The Bottom-Up Revolution
Well-designed public spaces often look promising at opening, then slowly lose energy and use. Max Musicant explains how that decline comes down to what happens after construction—who maintains the space, how it’s programmed, and whether anyone is responsible for making it work day to day. From simple fixes like better seating and things to do, this conversation gets into why so many spaces never become places.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. As someone who loves cities, I love thinking about all of it — the streets, the buildings, and housing — but I also really love thinking about the spaces between. If you look at a city, you'll see the buildings, the roads, the parking lots, and if you look really closely, you can see the spaces between, the spaces that make up the public route and the public space connecting all of that. I think it's kind of an overlooked space when we talk about cities, and I think it has so much potential for how we shape the places that we call home, the places that we love.
How can we take better care of these connective spaces, these spaces between, these public spaces? That's something that today's guest thinks a lot about, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Today, I'm joined by Max Musicant. He is the founder and president of the Musicant Group, a placemaking consultancy where he partners with public and private organizations to create attractive and active public spaces. As a believer in the potential of any space to be a great public space, he shares insights and strategies for effective placemaking on his Substack, The Practice of Place. We'll be sure to put a link to that in our show notes. Max, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.
Give us a little bit of backstory. Tell us where you've been and how did you come to notice cities and to care about public spaces.
I've been interested in cities for a long time — going back to probably in earnest in high school — and I've always really cared about people. I care about cities because that's where so many of the people are. I care about public spaces because that's where we can come together and form relationships and meaning and collaboration.
My curiosity in high school really stemmed from being on a traveling soccer team. I grew up in Minneapolis proper, and our games were all over the place. I just started noticing and being curious about the differences — the fields of Eden Prairie and Coon Rapids and Blaine, and these huge expanses of grass surrounded by kind of homogenous housing. I got curious about suburban sprawl as a high schooler and wrote some papers on it. That sort of kept evolving into collegiate studies, and then eventually finding my path into placemaking as a professional.
Can we jump into that in a little bit more detail? You studied planning in college, right? Can you bring the camera in and go a little bit slow motion. How did you go from planning to placemaking, and what did it even mean to decide on trying to pick placemaking as a career? I don't think a lot of people even think of placemaking as a career path. Tell us more about that.
I think there was something appealing about it, because my parents were deeply involved in local politics, and my grandfather was an artist, so it's kind of a blend of those two things together. In college, when I was studying urban planning and reading luminaries like Jane Jacobs and Suburban Nation, I was really excited about the ideas. But when I started to look for jobs in the formal, capital-U, capital-P Urban Planning field, it seemed like a lot of the work was around writing reports. That was not as exciting as creating the places I was reading about.
Lucky for me, there was a family friend who was really involved in local economic development work here in Minneapolis. I got turned on to that as a potential. The idea was appealing because economic development seemed to be the work of making those visionary plans actually happen in real life.
Interesting. I feel like someone else could hear that and think architecture, or urban design, maybe not urban planning. How did you come to see economic development through that lens? Because I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe economic development that way.
For me, I saw it as much more people-oriented. I felt that architecture was much more object-focused, which was not my point of departure. My core is always caring about people. Of course, buildings shape our experience, but there's something about the operationality and the ongoing lived experience that I think economic development, in its best form, can address.
We have to put an asterisk on economic development.
Yes — we're not talking about giant subsidies for suburban business parks, but more like nurturing small business ecosystems in urban and small town areas. I love Minneapolis growing up there, but I wanted to get out. My dad was from the Bronx, so I decided to move to New York, and that's where I really discovered placemaking, which was not on my radar at that point.
I landed at a really robust neighborhood economic development agency based in Jamaica, Queens. They owned and operated office and retail spaces, as well as — this might be hearsay — about 2,000 parking spaces that served a walkable commercial district. They had also set up some business improvement districts. While I was there, we started using placemaking and public space management and activation strategies as an economic development tool — as a way to improve the lived experience of people that lived and worked and shopped and visited this very vibrant working- and middle-class commercial district, as well as making it a more attractive place to invest as we were assembling land and recruiting developers to build office space, hotels, and affordable housing — non-displacing uses that would bring in jobs and housing density that would be valuable to the neighborhood.
