COMMUNITY / 5th Annual International Placemaking Conference

In June, Brian Michener, AIA, joined placemakers from around the world in Detroit for the 5th Annual International Placemaking Week hosted by the Project for Public Spaces in collaboration with the Downtown Detroit Partnership. This year’s sold-out conference saw nearly 650 attendees from 177 cities gather under the theme “From Recovery to Resilience through Placemaking.” Detroit was the perfect host for that theme — a city that knows a little something about recovering from rough times. Brian attended packed panel discussions and on-site workshops; however, one event stood out from the rest: a mobile workshop titled, Remembering and Rebuilding: Civil Rights, Trauma, and Renewal in Detroit Parks.

The workshop took attendees to three sites spanning the width of the city, each telling a different chapter of the same civil rights story.

The first stop was the Dr. Ossian Sweet Educational Plaza, a small park built next to the home where, in 1925, a Black physician and his family were besieged by a mob for the “crime” of moving into an all-white neighborhood. The Sweets defended their home, a shot was fired, and the resulting murder trial became a landmark moment in the fight against housing discrimination. A century later, that same lot now elegantly stands as a memorial to the tragedy and a monument against racism, racial profiling, and civil injustice. The park’s design spreads the significance of the events through low planters in the shape of the original buildings’ footprints, contemplative hardscaping and site furnishings for pause, and educational signage that concisely communicates what happened and its significance to all.

The second stop was to Gordon Park, historically significant as the “ground zero” flashpoint of the 1967 Detroit Uprising. Located at the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard (formerly 12th Street) and Clairmount Avenue, the park was built on the ashes of the “Blind Pig” (an illegal after-hours club) where the devastating five-day civil unrest began in 1967. Today, Gordon Park serves as a symbol of both remembrance and community resilience. It features a Michigan State Historical Marker unveiled in 2017, a playground, and nearby public murals designed to promote healing and progress in the area.

The third and most powerful stop was to Birwood Park and the prominent Birwood Wall, a six-foot concrete barrier — a real world “redline” — built in 1941 to physically separate Black and white neighborhoods so that a developer could qualify for federally backed loans. Today, at the insistence of the community, a stretch of that wall still remains bounding the west edge of Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground. Through open dialogue and engagement, the community designed a mural and painted it together on the wall, uniting a neighborhood around the very thing that tried to divide them.

What Urban Designers Can Learn From Detroit’s Civil Rights Landmarks

What stood out wasn’t just the history itself — as painful as that is — but what the community chose to do with it. In all three places, residents didn’t tear down the evidence of injustice or erase it completely. They used it to construct a place of healing, contemplation, and community. They turned a site of violence into a plaza where kids do homework on educational signage benches. They turned a wall meant to divide people of different skin colors into a brightly colored canvas as a backdrop to a shared playground. It’s not erasure, and it’s not just memorialization — it’s placemaking as renewal.

For urban designers, architects, and planners, these three parks deserve to be studied as exemplars of community placemaking. They show what genuine community engagement looks like when it is not just a checkbox: residents, artists, and descendants of the people involved were the ones shaping how these stories get told and what the space feels like today. They show urbanism at its most meaningful — small, low-cost interventions (planters, murals, etc.) that carry outsized emotional and civic weight. And they show that placemaking can hold two things at once: unflinching honesty about the past, and a genuine, physical invitation for the future.

Small Interventions With Lasting Civic impact

Most placemaking conversations focus on activation — how do we get people into a space and keep them there. Ossian Sweet Plaza, Gordon Park, and the Birwood Wall in Birwood Park ask a harder, more important question first: what does this land already carry, and how do we build something that honors it rather than paves over it?

That’s the lesson we are bringing back to our work in Kansas City, Omaha, and the Midwest region.