During our annual event, we asked you to tell us your stories; of creative challenges, ideas, and successes. In collaboration with DARE Clan, this storytelling series introduces creative entrepreneurs from around the world, telling us the impact and change they bring about, all in their own words.

This week, we meet Aaron Greiner, urban designer, founder and director of CultureHouse. CultureHouse works to improve livability in local communities by transforming unused spaces into vibrant social infrastructure.

This is Aaron's DARE Story.

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Public Spaces are Disappearing—Here’s a Way to Bring Them Back

Social infrastructure, defined by Eric Klinenberg as “the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact,” is critical to creating happy, healthy, and connected communities. These are places like coffee shops, libraries, temples, schools, and barbershops. While they may have other functions, like selling coffee, all these places are centers for community gathering. Over the past year and a half, however, they look completely different.‍

‍When lockdowns started across the world in early 2020, many thought it would be a temporary condition. In many countries, coffee shops, libraries, food markets, and community centers closed their doors—often with optimistic messages taped to the door saying they’d be back in two weeks (oh, how naïve we were). As it became clear that COVID-19 was not going away, these businesses started to reopen. When they reopened, however, there were some clear differences.

Commercial pay-to-enter establishments were forced to adapt to new laws, restrictions, and navigate continuously changing measures while trying to stay afloat. As a result, many public spaces jettisoned their public spaces.

The coffee shop down the street from me installed a pick-up window in place of their front door, removing access to the seating inside. The food market changed their public seating to reservation only. The craft store moved to online-only, with no public storefront. Although many businesses opened parklets on the street, these are almost entirely private spaces — not open to the public. Over a year later, these spaces still look like this. It’s not surprising they made this change, nor do I blame them. These businesses rely on sales from customers and, at a time where they were struggling to stay afloat, they needed to optimize for maximum profit.

Non-commercial spaces, however, reacted quite differently. Without the need for paying customers, they reopened with safety and community at the forefront.

At first, my local library stayed closed to protect the safety of the staff. When they reopened with contactless pick-up, they worked with CultureHouse to also open an outdoor COVID-safe work and learn space. This allowed the librarians to stay safe while still providing access to social infrastructure to the community. Down the street, the public school set up tents in the nearby park for outdoor learning. While useful for students, the tents were also publicly accessible in the park—allowing anyone a dry and shaded place to see friends and family outside.

There are two main lessons I’ve gathered from observing this trend in my neighborhood and indeed across the globe.

First, we have seen a dramatic decrease in social infrastructure accelerated by the pandemic. And second, non-commercial institutions are much better equipped to respond to disasters in a way that maintains access to essential public gathering space.

Access to space to gather in person is always important, but it’s even more critical in times of crisis when strong community networks can literally save lives. With so many commercial spaces closed for public gathering, we are further increasing social isolation and degrading support networks. In the US, just in the past month, we’ve seen two hurricanes that have flooded New York and left hundreds of thousands without power in Louisiana—in a heat wave nonetheless. The untold loss of life is no doubt exacerbated by the degradation of community networks due to a lack of access to social infrastructure over the past year and a half. 

In all this gloom, however, there is hope — and that’s where CultureHouse comes in.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen business owners, municipalities, and community activists adapt our cities through quick and cheap methods—with parklets, community fridges, and open streets.

At CultureHouse, we use this same method (often called “tactical urbanism”) to create pop-up community spaces in vacant storefronts.

These “CultureHouses” are a bold new category of social infrastructure—free-to-enter cultural hubs that provide neighbors a place to create strong networks. At our most recent CultureHouse pop-up in Peabody, Massachusetts, in the US, 83% of visitors reported they met someone or made a connection at the pop-up. We were able to create this space despite opening during the ongoing pandemic.

We will continue to see disasters that upend all corners of our society. We need non-commercial social infrastructure that can survive economic downturn and continue to provide spaces for neighbors to connect. These spaces, such as libraries, community centers, and CultureHouse spaces have a structure that allows them to maintain space for social connection when it's most important. Given these spaces are not generally customer-funded, it is imperative that our municipal governments and institutions see them as an important tool for human survival and invest in them accordingly.

As Klinenberg so perfectly put it, “it’s the strength of a neighborhood that determines who lives and who dies in a disaster.”

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This article is written by Aaron Greiner, in collaboration with DARE Clan and xPlot.

To read more about Greiner and CultureHouse, you can visit their website: culturehouse.cc or read our in-depth interview with Aaron Greiner from May 2021.

Cover photo via CultureHouse.

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