As a new year begins, we take a moment to look at the future.

This episode features two fascinating conversations. First we talk with Futurist JT Mudge about how understanding changes helps us imagine, design, and prepare for the cities of tomorrow. Then Seattle based historian, Feliks Banel, highlights how the lense through which we imagine a future can shape the world of tomorrow.

JT Mudge is an award-winning futurist passionate about sustainability, ethics, and ancestral futures. He holds a masters of science in foresight from the University of Houston, where he is an adjunct professor teaching foresight and change theory. He currently serves as a Senior Strategic Foresight Advisor for The United Nations Development Programme.

The ideas and opinions JT expresses in this conversation are his own, and do not necessarily reflect The University of Houston, the UNDP, or any other organization JT is affiliated with.

Feliks Banel is a Seattle-based historian, radio producer, and longtime contributor to public radio, where he specializes in Pacific Northwest history and civic memory. His work often explores how major moments—like the 1962 Century 21 Exposition—continue to shape the identity, culture, and physical landscape of Seattle today.

(Extended conversation with Feliks available here)

JT Mudge

United Nations Development Programme

Metropolis

The Toynbee Convector

Feliks Banel - Cascade of History

Seattle Worlds Fair

Downtown Seattle Association

In this New Year’s episode of The Sidewalk Ballet, Chip sits down with Josh Yeager — a deeply thoughtful placemaker and one of the most generous champions of this work — to talk about what he’s seeing on the ground right now. Not in theory, but in real places, with real people.

Josh brings a wide lens shaped by years of practice and support for others doing this work, helping surface the patterns, tensions, and quiet shifts that don’t always make headlines — but that say a lot about where cities are headed.

That conversation sits within a broader reflection on the Sidewalk Ballet season so far. Drawing from conversations with guests including Karen Christensen, Jay Pitter, Nate Storring, Kady Yellow, Majora Carter, and others, this episode translates big hopes for our cities into everyday practices — the small, local actions that actually shape community.

Josh Yeager

Starkey Strategies

Streets Department

FIFA Cities

Cities are often shaped by experts, policy, and process. But what happens when young people are trusted to help lead the work?

In this episode of The Sidewalk Ballet, we explore what cities can become when youth are treated not as voices to consult, but as collaborators to trust.

We begin in Boulder, Colorado with Mara Mintzer, co-founder and Executive Director of Growing Up Boulder, a nationally recognized leader in youth civic engagement and child-friendly city practices.

Mara challenges a core assumption of city-building: that children are future citizens, rather than current ones. Through partnerships with city departments, schools, and community organizations, Growing Up Boulder has helped young people shape master plans, parks, transportation systems, and public spaces across the city.

Mara is also co-author of Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices for Planning Sustainable Communities, a practical guide for youth-centered civic engagement.

The second half of the episode shifts to New York City and a team of fellows from the Urban Design Forum’s Forefront Fellowship Program.

Through a six-month, youth-centered research project, the team explored a simple but powerful question: What could a library be if young people helped design it?

Working with teens across Manhattan and Brooklyn—including at the High Line and the Free Black Women’s Library in Bed-Stuy—the team built a process grounded in trust, collaboration, and care.

Across Boulder and New York, a common lesson emerges: youth don’t just offer opinions — they offer clarity.

They help us see cities not as systems to manage, but as places to belong.

This episode is an invitation to rethink who we listen to, how we design, and what becomes possible when we trust young people to help shape our shared spaces.

Mara Mintzer

Mara Ted Talk - How kids can help design cities

Placemaking with Children and Youth

Child Friendly Map

Child Friendly Cities

Youth-led Libraries of the Future

Zine Archive

High Line Fellows: Emerging Leaders Program

The Free Black Woman’s Library

Claudia Dishon

Nichole Aquino

Urban planner, author, and placemaker Jay Pitter, MES joins The Sidewalk Ballet to talk about her forthcoming book Black Public Joy: No Permit or Permission Required. Through her award-winning practice, Jay has shaped national city-building conversations and led equity-based projects across North America.

Her work begins with one radical premise: that public joy is not a luxury, but a human right. Jay challenges us to reimagine how cities are built, governed, and experienced. Together, we’ll explore how Black joy operates as both resistance and restoration; how the spaces we design can either stifle or sustain belonging; and what it takes to create a civic culture rooted in care, connection, memory and shared delight.