Very strategic use of placemaking — maybe not quite as organic as most people might think of it, but it makes sense what you're explaining. Although, when I heard the phrase "activation strategy," I couldn't help thinking that Jane Jacobs would chuckle. Continue the journey for us. You're working in New York — what comes next? What's the next chapter?
What I was experiencing there was that placemaking work and public space management are really exciting and fun. They're holistic — integrating the built environment, operations, events, and partnership work. It's sort of civically entrepreneurial, and it's very immediate. It's not like a design and development project that takes years to manifest. What you're doing is impacting people every single day.
The other thing I was finding was that there wasn't a lot of creativity in how people generally take care of spaces, and that this was a creative practice in an area that had very little of it. That was very appealing — to bring new life into a relatively stale enterprise. So I was hooked.
My mentor at the organization encouraged me to pursue a business degree to further my practice. Even though I had no inherent interest in a business degree at that point, I went and got an MBA with the idea of applying it to public spaces. After graduation, I moved back to Minneapolis expecting to work for a business improvement district or economic development agency — the sorts of organizations doing the most interesting, creative, and meaningful work in this realm. But when I moved back, I found that not only were there no jobs doing this sort of work, there weren't even organizations doing this sort of work in the Twin Cities.
That's when I asked myself: is there any reason why a business-improvement-district-like service — one that combines physical design, furnishing, care, site operations, events, activities, and marketing — couldn't all be combined into a third-party service that could activate and revitalize public and common-area spaces of any size or scale? I thought, there's no inherent reason why that shouldn't work. That was the genesis of the Musicant Group, my firm I've been running since 2012 — to revitalize and activate public and common area spaces by utilizing this holistic approach, originally based on how business improvement districts bring spaces to life.
Can you talk a little bit more about the design and the operation, and how you see those as connected? I feel like there's a lot of conversation about the design of public spaces and the value of them, but you put an emphasis on operation and care. Can you flesh that out? I've seen a lot of placemaking projects get really excited because of the design and the idea and potential, but then fizzle out two months down the line after launch.
There's a saying I love: you can operate your way out of a bad design, but you can't design your way out of bad operations. The life of a space really starts after the ribbon cutting. That's when people are able to enjoy it. You can have a really great design, but if it's not being cared for, the inevitable trajectory is decline. The space can't adapt. If things break through wear and tear — which is natural, and what you hope for if people are using it a lot — and that maintenance isn't there, things are just going to go downhill.
On the flip side, I've worked in some really maladaptive design spaces that had a lot of abstract ideas manifested in weird geometries and shapes kind of thrown on the ground. With the right operations — staffing, events, programs, small-scale furnishings and amenities — you can relatively quickly turn any space around through savvy care, programming, and marketing.
As you mentioned, there are so many spaces we can visit that look interesting but aren't very usable, and the level of care is noticeably absent. No one feels good in a space that's not cared for. Yet, what's ironic is that we spend, as a society, so much of our creative energy on the creation and design phase, and then basically just walk away and say "it's done" for the next 10, 15, 20, 25 years. That's really unnatural. That's not how natural systems work.
I heard a quote the other day: "If space is for movement, place is for pause." I'm curious how you think about the value of placemaking — because placemaking is supposed to turn a space from something to pass through into a place to stop and be. Our current way of approaching the public realm and city development is so focused on the pass-through, the arrival and the departure. There's very little pausing.
How do you think about how we can embed placemaking within this broken approach to place-building such that we're able to have more of those pauses? Because I think that's really the point — to transform public environments from places to hurry through into places to stop and be with each other. Big philosophical question. I'm just going to hand it to you.
I wrote a piece recently called "Placemaking Is Dead, Long Live Placemaking," and in it I put forward that the proper use of the term "placemaking" — and one of the solutions to the challenge you're describing — is that any activity relating to the built environment can make a place better or worse. There's nothing inherently good or bad. Placemaking is a lens through which we should try to direct all the activities we can that relate to the built environment: design, operations, care, events, etc. How can we orient all the things we're doing toward strengthening a sense of place?
As for why so many of our places are designed to facilitate movement and not really support congregation, enjoyment, lingering — I think it gets to who is in charge of most of our public realm. It's agencies that are functional silos charged with facilitating movement. Most of our public realm is dominated by transportation uses and transportation agencies, whether at local, state, or federal levels. Even the best-intentioned ones — even bike advocates and bike planners — can fall prey to this. We're really focused on creating good biking experiences, which is great, but what about when you get off your bike?
