I share.

From Soccer to Cities

I can remember a curiosity and concern about cities and urban form as a 14- or 15-year-old on a traveling soccer team. We were from the city, with home fields that often had more dirt than grass, the corners blending into gravel from baseball diamonds. When we traveled to suburbs like Eden Prairie, Woodbury, Coon Rapids, Edina and Blaine, the fields — and the expanse beyond — were filled with lush grass, clean lines and proper drainage. In the distance were more fields, wide roads, new homes and drive-throughs. Even then, while I appreciate the grass length, I felt a certain deadness to these spaces compared to my relatively traditionally walkable neighborhood. I sensed hidden rules and dynamics shaping city and suburban life that went largely unexamined by those formally tasked with improving cities. This curiosity led me to investigate the perils of suburban sprawl in high school and later study urban planning in college.

After graduating, I wanted to help create the places Jane Jacobs and others described. Urban planning, I thought, must be the place to be. But when I began my job search, I realized planners were often confined to writing and managing predefined processes. There were many other people influencing our cities far more than urban planners.

I didn’t want my work to end up as a pile of paper on a shelf — I wanted to do something real. A family friend introduced me to the field of economic development, which seemed focused on making these lofty plans actually happen. Ready to leave the Midwest, I moved to New York City to learn and contribute.

I landed at an entrepreneurial non-profit community development corporation in Jamaica, Queens (Greater Jamaica Development Corp). Entering its 40th year, the organization had helped stabilize the downtown and restore it as a place serving the surrounding working- and middle-class communities. During my time there, the organization was making two strategic shifts: first, to use its real estate holdings to assemble sites for large-scale redevelopment focused on commercial uses and affordable housing near the region’s third-busiest transit hub; and second, to improve the experience of the downtown public realm.

When I arrived, the first strategy was well underway under the founder and Executive Director, Carlisle Towery. Trained as a planner, he had doggedly and effectively shaped change in the neighborhood from a bird’s-eye view, working to replace elevated trains with subways, advocating for a new college, securing large government offices, ensuring a new monorail connected JFK airport to Jamaica’s train station and putting together financing for key projects. His work stabilized the commercial center, improved quality of life and reduced blight.

And yet, despite 5,000 added public-sector jobs, a renovated train station with an airport link and a new college, something remained missing. This became clear as the organization pursued its first major market-driven real estate investment in 50 years.

A pattern emerged. We would present developers and investors with materials showing assembled sites from soaring aerial views. The transit access (Midtown Manhattan, JFK Airport, much of Queens and Long Island within 20 minutes) was unmatched. Many developers grew excited and scheduled site visits.

But once onsite, the conversations ended. Even by New York standards, the area was chaotic: people selling single cigarettes, trash blowing everywhere, a tangle of buses, vans, liveries and taxis, all overshadowed by a dark and foreboding 150-foot concrete overpass carrying the Long Island Rail Road. Beyond it was more trash, no sit-down food options, empty tree pits, overflowing bins. It didn’t inspire confidence for multimillion-dollar investment in an office or hotel, and more importantly, it didn’t provide a dignified experience for those who lived and worked there.

This is where the second strategy came in. The organization had brought in Andy Manshel, who had been part of the leadership transforming Bryant Park through countless small and large changes driven by observation, trial and error, and reliable resources. One key lesson was that the quality of the public realm experience drives long-term economic development, and that experience depends on the quality of care and what people can do within a space.

So, the organization began working on ongoing care and activation of the public realm. Since several entities already had partial responsibility, we aimed to be the connective tissue so the human experience didn’t fall through gaps. Efforts included using existing in-house parking management staff as roving ambassadors, new cultural programming in the main park, jazz concerts in transit and retail areas, retail recruitment focused on sit-down dining, district-wide cultural promotion, converting a traffic lane into a dignified waiting area for a busy bus pick-up zone, turning empty storefronts into artist studios, and relighting the underpass. Some initiatives had big impacts; others didn’t. We kept what worked and learned from what didn’t.

Over time, the public realm improved. Visitors, business owners, and institutions began to expect better and treat it better. The narrative of the area shifted, and since then it has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in affordable housing, hotel rooms and more.

