Winter Magic-Making: Turning Challenges Into Opportunities
Creating meaningful experiences that not only withstand, but celebrate, the cold weather months.
Winters in the northern climes are materially colder and darker than the rest of the year. We’re stating the obvious. But, too often in placemaking work, these are viewed as exclusively negative phenomena that must be tolerated rather than captured as opportunities.
Constraints foster creativity. Changing our mindset around these cold-weather characteristics provides insights into approaches which can foster activity and meaning-making.
Below are some of our strategies for making magic during the winter months:
Leveraging Contrasts:
The dark and cold make any source of light and warmth that much more attractive, just as shade and coolness serve as draws in the summertime. Creating and using these contrasts are a common thread through the activation strategies that follow. Specific tactics include:
String lights along perimeters and overhead
Decorative light displays
Fires
Bored People are Cold People:
…and cold people go home. People don’t mind being out in cold temperaturea as long as they are engaging in an experience. Participation is key. The more that people can be an active part of the event, the stronger their memories of it will be and the less they’ll think about the wind chill. While people don’t need to be warm the whole time, you can dramatically lengthen the stay of a visitor by providing opportunities to warm up, such as:
Warming houses
Fires (a common theme!)
Selling hot beverages, or even potatoes as hand warmers
Access to adjacent stores…
Proximity of Activations to Commercial Centers:
One of the most common mistakes communities make is to locate their winter activities in areas that are too far from their main streets to provide any benefits to retailers - and provide visitors with more things to do and ways to warm up. In wintertime, even one or two blocks can sometimes be too much of a barrier to generate meaningful foot traffic for local businesses.
Better to shoe-horn an activation into a site adjacent to other activity-drivers (and beneficiaries of your efforts) than to pick the “perfect site” that is isolated from any positive adjacencies.
Don’t Forget About Maintenance:
Icy, uneven, and slush-filled pedestrian and bike pathways can be a major obstacle for visitors of all kinds, but especially seniors, persons experiencing disabilities, and families with strollers. Maintaining safe, dry, and well-lit pathways in public spaces, on walks and trails, throughout business areas, to and from major access points, is a critical component to any winter activation.
Meaning Making
With the continued decline of participation in religious institutions, especially in northern climates, there remains an innate desire to mark the season and the passing of time. While holiday shopping has filled much of the void for many, growing numbers hunger for something more purposeful to pair with the consumer ritual. Creating new - and amplifying existing - traditions serves not only to strengthen the social fabric of the community, it can also draw visitors to support surrounding commercial uses. An excellent example of a new secular tradition is the Luminary Loppet, which combines cross country skiing, ice sculptures, theater arts, and fire every January on a frozen lake in Minneapolis, MN.
Winter is Coming… so make the most of it!
Don’t shy away from colder temperatures. If anything, people are hungrier for things to do during winter months and there’s less on offer. If you’re strategic and creative, you can work with the “difficult” elements at hand, turn them into opportunities, and help users of a space to enjoy a place all year around.