Street Plans Principal Mike Lydon joined Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns and Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 in a three-day “boot camp” style workshop for Memphis city leaders. The training was hosted by the City of Memphis, the Urban Land Institute, and a variety of other local foundations, businesses and non-profit organizations.
The Memphis Bootcamp focused on helping city leaders identify opportunities for more economically productive patterns of development and delivery methodologies for the short-, mid-, and long-term.
On the first day of the training, Mike Lydon led a session that introduced high-level city leaders to placemaking and the high-value return that may be gleaned from the Tactical Urbanism delivery methodology. Pointing to several local examples, an emphasis was placed on connecting local leaders with more bottom-up, incremental efforts to improve the city and its finances at the neighborhood scale.
Mike also delivered a public lecture about how Tactical Urbanism may be used to change the culture of a city, as well as a workshop for select public, private, and third sector leaders for the Edge neighborhood. The effort helped attendees identify a number of short-term projects, including the use of the City’s emerging MEMFix program, to bring economic vitality back to the downtown-adjacent neighborhood using the incremental 48x48x48 approach.
Several of the identified projects were implemented within days, weeks, and months of the initial workshop, bringing more value to the public and private assets found throughout the neighborhood. These include low-cost bicycle lanes, wayfinding signs, a public plaza, and pedestrian curb extensions that have helped support continued private sector investment throughout the area.