Walk/Bike/Places is the premier conference in North America for walking, bicycling, and placemaking professionals from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Produced biannually in different cities around the world by the New York City-based nonprofit, Project for Public Spaces (PPS), Walk/Bike/Places focuses on addressing the most important and challenging issues of the moment, and making the conference a place where diverse voices are heard, and leaving a positive legacy in the host city.
We worked with PPS June 15-18, 2021, on an hybrid in person and virtual Walker/Bike/Places conference in Indianapolis themed The Route to Recovery. The conference brought together practitioners, policy-makers, and public space advocates to address the many of the urgent challenges and long overdue injustices that have come to the surface within our field. Many of the events that took place throughout 2020 only intensified and revealed issues that had been long standing and devastating influences in our society relating to public health, systemic racism, climate change, economic inequality, and democracy. The conference dove into how public space plays a role in these issues.
Check out this blog our executive director, Jim Walker wrote on the PPS website for the conference.
In 2020, Big Car assisted PPS in developing their first ever virtual conference on August 3-7. Through screens, participants took a tour of the nitty gritty details of functional and dysfunctional streets in the city with Bike Indianapolis and the City of Indianapolis, crowdfunded public space highlights with Patronicity, porch parties with Harrison Center, tactical urbanism projects with Indiana State Department of Health, and the story of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. Attendees also learned Big Car’s study of societies seeking utopia and our affordable housing programming.
