The Knight Cities Challenge just gave out $5 million to winning ideas from civic innovators to help 26 particular American cities, from Detroit to Macon, Georgia. But there's no reason these ideas can't be used elsewhere. Here are six of the 37 winning projects that other cities might want to steal.
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Turning a highway into a bicycle park

In a couple of years, the last mile of the Innerbelt highway in Akron will be shut down. The road divided the city's downtown, and was unpopular almost as soon as construction started in 1970. When the cars are finally out of the way, one section of the former highway will be turned over to bikes, in a new mountain biking park connected both to the downtown and a nearby bike trail.
"It's a way for people who don't typically ride bikes to start doing it, and get excited about it," says Jonathan Morschl, who is leading the project.

Pop-up minimum grid

It isn't easy to bike around downtown Macon, Georgia, right now, but the city will soon get to experience what it's like to have better infrastructure. In a variation on Better Block—the project that temporarily turns a block into a walkable, bikeable, active place—a local nonprofit will be temporarily converting an entire neighborhood. "People will be able to come out and ride it, and see what it's actually like to ride on good infrastructure," says Josh Rogers, president and CEO of NewTown Macon, the organization leading the project.

Over a Friday and Saturday, neighbors will be able to try out protected bike lanes, bike boulevards, and new pedestrian infrastructure connecting the heart of downtown with surrounding neighborhoods, a university campus, and parks. "All that stuff's really close, but totally disconnected right now," he says. "That's the idea of this route." Some of the new infrastructure will stay in place, and Rogers is hoping that residents will like the rest so much that they demand that it become permanent.

Front lawn placemaking platform

"We're trying to transform the most ubiquitous and underused space in America—the front lawn," says Max Musicant, founder and principal of the Musicant Group, a placemaking firm based in Minneapolis. Inspired to do something about the fact that people keep becoming more isolated from their neighbors, the group is designing a toolkit that homeowners can use to make their front lawns social. That might mean moving furniture and a grill into the front lawn, planting a garden, or adding a Little Free Library.

"It's really about people getting in touch with the things that matter to them, and putting it on their front lawns," he says. "They're going to be present in their front lawns again, and by doing that—instead of being in the backyard, or just inside—they're going to have serendipitous interactions with neighbors in a way that was never possible." The designers plan to test the project with 15-20 people in a couple of typical neighborhoods in St. Paul, release a beta kit online, and build a final kit that will come out in 2017.

By Adele Peters, Fast Company

​To read the full article, go here.

A pair of St. Paul civic projects have won sizable grants from the Knight Foundation in response to a national call for ideas that would improve urban living.

The Knight Cities Challenge awarded roughly a quarter of a million dollars to the two St. Paul projects — one thought up by a professor at the University of St. Thomas and the other by a small-business owner from Minneapolis.

The first project will focus on turning front lawns of residences and apartment buildings into places where residents can actually meet and talk.

Max Musicant, a Minneapolis resident who is the founder of the Musicant Group, said most front lawns are dead spaces that residents tend to avoid, and doing something as simple as setting up a “porch-like” setting with chairs and a grill make it easier for neighbors to meet. His project will offer kits and advice to help residents do just that.

Musicant said he will focus on a couple dozen properties in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway and Rondo neighborhoods, and will partner with the Friendly Streets Initiative to carry the project out.
It received an $82,400 grant.

The second project, titled “I’m going to vote today,” will take place during the upcoming November election, and will test whether people receiving tailored messages through the mail encouraging them to vote will be more likely to do so.

Households who get the nonpartisan messages, which include stickers saying “I’m going to vote,” will be contrasted with households who don’t. Determining whether someone votes is public information.

The project received a $170,000 grant.

“One of our interests is in increasing civic engagement, and it’s especially important that it happens at the local level. So we have a particular interest in increasing participation in local elections,” said George Abbott, the interim program director for St. Paul, who also oversees the Cities Challenge.
The Knight Cities challenge, an annual contest, awards about $5 million annually to projects nationwide; this year, there were 4,500 applicants and 26 winners.