In most American cities, there aren't planners or operational entities charged with managing a place and the integrated connectivity of movement spaces alongside gathering spaces and how those connect to commercial services and neighborhoods. The only real version of that we usually have is the parks department, but the parks department is almost always solely confined to just the parks. So much of the gathering spaces and places where we could make connections are usually not going to happen just in parks — they're going to happen on sidewalks, in commercial districts, at schools, transit facilities, and so on. None of those are given the mandate or authority to generate that kind of social benefit.
These places where we like to gather are also places that are economically successful. The tagline for my business was "creating places where people want to be," and wherever people want to be, they want to do things nearby — live, work, eat, play, shop, ride the bus. So places where people gather are both commercially and socially valuable.
Maybe the final part of the answer to your question — how do we move from a movement space to a lingering space with strong place? We have to frame the work of placemaking in terms that other stakeholders with authority actually care about. I call this "placemaking is change-making work." By creating these places of meaning and quality experiences, we're flying in the face of prevailing systems. So we need to structure this work in ways that navigate those systems. We have to translate what the social good is, usually into economic terms or safety terms — basically other data points that matter to those with authority — at least in the short term, to get things rolling until we've built more momentum and our own agency.
You mentioned your article, "Placemaking Is Dead, Long Live Placemaking." Can you share a little about the heart of that piece? I'm also trying to ask you to define placemaking, and I think the answer to one will be the answer to the other.
"Placemaking Is Dead, Long Live Placemaking" is the manifestation of something I've been feeling for many years. Many other practitioners in this realm have been experiencing it too. I feel like we were at peak placemaking maybe five years ago, and it's become a victim of its own success. Like so many other meaningful words and approaches — sustainability, equity, resilience, diversity — these are all important concepts. They were important before they were cool, they were important while they were cool, and they're still important even after they're maybe not in vogue anymore. That's how I feel about placemaking.
It's lost its meaning for a couple of reasons. One, it's become very vague — people have attached it to so many different things, and there's no shared understanding about what it means. In particular, it's become a noun rather than a verb. Its original conception was an action, a way of doing something. Then it got perverted into a noun. You'll often read things like "here's a placemaking element" or "we did some placemaking over there" — this bench or this art is "placemaking." Which is absurd. Underneath that is an assumption that there's a fixed amount of place available, and we put the place there because we didn't have enough for the rest of the space, and the other space is not as good because we put the placemaking over there. It just doesn't make sense.
The other part is that it became a fundable priority. People were doing authentic placemaking work that was having success, and well-intentioned foundations and governments started diverting funds dedicated to enhancing that work. The inevitable result is that people start naming things they're doing as "placemaking" in order to gain funding. I don't malign that — it's a natural consequence, and people are trying to sustain their organizations. But that's another way the word loses its meaning.
All that to say, it's gotten very convoluted, and I don't think it means anything anymore — but it's still important. For me, placemaking should be reclaimed as a process, an approach — the way we're doing design, the way we're doing operations, the way we're doing activities and events. A great place is defined by how good the experiences are, and those experiences are the result of the holistic interaction of all these different factors. Placemaking is the process of creating those great experiences by connecting all those different elements that go into creating a great place.
I think placemaking is also about connecting actual place. I think placemaking is inherently connective, because you're usually working in a realm that's between spaces, so no one really owns it. That's why I was saying at the beginning of the show — it's the space between. The best placemaking I've seen is when it's hospitality over a connective public realm that makes it a hospitable place to be. It doesn't even have to have an event — it's just that someone made it hospitable, someone made it inviting. So now I don't feel like I'm just moving through a collection of random buildings. I feel like I'm in a coherent space, because someone took the time to create — whether it's through visual cues, trees, flowers, flags on the poles — they were able to take all those isolated pieces and bring them together into something that feels like a whole. Does that make sense?
Placemaking can happen anywhere. We all do placemaking in our own homes.
I've been thinking about the home this whole time, because I feel like placemaking is homemaking for the public realm. The problem is we now live in a culture where nobody thinks of themselves as a public homemaker. So you have to have these third parties come in and do that work, and it tends to be primarily focused on the economic side. I always get annoyed when people treat placemaking like this special thing that they have to spend $250,000 on. People have been doing this naturally. Why is it now this weird, separate thing that we have to hire a consultant for? People are naturally makers. They're space makers. It's just what they do.
