18 Dec 2015 Year in Review
Wow. 2015 has been an amazing year for 8 80 Cities. We’ve met so many wonderful people and contributed to the process of making a number of communities better places for people.
Everyday we are reminded that there are people in the world who want to make their cities better for everyone – young, old, rich, and poor.
We’ve been to San Diego, Portland, Los Angeles, Windsor, San Antonio, Detroit, Victoria, Atlanta, St. Paul, Copenhagen, Markham and many more places this year. To share some highlights, we’ve rounded up a list of our favourite moments of 2015.
Portland Study Tour
Public space is good for business. This was the most valuable lesson that we learned when we took a group of Knight city representatives to Portland to study the interaction between local business and public space. We learned so much about the role of public space in building a robust local economy that we wrote a whole chapter about it in our Doable City Reader.
K880 Emerging City Champions Fellowship Program
With generous funds from the Knight Foundation we were able to spend 4 days in Toronto with 25 amazing young leaders. These are inspiring young people who are working hard to improve the way people think and feel about their cities’. The #K880Champs program has been such a rewarding experience for our staff. Stay tuned for K880 updates in 2016 😉
Viva CalleSJ Open Streets San Jose
No one loves Open Streets more than our staff and we’ve been privileged to work with the great staff at the City of San Jose and the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition to help bring Viva CalleSJ to the streets of San Jose. All their hard work culminated into the big day when thousands of people took to the streets to walk, bike, roll!
CPH 2016
In Copenhagen, Denmark, we gave representatives from Knight cities the opportunity to think outside the box. We wanted our tour participants to be inspired by the most liveable city in the world and to think creatively about how to improve the public life of their cities.
An All Ages and Abilities Cycling Network in Victoria, BC.
We’ve been working hard with the City of Victoria and an all-star team of liveable city experts to design a network of protected bikeways that will make Victoria the best cycling city in Canada. We met with the community in the streets, in the rain, and gave residents an opportunity to share their thoughts on this vision. We’re looking forward to Victoria’s cycling future.
The Healthiest Practice Open Streets Toolkit
With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation we created the first-ever comprehensive toolkit for Open Streets organizers. Building on experiences from others in the field, this toolkit will help any community get started in planning a program from building a strong team, finding sponsors, planning a route, recruiting volunteers, and so much more. If you haven’t checked it out yet, we would highly recommend it www.healthiestpracticeopenstreets.org
If the work we did with you is missing from this list, don’t worry. We still think you’re fantastic. Check out our other blog posts from 2015. Chances are we already wrote a post about your project or city or you’ll see one here in 2016.