The Knight Foundation conducts multiple challenges, though not every year, including the Arts Challenge, News Challenge, and Green Line Challenge.

The Knight Foundation formed as a part of Knight’s newspaper division in 1940. Brothers John “Jack” S. and James L. Knight died in 1981 and 1991, respectively, and left the foundation a total of $630 million.

The foundation focuses on improving cities in which the Knight brothers once owned newspapers, of which St. Paul was one.

By Tad Vezner, Pioneer Press

To read the full article, go here.

A program to help homeowners create welcoming community gathering places and an experiment to see if a little sticker can encourage people to get out and vote are St. Paul winners of the Knight Cities Challenge, a program that will split $5 million among 37 projects meant to help cities attract talented people and encourage civic engagement.

The challenge garnered more than 4,500 ideas to make the 26 communities where Knight invests “more vibrant places to live and work,” according to a statement from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announcing the winners Tuesday. “It asked innovators of all kinds to answer the question: What’s your best idea to make cities more successful?”

To Max Musicant, the idea is to help people get to know one another with more engaging open spaces. He got the idea to transform empty lawns into “vibrant places full of life” after a fire alarm sounded at his Minneapolis apartment building a few years ago. As his neighbors milled about, he realized he didn’t know them.

“So I went and bought cheap chairs from Home Depot and just started sitting there,” he said. “Within the first week, I got to know half my neighbors.”

An $82,400 grant from the Knight Foundation will help Musicant develop tool kits for St. Paul homeowners and other property owners to use their yards and open spaces to foster a sense of community. Part of the effort will include a pilot project involving 15 to 20 homeowners in the Hamline-Midway, Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods.
“I think it’s going to be awesome,” he said.

Aaron Sackett, a behavioral scientist at the University of St. Thomas, has studied the effects of those little red “I Voted” stickers that people wear on Election Day. He wondered: Would sending out “I Plan to Vote Today” stickers in the mail ahead of time get more people to the polls?

The “I Voted” sticker is “a little bit of a behavioral reward, like pressing the lever gets a treat,” Sackett said. “The other benefit is you go back to work and everybody sees it.”

Sackett’s idea is to use that “nuanced form of peer pressure” with stickers mailed to every registered voter in St. Paul. He and project partner Christopher Bryan, a University of Chicago associate professor, got a $170,275 grant.

By James Walsh, Star Tribune
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To read the full article, go here.

The Knight Foundation announced on Tuesday 37 Knight Cities Challenge grant winners competing for part of a $5 million pool of funds, including two from St. Paul.
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“When we reviewed the finalists, we were looking at them geographically blind,” said George Abbott, who leads the Knight Cities Challenge. “We were really looking for the projects that would help us achieve our goals.”

The three main goals for the challenge were to retain talent in the respective city, increase civic engagement and expand economic opportunity, he said.

Aaron Sackett, an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas, will receive a $170,275 grant to test how participation in local elections changes if people are given a sticker to wear on election day that reads “I’m Going to Vote Today.”

Sackett and his research partner Christopher Bryan, a faculty member at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, plan to send stickers to St. Paul residents ahead of election day to remind and encourage people to vote.

Musicant Group was awarded $82,400 for its proposal to develop a toolkit residents can use to create community hubs on their lawns.

The place-making and public space management firm partners with community and commercial groups to create public and common area spaces.

The group has in the past partnered with companies like Minneapolis-based Ryan Cos. US Inc. and the Minneapolis office for CBRE to plan Capella Tower’s common spaces on the first floor and skyway level.

Winners will have 18 months to implement their ideas.

About 4,500 ideas were submitted in October for the call for ideas to improve 26 cities around the country.

“It’s quite overwhelming,” Abbott said. “And it’s really encouraging to see the response that we received and the number of great ideas that are out there.”

In January, 158 finalists were announced, with more than a dozen applicants from Minnesota.
Last year, 32 applicants were awarded during the first ever Knight Cities Challenge.

By Janice Bitters, Finance & Commerce

To read the full article, go here.