So much of what makes a place better is very intuitive, and I believe everyone is capable of making great places. The reason it's an industry now is because most of our public realm is governed by a fairly complicated bureaucracy, and it requires project management in order to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles, challenges, and processes needed to make any changes.
Thank you for speaking to that. I've always been puzzled by this — it's like my toddler having to submit a form and wait 72 hours to find out what I was going to give him for a snack. This used to feel so normal and natural, and now it's this weird thing. It's just kind of less organic.
You all at Strong Towns have documented so many times people doing tactical urbanism — obvious, small-scale stuff, sometimes unsanctioned. What's the response? It's usually not "Thank you, that's great, let's build upon it." It's "Get that stuff off the street, get it out of the park, you violated the rules, you didn't go through the proper processes."
That gets into the placemaking-as-change-making idea. I think we're going to get the most impact from this work when we can create larger and larger spheres and bubbles of influence — carving out more space, physically but also in terms of community space and action space, to do things relatively naturally. And trying to expand the areas that are able to invite, tolerate, accept, and celebrate these normal incremental improvements and changes that people just naturally want to be able to make in space.
Can I tell you one of my beefs with placemaking? One of my hesitations. The way I've seen it referred to by city leaders and people in charge is like, "If we just do placemaking, it'll solve all the problems of this dead downtown" — but we're not going to tackle the traffic volume, the speeding, the width of the street. I've seen it used as a distraction: "Look, we put some cool paint on the ground — don't pay attention to the fact that there's a problem." The real problem why this downtown isn't working is not because you didn't have a mural on the ground in 14 primary colors. The problem is no one wants to be here on foot. You're basically a glorified parking lot and cars drive through at 55 miles an hour — but no one wants to talk about that. They would love to spend precious, limited resources on that mural, though, and then have a ribbon cutting and say, "Yay, we did placemaking."
That's all valid. That gets into the lens idea: okay, we want to make a stronger place, and this hypothetical downtown — which exists countless times over — is only willing to divert a tiny fraction of all the money and resources and human capacity through the lens of place. We'll divert $100,000 of the millions we're spending collectively in this downtown every year, publicly and privately, toward trying to create a better place. But we're not going to route our transportation decisions through the lens of trying to create a better place. We're not going to route our sanitation, our cleaning and landscaping services through the lens of what would actually make a better place. We're not going to route our zoning laws or our permitting regimes through the lens of what would make a stronger place. We're just going to do this small, high-visibility, ribbon-cutting-focused action through the lens of placemaking only — probably because we got a grant for it, and maybe not even willing to use our own funds for it.
That's the maligned use of placemaking. Again, it's an approach, a process — not an outcome, not an object.
Someone listening to this might be thinking about a dead space they're interested in trying to fix. We talked a little before recording about what makes for a good public space. Jane Jacobs has written a lot about what makes for good parks. Can you share maybe one or two insights about what to think about if we're noticing these pockets around town that could use some care? What makes for good placemaking — not just pretty, but actually active?
The easiest, highest-return-on-investment additions you can make to turn a place around usually come down to two things: there's nowhere good to sit, and there's nothing to do.
On seating — if there are benches, they're often pointed in the wrong direction, or they're in full sun when you want shade, or vice versa. Movable seating allows people to organize themselves. They can arrange it for groups or individually. Try to add a splash of color, especially if it's a drab space, because color communicates invitation.
The second thing is creating reasons for people to be there. Most empty spaces, if you ask yourself "what is there to do here?" — usually not much. People are not going to be in a space that doesn't have much to do. The easiest and cheapest thing to add is games — board games, lawn games, books. Those are things you can easily add to a space. You can go to Goodwill, buy some used stuff, and put it out there. From there, you can build in additions like food, shade, bathroom access, water access, play equipment, businesses, services, etc. But seating and games are the two things that will get people out the most. Also dogs, if you can get dogs there. And babies. Kidding — well, kind of.
The flip side is, okay, we're not in charge of that space — what do we do then? My answer is: scale whatever you do down to a minimally viable test or solution. Maybe you're not able to have things out all the time because of safety issues, theft, or regulatory restrictions — so go out there and bring it out yourself. Collect some data through photos, testimonials, usage counts, and survey questions. Try to collect data that the decision-makers and authority holders you're trying to influence will care about and notice. Create a case study around what you've done, and bring that to those who matter, to get more of that stuff introduced and formally adopted. Incrementally build it. But to stem the tide, you've got to acknowledge and work with that bureaucratic resistance in order to make things last.