This success far preceded and outlasted my modest three years as a project manager. But I was struck by this way of serving the public in public spaces, tying place care directly to economic development. When the quality of the public realm improves economic conditions, those gains can fund further improvements, enhancing culture, belonging and wellbeing.

I also saw the gaps in systems caring for public spaces, especially outside wealthy areas. Surprisingly, the best operators were often not government agencies but place-based nonprofits funded by additional property taxes: business improvement districts (BIDs). Focused on commercial districts, they could provide an array of services, including: ambassadors, cleaning, safety, events, marketing, maintenance, lighting, landscaping, etc. They brought vision and creativity to the daily care of the public realm, which had long lacked both.

This struck a cord for me and it became clear that this was to be my path. It merged my passion for cities and people with tangible action and invited creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit. I enrolled at Yale to get an MBA with the purpose of applying new skills to the care and revitalization of public spaces back home in Minnesota.

From Disappointment to Start-Up

But upon returning, I found no job like the ones I saw in New York; indeed, no organizations were even doing this work. My focus on integrating events, design and operations in public space was met with confusion. When people heard the word “placemaking,” all they thought of was public art alone. Nine months after graduating and moving back to Minneapolis, I was unemployed but clear on what I wanted to do and what my community needed: public spaces that foster belonging, vitality and wellbeing.

I asked myself: Could the integrated design, operations and activation services of a BID be provided to any type of shared space? At a micro, site-by-site scale? I saw no reason why not. I never anticipated starting my own business, but I knew there were no jobs out there for me. No magic opportunity was going to present itself. So, I founded The Musicant Group, with the mission and service of creating places where people want to be.

I won’t lie: it wasn’t easy in the beginning. My total income for the first year wasn’t sustainable, and by winter, the trickle of work I’d gotten had dried up. It was a tough time. I was doing a lot of reading and journaling and reflecting on my options. I decided that I’d keep at it through the next summer and if by then I didn’t have a livable income, I’d hang the project up and not regret having given it a try. Taking a chance like this was scary, but ultimately I got lucky, landing a project that paid me through the year and gained me some notoriety, and from there things took off.

I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but I structured the business as best as I could to give myself a runway to turn mistakes into lessons (something that became key to my theory on doing placemaking work, in general). I recognized this was what I wanted to do with my life, and that motivated me to survive — to not juice growth as much as possible upfront and risk failing, but to take things slow and fine-tune my processes along the way. I enjoyed a modest lifestyle in the beginning in exchange for a business that had staying power in the long run.

This work took me deep into the dysfunction of our shared spaces. Across thousands of events, design projects, acts of care, conversations and engagements, patterns emerged: many norms were at odds with the needs of actual users. But we also discovered strategies that worked and addressed root causes.

Over time, I realized I had been set free. Had I found the job I thought I wanted, I would have been confined to one geography, one type of space. Instead, I could serve any shared space, anywhere.

And that became increasingly important. When we think of public space, we imagine parks and plazas. But most of our lives unfold in other shared spaces: front yards, sidewalks, streets, transit stations, retail stores, schools, entryways, atriums, offices, parking lots, restaurants and more. What these spaces share is that they are shared. They offer opportunities for connection, collaboration and enjoyment — what Oldenburg called “third places,” though I argue the category must be broader.

Every shared space can and should provide a dignified human experience. Why shouldn’t a parking lot feel good? Why must a strip mall feel lifeless? For most of human history, we built dignified spaces … until the modern era. What happened?

I saw a massive unmet need to reshape our shared realm — especially the benign everyday spaces where we spend most of our time. While resources flowed to select parks, plazas and prestige locations, most of the built environment made people feel isolated and unwell. Despite countless books, guides, consultants and success stories, the inhumane built environment persisted and expanded.

Why is this happening, and what could be done?

That’s what I aim to answer here on Substack. My goal is not only to talk about why so much of our shared realm is failing and falling apart, but to also spread awareness on how it can actually be fixed. Because at the end of the day, our places are not doomed: I know through experience that this is a solvable problem. Come with me on this journey to save the spaces that are struggling the most in our communities.