Developed by SPUR and Gehl through work at San José’s Guadalupe River Park, Coexistence in Public Space asks how parks and public spaces can provide joy, belonging, and safety for everyone—including people experiencing homelessness. Its central proposition is simple but powerful: What if we designed public space for coexistence rather than exclusion?

Hyperlocal examines the growing world of place-based governance—from business improvement districts and community land trusts to neighborhood councils. By looking at these organizations as an interconnected field, the book explores their potential to shape more responsive, inclusive communities—and the complicated questions of representation, resources, accountability, and power that come with them.

Kathy Madden was a co-founder of Project for Public Spaces and one of the pioneers of the modern placemaking movement. For more than four decades, she helped turn the careful observation of how people actually use public space into practical tools that communities around the world could use to make better places.

SPUR — the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association — is a nonprofit public policy organization. We bring people together from across the political spectrum to develop solutions to the big problems cities face. Based in San Francisco, San José, and Oakland, we are recognized as a leading civic planning organization and respected for our independent and holistic approach to urban issues.

A project of SPUR was featured in Episode 3

Project for Public Spaces is a global nonprofit that has spent more than 50 years helping communities create and sustain public spaces. Through placemaking, training, convening, research, and advocacy, PPS champions gathering places shaped with—and cared for by—the people who use them.

Nate Storring is Co-Executive Director of Project for Public Spaces, where his work focuses on placemaking, public-space stewardship, and engaging people in urban planning and design through storytelling. He has helped shape PPS research and resources on inclusive placemaking, innovation districts, and place governance, and is co-editor of Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World and Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs. Before joining PPS in 2015, Nate produced exhibitions and public programs exploring cities, architecture, and transportation in Toronto, Chicago, Boston, and Rhode Island.

Abra Allan is Cofounder of Big Creative Consulting and Sidewalk Ballet’s unofficial Foreign Correspondent.