How one city is meeting the moment during a challenging national climate

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Taking in the Cincinnati civic commons by bike, on foot and in kayaks this fall during our Studio #10: Local Power, Lasting Impact. Image credit: Game Day.

At the foot of the Cincinnati hills this fall, our network of more than 120 multi-disciplinary practitioners from 11 cities across the country convened for Civic Commons Studio #10: Local Power, Lasting Impact.

Over three days together, we explored ways to double down on investments in public space to create long-term, transformational benefits for communities, even as cities across the country struggle with the federal government’s disinvestment in many local projects. In fact, the challenging national climate may actually present an opportunity for local movements to shine, as Alexa Bush, Detroit’s head planner and longtime Reimagining the Civic Commons champion put it. “Thinking so locally, and to such a mundane level, sometimes might be freeing — to just put one step in front of the other, of doing this work and starting to make the push for changes,” Bush said at a session about investing in the public realm as a strategy for equitable neighborhood redevelopment.

We saw the fruits of local strength through the work of our Cincinnati host team, helmed by Tri-State Trails and Mill Creek Alliance, who showed us a city building better connections among its 52 neighborhoods, visually demonstrated through physical trails and cleaner waterways.

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Exploring Mill Creek by kayak has introduced Cincinnati residents and visitors to the renewed waterway. Image credit: Game Day.

Within a larger 100-mile regional system, Cincinnati’s 34-mile CROWN trail will form a large ring around the city for bikers, hikers and walkers, opening up opportunities for them to go boating, kayaking and experience other recreational activities. Much of the trail has been completed, meandering through forests and along rivers, inviting visitors to explore parks, cultural amenities and neighborhoods — but most of the existing segments run through wealthier, whiter neighborhoods on Cincinnati’s east side. Completing the CROWN on the west side will provide the same opportunities to even more communities, particularly those which have been isolated for decades — the Mill Creek Greenway is the missing link. When completed, the CROWN will ultimately link the city’s 356,000 residents in a cohesive way to parks, schools, recreation, grocery stores and retail shops — the wide variety of amenities that contribute to quality of life — as well as access to job opportunities.

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The cleanup of Mill Creek has made it once again a safe and usable public space for Cincinnati. Image credit: Game Day.

A major environmental win in cleaning up the Mill Creek, which flows through the west side of Cincinnati, has also created opportunities to further develop public space to serve neighborhood residents. Once deemed the most polluted waterway in America in 1995 filled with raw sewage and factory waste, Mill Creek has now transformed into a point of local pride. The creek is a natural and recreational draw for Cincinattians, offering opportunities for fishing, boating, nature walks and educational field trips.

There is tremendous opportunity for the Mill Creek Greenway — and better access to the waterway for which it was named — to generate new value for undervalued west side neighborhoods. The local collaboration, focused on ensuring equitable investment that benefits nearby residents, demonstrates why local power matters deeply for lasting impact.

Here are five takeaways for the field from our visit to Cincinnati:

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Mayor Aftab Pureval spoke with former New York City parks commissioner Mitchell Silver about leading a city during difficult times. Image credit: Game Day.

Building enduring legacies takes political courage

Kicking off the Studio’s first day, Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval spoke with former New York City parks commissioner Mitchell Silver about his efforts to grow a more equitable city through affordable housing development. Part of that work was a major overhaul of the city’s zoning code — an effort that was controversial and had received pushback from residents and political opponents in the midst of a re-election campaign.

Despite the controversy, Mayor Pureval acknowledged the importance of leaders demonstrating political courage to make needed changes, even when those policies are unpopular. “Make tough decisions, even when it’s hard,” Pureval said. The stakes of leading a city are high, and you may alienate even your own team at times: “It can be lonely to do the wonky work of making a city better. It can make people uncomfortable, even allies.” Ultimately, the mayor said, good leadership is balancing the difficult work of daily governing decisions while also staying focused on the big goals that are crucial to a better and more equitable future.

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Anand Sharma of the Kresge Foundation led a panel with the CEO of Cincinnati METRO Andy Aiello, Council Member Meeka Owens and Phil Denning, executive vice president of the Port, about Cincinnati’s equitable redevelopment. Image credit: Game Day.

In a later session, Cincinnati Council Member Meeka Owens echoed Mayor Pureval’s discussion of political courage. The work needed to reach housing, climate and transit-oriented development goals often means facing immediate, widespread opposition from your constituents at political cost, she said — yet making the forward-thinking policy decisions needed to reach goals decades in the future must be balanced with the need to engage today’s constituents. It’s a key question for Owens: “How do we listen to all the voices and still make quality decisions?”

