The Building Healthy Places Initiative is pleased to announce that four grants have been awarded to ULI District Councils to support innovative local creative placemaking initiatives.

Creative Placemaking Grants for Healthy Corridors

• ULI Memphis – Madison & Cleveland MEMFix. This project supports efforts to animate the Memphis intersection of Madison Avenue and Cleveland Street with art, using a locally-developed toolbox of interventions.
• ULI Idaho – Activate Vista Corridor Sidewalks. This project build’s on ULI’s Vista Avenue Healthy Corridor effort, which seeks to utilize corridor revitalization to establish a gateway into Boise. The grant funds the implementation of creative placemaking strategies along a two block stretch of the corridor.

Corridor projects will receive $10,000 in support of efforts to utilize creative placemaking solutions to revitalize and transform soulless commercial corridors into healthy and vibrant places. Grantees will receive advisory assistance from the Building Healthy Places Initiatives and Juanita Hardy, ULI’s senior visiting fellow for creative placemaking.

Creative Placemaking Advisory Workshops

• ULI Michigan will work with local partners, including the Henry Ford Health System, to explore opportunities to inject a focus on creative placemaking and health within ongoing neighborhood revitalization efforts in Detroit, helping to bolster connections with the local artist community
• ULI Triangle will lead in helping planners, developers, and community leaders consider the integration of creative placemaking strategies within transit expansion projects in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina.

Advisory Workshop grantees will receive $5,000 to address local or regional land use challenges with creative placemaking solutions, and to identify opportunities to enhance the local real estate community’s understanding and utilization of creative placemaking strategies, especially those which promote health. The Building Healthy Places Initiative will assist in organizing an advisory workshop which will engage national and local experts and leaders to exchange advice and ideas on how to implement creative placemaking strategies to advance local goals.

About the Creative Placemaking Project

ULI’s Creative Placemaking Project is being undertaken as part of the Building Healthy Places Initiative. The project is developing resources about effective creative placemaking strategies which will be widely distributed among ULI member and partner networks; embedding creative placemaking strategies in ULI programs, including the Healthy Corridors project; and advancing efforts by ULI members and District Councils to utilize creative placemaking approaches in development projects.

ULI is grateful to the Kresge Foundation for its support of this project. (Read more about the ULI partnership with the Kresge Foundation.)

About the Healthy Corridors Project

Over the past two years, ULI has been undertaking a project focused on transforming underperforming urban and suburban arterials into healthier places. This project has been led by the Building Healthy Places Initiative in partnership with the he Rose Center for Public Leadership and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson and Colorado Health Foundations. ULI Colorado, ULI Nashville, ULI Idaho, and ULI Los Angeles were exceptional District Council partners on this project.

Learn more about the project by reading the report Building Healthy Corridors: Transforming Urban and Suburban Arterials into Thriving Places, available at www.uli.org/healthycorridors.