Re-Mapping the Publics...
Sweet Water Foundation welcomes you to the third exhibit in the Thought Barn: Re-Mapping the Publics…, an assemblage of art, artifacts, and reflections on city planning and development. Re-Mapping the Publics… offers a blueprint for re-mapping our city’s resources to create true common wealth - the spaces, structures, networks, resources, and opportunities essential to mending the urban fabric, healing communities, and equipping our neighborhoods to thrive, rather than merely survive. This exhibit builds upon We The Publics...from Bounded Rationality to Unbounded Possibilities, which provoked a reframing and reclaiming of the ‘Publics’ and offered The Commonwealth as a living demonstration of the paradigm shift required to reconstruct public trust.
Re-Mapping the Publics… continues the conversation through an examination of how cities utilize public money, labor, land, and materials to address challenges and plan for the future. The first half of the exhibit aims to decode city planning and neighborhood development processes. It reflects on historical and present-day planning practices and examines their impact. The second half of Re-Mapping the Publics… invites us to imagine what if? What if we re-mapped public resources? What if city planning and neighborhood development tackled fundamentals (trash pickup, growing food, building and repairing homes, etc.) before launching multimillion-dollar initiatives? What if residents were invited (and expected) to do more than attend community meetings to make their neighborhoods and the city a better place? What if neighborhood development took place on a human scale, fueled by relationships and a collective commitment to do the necessary work?
Developed by Sweet Water Foundation for Re-Mapping the Publics… (2023). Shared under Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. info@sweetwaterfoundation.com