(Editor’s note: Shortly after our visit, Mayor Pureval won re-election in a landslide and Council Member Owens was also re-elected.)

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At Memorial Hall, cultural anthropologist Anand Pandian and Kyle Kutuchief of the Knight Foundation spoke about overcoming the divisions in American society. Image credit: Game Day.

Bridging the “architecture of separation”

In a conversation with Knight Foundation’s Kyle Kutuchief, anthropologist and author Anand Pandian described how the way Americans live their lives — how their houses are built, the cars they drive, what they wear and how they move through the world — reflects deepening divisions, isolation and fear.

Similar to how he analyzes this in his new book Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, Pandian described this “architecture of separation” as deep-seated patterns that amplify fear and distance between neighbors. Pandian traced these dynamics through stories he collected from more than a dozen states around the country: locked doors becoming metaphors for closed borders, time spent on front porches interacting with passersby giving way to time spent on isolated back decks and ever-more vigilant security technologies (like doorbell cameras) replacing simple human encounters. For him, these shifts reflect a deep cultural move toward individual protection rather than shared wellbeing.

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To rebuild social trust, people need chances to encounter each another as real human beings, Anand Pandian said in a talk with Kyle Kutuchief. Image credit: Game Day.

Thankfully, Pandian argues that public space is one of the most powerful solutions to bridging these divides. Drawing on examples from his travels, he discussed how parks, plazas and everyday civic spaces have historically functioned as the places where strangers coexist, learn from one another, and practice small acts of neighborliness. In Denton, Texas, Pandian described how a public park built on the site of a destroyed Black neighborhood later became the stage for a 20-year campaign led by activist Willie Hudspeth to remove a Confederate monument, reclaiming the space for everyone. Hudspeth’s vision wasn’t just removal but reconciliation — he imagined turning the park’s long-dormant fountains back on to encourage people of all races to drink together, transforming a landscape of exclusion into one of shared belonging.

These shared settings — whether Halloween doorsteps or town squares once marked by Confederate monuments — create opportunities for collective belonging that undercut fear and isolation. Pandian emphasized that rebuilding social trust depends on rebuilding these spaces and the rituals within them, giving people more chances to encounter one another as real human beings.

“There’s a daily give and take that’s necessary with strangers,” Pandian said. “It’s a reminder that it is possible to share a place with people you don’t know, and to have a life with them.”

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Mill Creek’s recovery has been a key environmental victory and is now a vibrant living ecosystem. Image credit: Game Day.

Invite people into the work through small wins

We saw creative examples of how to bring the community in while the work is proceeding; there’s no need to wait for big ribbon-cuttings or official openings. Mill Creek provides ample opportunities for visitors and local residents to get to know the waterway. The Cincinnati Recreation Commission has recently installed a self-service kayak kiosk at Salway Park by the creek — encouraging residents who may not normally have access to kayaks to take to the water. While Mill Creek Alliance has organized canoe trips to familiarize kids and families with the waterway. They’ve seen that touching the water is one of the best ways to create advocates and continued support for the mission, rather than waiting years into the future for the full infrastructure buildout.

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In planning the expansion of the CROWN, Tri-State Trails has hosted bike rides and events to invite the communities to join the process. Image credit: Game Day.

Cincinnati convener Wade Johnston of Tri-State Trails said they’re also building trust by inviting neighbors in historically-neglected communities along the CROWN trails to become stakeholders through ride-alongs and bike repair pop-ups, ensuring that bicyclists who already live in those neighborhoods are part of the conversation.

Darryl Franklin, a North Fairmount community advocate, grew up hearing stories about how dangerous and dirty the Mill Creek was — so he was amazed to take his first kayak trip after the cleanup to see how it’s become a thriving, vibrant waterway. Franklin has since become an advocate for the creek, encouraging his neighbors to enjoy the waters in their own backyard that’s open and accessible to all. “Now, I see it as an opportunity to have a place in the community to build around,” he said, a refuge “to sit down and relax.”

Innovative organizational structures and partnerships can unlock multi-faceted solutions

At the historic Memorial Hall site in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, we heard about the advantages of partnerships on the local level from Scott Kratz, the president and chief executive officer of Building Bridges Across the River and founding director of 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington D.C.

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Detroit city planner Alexa Bush and Scott Kratz, head of Building Bridges Across the River, talked about equitable neighborhood redevelopment. Image credit: Game Day.

These lessons of collaboration are the backbone of Kratz’s project to realize the civic, equity and environmental goals of the forthcoming 11th Street Bridge Park. While planning the bridge park, Building Bridges Across the Water has spent the past decade developing a community preservation plan in partnership with the D.C. government. Collaborating city agencies, non-profits and community organizations have begun implementing the strategies to improve and strengthen local resources, showing that the planning phase can also provide current benefits to residents.