The other struggle I tend to see is that people want to do placemaking in places that aren't walkable. They'll do walking-oriented placemaking interventions in an environment where everybody's in a car, and then ask "Why didn't it work?" Can you speak to that? How do you think about it when you're realizing, I really want to add some life and beauty here, but the on-foot traffic is so low that even if I put in benches, color, and a coffee truck, the chances of it becoming an activated place are really low?
We've done a lot of work in the suburbs, with suburban strip malls and other land uses like that. This gets back to the relational aspect of placemaking — it's not about the mere presence of something that matters, but proximity, and how you can take two distinct objects or elements or activities and, by putting them in the right proximity to each other, one plus one creates three. A bench and a tree separate from each other are just a bench and a tree. But if the bench is under the tree, all of a sudden they're creating a much better experience together than either one alone.
What's so hard about our suburban land use pattern is that everything is so separate from each other, there's so little synergy happening. So if you're in a suburban context trying to create a stronger sense of place, you have to build from the active edges that exist. That's how nature works too — nature doesn't plant a seed in the middle of the desert and expect things to happen. Things grow from the edges. So find the activity centers and try to grow from there.
A suburban model usually has one active edge — the parking lot and the active edge of the doorway, whether that's a commercial strip, a library, community center, or school. Use that existing activity to try to grow some tendrils of placemaking.
One great opportunity I often see in suburbia is a kind of cohesive one-sided Main Street that exists, but where the division at the property lines is so severe — driveways, private sidewalks that dead-end, drive lanes, weird curbs, and then the sidewalk pops back up almost exactly where it should be. So geographically, it's very close. Experientially, it's awful. You can actually start to create a walkable experience, sometimes for quite a long distance, by connecting these uses together through placemaking interventions. I've been having conversations with a suburb here that has a library, a café, a movie theater, and a grocery store all in a row — but the experience of walking between them is almost impossible. And yet you can see the cow paths killing the grass where the desire lines are. Some people are already positively breaking the rules and making those connections happen. Find those desire lines, find those active edges, and make your placemaking interventions there to build those connections.
Thank you for sharing that, Max. I love that concept of looking for the active edges — that's just a really wise approach. It definitely gives me a lot to think about. I see areas in my city with latent demand to be more active and pedestrian-friendly, where placemaking could really take off. This gives me something good to think through.
I want to ask you about something you mentioned when we were talking offline. People listening to this are the kinds of people who want to try small ideas — the tactical approach, trying to fix something, make it better, make it more beautiful — but they may be experiencing a lot of resistance. You had an interesting perspective on why cities often resist new ideas, taking risks, or creating something that can last or be built upon over time. There tends to be an emphasis on "it needs to be big, beautiful, and done from the beginning." You were explaining that a lot of the reason people run into that resistance is because of the incentive structure around the whole system. Can you expand on that for our listeners?
This really stems from something you all at Strong Towns have talked about a lot — when you orient yourselves toward getting funding from somewhere else, whether that be grants, other people's money, or using bonding and loans as a way of creating new things. What happens is you have these enormous moments of change, capital events happening — on the public side, infrastructure improvements, park redesigns, a new building going up; on the private sector side, new development or a new acquisition. There's a tremendous amount of resources all of a sudden happening at once, and that capital has requirements of delivery, deployment, and interest payments that accumulate over time.
So you have a lot of people organized around facilitating this capital use to make a very large change — a design project, a building project, etc. All of their incentives are around creation. And then the project is "complete," the ribbon cutting happens, and for the most part, those involved in the creation phase have very little influence or impact — and certainly face very few consequences — regarding the lived experience of these spaces after they're built.
The people involved and the incentive structures then dramatically change. We go from what I call the "upsiders" — who are all focused and incentivized to create, no matter the consequences — to the "downsiders," which is almost everyone involved in the day-to-day life, care, and use of these spaces. Because we don't self-fund incrementally, the maintenance team is literally charged with trying to keep a space the same — not to make it better, but to keep it as good as it was on ribbon-cutting day. But when you try to keep anything exactly the same, you're really just inviting decline, because keeping something static is impossible in an evolving world.
