In this episode, I speak with community leaders, and all-around good neighbors, Judy Sullivan and Meg Moschetto of the Cochrane Heights Neighborhood Association in Dallas, Texas. They recently transformed an ‘eyesore’ alley into a place of connection, expanding their neighborhood, increasing safety, and paving the way for a butterfly garden, kids playing and many more dog walks with neighbors. Their journey and the beautiful results were first captured by the Dallas Morning News, and serve as an example to us all for how small community-led changes can have a big impact.

How can a one-day event spark lasting change? How can community design be open sourced? What should we be measuring if we want to gauge positive change?

I talk with transportation and placemaking expert, Andrew Howard about his experiences doing just this with Team Better Block. Andrew is the director of placemaking at WGI, a national design and professional services firm leading in technology-based solutions for the construction of public infrastructure and real estate development. Andrew co-founded Better Block in 2010 as a transportation and placemaking focused public outreach firm that temporarily re-engineers auto-dominated, blighted, and underused urban areas into vibrant centers.

What is the most talked about neighborhood in Austin, TX? The Community First! Village, a 51-acre master planned village that fosters independence, friendship and community in service with the homeless. This innovate residential program, developed by Mobile Loaves & Fishes is rethinking housing and showing amazing results.

Shelby Blessing, AIA is a design architect, impassioned activist and Austin-based design for equity leader, with Page/. She shares stories from years of working with and serving the Community First! Village through design and research.

Katie and I explore how love can be a power to transform the world. Katie shares how she has learned to think about and practice designing with love, and how designers can use love to help dismantle systemic injustices.

“Talking about Love gives us clarity. Love and abuse, or love and racism, or love and discrimination, fundamentally cannot coexist.” - Katie Swenson

In this episode, Maya and I explore how the built environment can foster justice, equity, diversity and inclusion – how often it’s purposefully designed to exclude and how we can change that. Maya’s journey to create Chicago Mobile Makers started off with two questions - 1. How can we diversity the design profession? 2. How can we improve disinvested communities? And, can those two things happen simultaneously? As her and her colleagues at Chicago Mobile Makers look to this next school semester in the face of COVID-19, the mobile maker has some very special things in store that are uniquely positioned to benefit Chicago area youth. If you want to learn more about here or her work please check out the links below to her website, Chicago Mobile Maker’s Website and their recent feature in Dwell Magazine.