“We can combine our resources to make a bigger impact in the community and build strength from each other,” Kratz said.

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The restoration of Memorial Hall brought the Beaux Arts theater back to life. Image credit: Game Day.

Memorial Hall and the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood also demonstrate the advantages of collaborative creative planning. As a renovated century-old Beaux Arts theater, Memorial Hall is stunning on its own, and across the street the revitalized Washington Park serves as one of the highlights of Cincinnati’s parks system. Both are managed by local economic development corporation 3CDC. The renovation of 165-year-old Washington Park in 2012 was funded through a public-private partnership between the City of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Park Board and 3CDC. Parking for Memorial Hall was built underneath by taking large parking lots that previously dominated half of the park and putting them underground — new fields, picnic tables and a playground were built above the parking lots for the community, yielding an amenity-rich and walkable public realm. Because they have a for-profit real estate development component, 3CDC can afford to operate public spaces like Washington Park and make significant quality-of-life improvements while collecting developer fees to offset the costs of managing high quality public spaces.

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Over-the-Rhine benefits from 3CDC’s use of tax increment financing districts that leverage nearby downtown real estate values. Image credit: Game Day.

Another strategy that 3CDC has effectively used in its role as community developer is strategically looping downtown Cincinnati within the boundaries of tax increment financing districts that include Over-the-Rhine, thus funding civic, mixed use and housing developments in the neighborhood through harnessing the increasing value of real estate in the central business district.

On the west side we saw more examples of multi-faceted solutions. For instance, Lick Run Greenway, a 1.5 mile-long walking and bike path with basketball courts, murals and native plantings, was created because the city’s Metropolitan Sewer District built a stormwater management project as a park instead of gray infrastructure with the typical sewer system to manage overflows into Mill Creek. This green infrastructure has the capacity to manage 800 million gallons of combined sewer overflow each year into the creek, and offers multiple benefits to neighborhood residents as a place to connect with nature and one another.

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A stunning example of green infrastructure, Lick Run captures sewer runoff while providing walking paths and open space. Image credit: Game Day.

Next to Lick Run sits the massive abandoned Lunkenheimer valve factory, where we learned about the unique structure of the Port, an economic development corporation with a land bank entity. As a quasi-governmental entity in Cincinnati, the Port has acquired properties like the Lunkenheimer building which will need serious environmental remediation before it can be redeveloped. Through its land bank tools, the Port was able to start environmental work on Lunkenheimer and two neighboring buildings before officially acquiring the property, and without exact plans beyond possibilities for commercial or residential use.

Phil Denning, executive vice president of the Port, explained the structure as having a public sector mission with private sector speed and risk tolerance for complicated properties like the Lunkenheimer factory. “All that alignment means that we can invest in big, iconic assets,” he said.

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The vision of the Cincinnati Civic Commons team is to connect communities and spur equitable redevelopment in underserved areas. Image credit: Game Day.

Collaboration can drive connectivity and reknit communities

In Cincinnati, local organizations are eager to reconnect divided communities and create shared identity — and collaboration is key to that ambition.

Even in a sector like transit, where multiple agencies — from Hamilton County’s regional transit system to greater Cincinnati’s Metro — may have different priorities, connective infrastructure is the ultimate goal, said Andy Aiello, head of Cincinnati Metro. “Our job was to change the region, not just run transit. We are now the catalyst for change in the region,” Aiello said.

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The Cincinnati Civic Commons team, including Wade Johnston of Tri-State Trails, are committed to their mission to catalyze equitable redevelopment in underserved areas of the Mill Creek Valley. Image credit: Game Day.

It’s the same ethos of connection that drives the Cincinnati Civic Commons team’s vision of equitable redevelopment in the Mill Creek Valley area catalyzed by the CROWN, connecting trails and waterways. As Johnston said, “we want to be a national leader in equitable greenbelts.” The ambition is that the Mill Creek Greenway can become a model for others.

While there are challenges of disconnection — access to the Lick Run Greenway and Mill Creek can be treacherous because of nearby busy roadways, freeways and the CSX railyard, showing the need for contextual visioning and planning beyond individual assets — the broader movement is cooperative and enthusiastic.

Cincinnati is leaning into local collaboration, drawing inspiration from the community efforts that cleaned up Mill Creek after decades of pollution. When leaders have vision, courage and together put in the work locally — on trails, in waterways, through policy and with communal strengths — the impact will be significant, no matter the national context.