California Main Street Conference 2024 in Eureka

From Childhood Memories to California’s Main Streets: Creating Enduring, Resilient Streets.
From street cars, parking lots, malls, and now on-line shopping, Main Street’s success traditionally focused on economic development, through both transportation, and shopping trends. These trends have shaped Main Streets in positive and negative ways. However there is another approach to enhancing Main Streets and that is through sensory experiences which can bring all people together and improve their wellbeing.
These preservation and the enhancement California’s Main Streets is driven by passionate people who understood the connectedness these streets bring. This type of planning needs a deeper level of community engagement that helps the public articulate their emotional attachment to place. The 2024 California Main Street Conference in Eureka allowed us to train, experiment and develop innovative community engagement tools to do just that. These approaches dovetail nicely with their personal and professional missions.
Forget words, maps, and data, because these traditional planning tools fail to fully describe the sensory rich relationships to the built environment that people experience on Main Street. Instead of asking people what they want, which is usually more parking we had the them build their ideal Main Street. By building with their hands and objects they can allow their mental and body “talk” and well has highlight the small details that make a place meaning full.
The training focused on personal discovery and meaningful connectedness - building relationships every step of the way and uncovering those intangible experiences that people bring to Main Street and visa versa.
Build Your favorite Childhood Memory (Individual) The first training activity was a model building workshop where participants started by building a model of a favorite childhood memory. This activity helped participants get comfortable with using their hands and objects, put them in a good mood, and served as an easy way of helping them get to know each other. Additionally, by building the model of the memory they revisited places of joy that shaped their lives and well-being, forming their urban planning DNA. This DNA shapes how the participants relate to space as adults, and these memories follow them wherever they go. Not surprisingly all the participants’ memories were outdoors and they made connections to why they do their Main Street work. These elements they created build their memories can be used to build meaningful Main Streets and helped the participants learn from their personal histories.
Build your ideal Main Street(Teams) Participants worked in teams with the mission to “Build their ideal Main Street” in 10-15 minutes. This activity promoted social cohesion and solutions based on their memories, needs, and aspirations. The teams were not given any constraints, so all solutions were welcomed, promoting autonomy in the development process. The communal nature of this process provided a platform that everyone participated in regardless of typical barriers such as language, age, ethnicity, and professional training.`
Building imaginary dioramas with objects actively engaged participants in the design process, rather than leaving it all up to the experts. Participants were able to communicate, illustrate, and negotiate ideas with others in ways that would have been difficult using existing maps and words alone. In fact, maps would have limited the creative, brainstorming process and would have favored people who can read maps. The objects’ tactile, visual, and spatial elements gave participants, to create from their gut as well as the opportunity to quickly test their ideas and design interventions with others. Through this process, new ideas emerged and developed. In a short period of time the scenarios began to take form and fill out the tabletops.
Once the time was up each team presented their ideal Main Street in two minutes to the whole group. The team’s models focused mainly on the qualitative elements of Main Street that they wanted to experience.