With a little bit of duct tape and a handful of volunteers, unused intersections across America are becoming Better Blocks.
You’re probably asking, what’s a Better Block? Well, it’s sort of a temporary community hangout that serves as an attempt to revitalize a run-down or unused area of town.
Thanks to the Better Block Project, an empty street in the Oak Cliff district in Dallas recently turned into a short-term plaza complete with pop-up shops, cafe seating, bike paths, local artists and activities suitable for the whole town.
“This is a street that’s worthless,” a woman says in the video below. “You can get to any point that’s around here without driving on this piece of pavement, so why not activate it and let the people own it?”
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According to founder Jason Roberts, most Better Block events cost less than $2,000 to organize, including the price for permits and insurance. As TreeHugger points out, it’s a small price to pay to revitalize a neighborhood and spur the local economy. Liveable Cities reports that after one event, vacancy rates on one block dropped from 75 percent to 10 percent, and active storefronts rose from 25 percent to 65 percent.
If you check out this map, you’ll see that since its founding in 2010, the Better Block project has caught on in cities from coast to coast.
Interested in organizing your own Better Block? The project happens to be open-sourced, which means it’s free and can be built upon. Check out this link here for information and resources.
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Tag: neighborhoods
Watch: How a Social Network Lets You Meet the Neighbors, Without Leaving Your House
If you needed to borrow a cup of sugar, would you know where to turn? Maybe not, thanks to a number of factors, including technology, that are pulling people from their front porches. But Nextdoor — a free social network — aims to prove that technology can also be a part of the solution when it comes to creating and strengthening community.
“It’s not that people don’t want to talk to their neighbors, it’s that they don’t know each other….They don’t know how to start that conversation,” says Sarah Leary, co-founder of Nextdoor.com. “We needed to create a platform that would solve the real problems that people faced everyday in their neighborhood.”
Nextdoor started in Menlo Park, Calif., but the site now covers more than 30,000 neighborhoods across the country, allowing residents to help each other, whether it be finding a reliable babysitter, looking for a lost pet or preventing crimes in the community. “The neighborhood is actually the original social network,” Leary says. “We’re incredibly proud to create a platform where people are just following their natural instincts to look out for each other and help each other…. We’re just making that a lot easier.”