JayPitter.com

Black Public Joy

evas.ca

Kady Yellow is an international Placemaking expert who has been activating public spaces since 2010, when she first discovered the power of collaboration among governments, communities, and the cultural sector to create vibrant, people-centered cities.

In this Episode, Chip and Kady discuss her path, teachers and lessons that brought her to the work she is doing in Jacksonville, Florida, as the Vice President of Placemaking and Events for Downtown Jax.

Kady shares her strategies for connecting citizens to civic life and reducing barriers, both for residents and municipalities, allowing for a greater sense of ownership and belonging in the places she - and fellow Florida residents work.

Episode coming November 18th

Also in this episode, Chip explores Community Participation and Placemaking around a Submersible Embankment Project in Sunamganj, Bangladesh with Iffat Baki Bushra.

https://www.placemaking.life

Downtown Vision

How to bring your city to life | Kady Yellow | TEDxJacksonville

Cara Courage

DJ Larry Love

Eric Liu - Citizen University

Submersible Embankment Project

Zarni deVette

Nate Storring is the Co-Executive Director of Project for Public Spaces, where he helps shape the organization’s strategy and leads its work in placemaking, communications, and development. Over the years, he’s been a driving force behind PPS’s publishing and research—including How to Turn a Place Around and new explorations of inclusive placemaking that expand how we think about belonging in public life.

In 2025, Nate is helping steer PPS through its 50th anniversary—a milestone that invites both reflection and re-imagination: fifty years of creating people-centered places, and a future that centers justice, connection, and resilience.

In this conversation, Nate talks with Chip about his own path into placemaking, the legacy and evolution of PPS, and the passing of co-founder and placemaking pioneer Kathy Madden—just days before the interview. Together they explore how our understanding of public space has changed over five decades, what still holds true, and how the next era of place will be defined by the complex realities of place governance and the ever-shifting boundaries between public and private space.

Also in this episode, Abra Allan revisits an innovative exploration into coexistence in public spaces developed in 2020 by SPUR and Gehl.

Episode Links

https://www.pps.org/people/nathan-storring

http://www.nathanstorring.com/

https://www.placemakingweek.org/

https://www.urbanspacegallery.ca/

https://www.spur.org/publications/spur-report/2021-01-25/coexistence-public-space

Majora Carter is one of the most visionary voices in urban revitalization today. A real estate developer, strategist, and Peabody Award–winning broadcaster, she has redefined what it means for communities to shape their own futures. From her groundbreaking work in the South Bronx to her national platform as an advocate for environmental justice and economic empowerment, Majora has spent her career challenging the idea that low-status neighborhoods are destined to remain so.

She is the author of Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, a book that reframes neighborhood development as a pathway for residents to build prosperity where they already live.

On The Sidewalk Ballet, Majora brings her trademark insight and candor to questions of community, resilience, and ownership. Our conversation explores how places—and the people who steward them—can unlock dignity, opportunity, and power in the face of daunting challenges.

This episode is a compelling look at what it takes to not only reimagine our neighborhoods, but to reclaim them.

ALSO

Producer Abra Allan sits down with the team behind SF Black Wall Street, a grassroots organization working to preserve and strengthen San Francisco’s Black community through three powerful tenets — home ownership, business ownership, and Black spaces. Together they talk about the rebuilding of 1921, a “third place” for creativity, entrepreneurship, and dialogue that embodies both resilience and hope. The conversation explores what it means to reclaim place in a city where belonging itself can feel endangered—and how economic empowerment can become a foundation for cultural survival.

https://majoracartergroup.com/

https://SFBWSFoundation.org/

https://boogiedowngrind.com/

https://lahainacommunitylandtrust.org/

https://ebprec.org/

https://homeboyindustries.org/

As we kick off the sidewalk ballet - a project dedicated to understanding cities and strengthening community - There is really no better place to start than at the neighborhood cafe, or the corner pub.

Karen Christensen is an author, publisher, and community leader whose work spans culture, sustainability, and the power of networks. As the founder of Berkshire Publishing Group, she has long championed ideas and institutions that strengthen communities. Her forthcoming book, written in collaboration with Ray Oldenburg, revisits and reimagines the concept of the “third place” for today’s world.

On The Sidewalk Ballet, Karen shares her perspective on why third places matter now more than ever. Our conversation explored themes of loneliness and isolation, the distinction between third places and public spaces, and the importance of creating space for conversation, plus her work on the encyclopedia of community.

This episode will open the series with both depth and urgency, offering fresh insight from one of the voices carrying the legacy of The Great Good Place into a new century.