The Sidewalk Ballet Field Guide
The Sidewalk Ballet Field Guide is a growing collection of people, organizations, projects, books, ideas and ongoing conversations about cities and the people who shape them. It grows out of the podcast, but extends well beyond it—connecting the people doing the work, the places where it’s happening, and the ideas, experiments and resources worth carrying forward. Think of it as part reference library, part trail of breadcrumbs: a way to follow the conversation wherever it leads.
Explore by type, browse alphabetically or by date, or search for something specific. Follow the tags to discover connections—or explore the map to see where the people, projects and ideas in the Field Guide take us.
Placemaking Jax
PlacemakingJax is a Jacksonville-based initiative that uses arts, culture, and creative placemaking to bring people together and strengthen the city’s neighborhoods and public spaces. Through public art, events, activations, and community partnerships, the program creates opportunities for residents to experience Jacksonville in new ways while supporting local artists and a more vibrant public realm.
Iffat Baki Bushra
Iffat Baki Bushra is an urban and transportation planner whose work explores infrastructure, mobility, and community participation. She joined Sidewalk Ballet to share her research on a remarkable submersible embankment in Sunamganj, Bangladesh, where local knowledge and community participation are integral to adapting infrastructure to the rhythms of the landscape.
Kady Yellow
Kady Yellow is a creative placemaking practitioner and Vice President of Placemaking and Activations at Downtown Vision in Jacksonville. Through PlacemakingJax and a career spanning public art, Pop-Up Civics, and community-led activation, she works to give people a meaningful role in shaping the places they call home. Also, someone wrote a song about her.
Coexistence in Public Space
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
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.
Lahaina Community Land Trust
Created in response to the devastating 2023 Maui wildfires, Lahaina Community Land Trust works to keep Lahaina's land and housing in community hands. Through permanently affordable homeownership, rebuilding assistance, and local stewardship, the organization is helping residents protect their homes, cultural heritage, and right to shape their community's future.
The Great Good Place
Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place introduced the influential idea of the “third place”—informal gathering places outside home and work where people become regulars, relationships develop, and community life takes shape. Cafés, bars, barber shops, bookstores, and similar places become essential pieces of social infrastructure.
Homeboy Industries
Founded by Father Gregory Boyle in Los Angeles, Homeboy Industries helps formerly gang-involved and incarcerated people rebuild their lives through employment, education, healing, and community. Its social enterprises, including Homeboy Bakery and Homegirl Café, demonstrate how economic opportunity and a culture of kinship can transform lives and strengthen communities.
East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is a community-owned real estate cooperative working to take land and housing out of the speculative market and place them under collective stewardship. Through cooperative ownership and investment, EB PREC offers an alternative to displacement—giving communities a direct role in shaping their neighborhoods and sharing in the benefits of development.
Kathy Madden
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.
Tinicsh Hollins
Tinisch Hollins is a San Francisco-born organizer, policy advocate, and civic leader working at the intersection of public safety, economic justice, and Black community power. As co-founder of SF Black Wall Street, her work asks a fundamental city-making question: who gets to stay, build wealth, and help shape the future of a place?
Reclaiming your Community
Majora Carter argues that communities facing persistent poverty need talent-retention strategies just as businesses do. Building from her maxim that no one should have to leave their neighborhood to live in a better one, she offers an approach to community development rooted in keeping local talent and opportunity.
SPUR
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
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
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.
SF Black Wall Street
SF Black Wall Street works to strengthen Black economic power, entrepreneurship, and community in San Francisco by connecting and supporting Black-owned businesses. Through advocacy, events, business development, and community-building, the organization helps sustain a thriving Black business ecosystem while celebrating the culture, history, and contributions of San Francisco’s Black communities.
Bronxlandia
Bronxlandia is a cultural hub and multi-purpose live events venue located at 910 Hunts Point Avenue in the South Bronx, New York City. Created by community developers Majora Carter and James Chase, the space serves as a creative local venue addressing the borough's shortage of dedicated performance spaces.
Gwen Brown
Gwen Brown is a San Francisco community leader and co-founder and co-director of SF Black Wall Street, an organization advancing Black economic empowerment, cultural preservation, and community-building in San Francisco. Her work has included youth and workforce development, neighborhood investment, public-space activation, and creating opportunities for Black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs; she has also served on San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee.
Majora Carter
Majora Carter is an urban revitalization strategist, real estate developer, MacArthur Fellow, broadcaster, and author whose work focuses on creating opportunity within historically undervalued communities. Her approach connects economic development and talent retention to the belief that people should not have to leave their neighborhoods to find opportunity.
Karen Christensen
Karen Christensen is an author, publisher, and community leader whose work spans culture, sustainability, and the power of networks. As the founder of Berkshire Publishing Group, she has long championed ideas and institutions that strengthen communities. Her forthcoming book, written in collaboration with Ray Oldenburg, revisits and reimagines the concept of the “third place” for today’s world.