Armchair and professional planners, architects, designers, artists and makers take note: San Francisco’s Planning Department is partnering with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to produce the Market Street Prototyping Festival.
The Prototyping Festival will be held on two miles of Market Street from Embarcadero to 10th on October 2, 3 and 4 and will showcase ideas for improving the city’s public spaces, ideas which could be employed to help reshape San Francisco’s central corridor.
Any individual, business or nonprofit can submit an idea, the only requirement is that “ideas should aim to improve public spaces in a way that engages the community and encourages them to think differently about the city’s streets and squares.”
Ideas will be accepted through July 3 and up to 50 proposals will receive $2,000 apiece to build a prototype. After the festival select teams will work with the city to build out their ideas to become permanent, or semi-permanent, fixtures of the street and perhaps beyond.
Only in San Francisco do we need a 300,000 person street festival to design a street. Aren’t plans already complete? If not, why? Or is process Itself the goal? Is SPUR going to do a 2016 Festival? What in the world are we waiting for? Market St redo has been going on for years and seems we can’t get to point B.
Why do we need to re-design Market Street anyway? I go there every day, and seems to me it works pretty well as-is.
you must not take a bus
What is wrong with Market Street? Look, anything can be improved, but I can’t be the only one who is tired of seeing so much fuss and money pouring into things like these when we have actual CRISES in our city, including:
– Affordability
– Severe housing shortage
– Rampant homelessness that seems to be getting worse, not better
I’m sure that the Coalition to Enable Homeless Drifters to Move to SF, and the Coalition to Ban All Autos in SF will both be out in full force.
I used to play bass for Enable Homeless Drifters.
Hey, I remember you guys! Great punk rock band – you used to do covers of old Perry Como songs….