These folks have really rough incentive structures — they get punished for anything bad that happens, but receive no rewards for improvements. So any good ideas that normal people and users have around making a space better, all these folks see is variance, is change. Variance for them only brings a possibility of downside risk. So even if the expected value to the whole system is really strong, these downsiders — maintenance folks, regulators, property managers — only see the potential downside for them, and are thus trying to snuff out any change that's happening. Positivity is only possible in these huge moments of creation, and then we've got decades of stasis that follow.
Wow — so well put, and so on the nose in terms of describing the dynamic. I remember reading Death and Life of Great American Cities, and one of the things Jane Jacobs kept coming back to was this emphasis on everything staying the same. Our approach to cities has become very — I'm thinking of treating them more like playgrounds than like gardens. Something that just needs to be stable, safe, low-risk. You'll come back to it 20 years later and it looks the exact same.
I have a friend from my church I've been helping garden, and she's been doing the same garden for 25 years. She can walk me through year three, year four, year five — those flowers sat right there, we switched them out for these, then we figured out the soil over there. It's constantly evolving. You'll come back a year from now and the story of the garden is going to be totally different. I think our audience are very much gardeners, thinking about their places like gardeners, but having to work in an environment where places are being treated like playgrounds.
Okay, last question before I do my fun question. You've mentioned some of our principals and principles before. You're familiar with what we do at Strong Towns. How do you define the connection between building a strong town, making your place more resilient, and placemaking — or that hospitality of the public realm? How do you see those two as connected?
I think the Strong Towns principles and placemaking are maybe just two sides of the same coin in trying to create the communities we all want to live in. Strong Towns talks so much about the dangers of top-down funding and systems, and obviously the importance of bottom-up and incremental actions. I think that's exactly the placemaking approach too.
This work applies to how we build and how we orient what we're doing. But I think there's something that maybe isn't talked about as much — the operational considerations of taking care of these places once they're built. It is hard to change our road network, but what we can change, maybe more easily, is how we take care of that environment and how we attune it and adapt it and make incremental changes — even in a suburban land use context — with that gardening, placemaking mindset of "here we are, but how can we make it better incrementally?" Those small-scale placemaking actions are ultimately what will build more support, case studies, and foundational work that will allow for larger changes to be not only palatable but wanted by those folks who have been in traditional suburban land use patterns.
It's important to add not just intervention changes, but the mindset and system changes too — what you were saying earlier. Because really, at the end of the day, Strong Towns just wants our cities to be beautiful places, not just spaces. "Space is for movement, place is for pausing." When we look at historic patterns of development, one thing that's very obvious is that they were places, and many of them have remained places where people literally spend thousands of dollars to go sit and drink a coffee. So sometimes it comes down to: we just want our cities to be truly beautiful, stable, reliable, long-lasting places. What you're saying is it's not just about putting a mural on the wall — it's thinking about how we're doing transportation, how we're doing our financing, asking: is this going to make a beautiful place that people want to come back to over and over again?
There's a huge opportunity with the drying up of federal funds — or the idea that federal funds are not going to keep flowing down — for people to say, "You know what, all we have to work with is our own tax base now." Not only are we running out of capital funds to build new stuff, but the way our operations are set up, we can't make anything better. The only thing we have to work with is operations, and the entire way that we're organized cannot improve a place. All they can do is try their hardest to keep it the same — or do something radically new in very small locations. I think that's a positive crisis that could help communities reimagine the place management rather than a top-down systems approach.
This has been great. I could easily ask you a bunch more questions, but I'm going to get us on the off-ramp here. I ask all of my guests this question — I think it's a lot of fun. Tell us a little bit about your city, your neighborhood. What do you love about it, and what are a couple of local businesses you'd like to recommend people check out?
I live in Minneapolis, born and raised — I moved back, like so many do. I love it here. One of the recent reasons I love it so much is our community's bottom-up resistance to the occupation that happened here, which was entirely citizen-led and was really powerful in supporting all of our neighbors.
If you're going to come visit, I think the best thing about Minneapolis is the Grand Rounds — 25 miles of interconnected walking and biking trails along the shorelines of 10 lakes, a creek, and the Mississippi River, really weaving the entire city together, with some amazing restaurants interspersed among the parkland on lakefronts and waterfalls and other things like that. And if you come in the wintertime, I particularly recommend checking out our burgeoning sauna scene — in particular, 612 Sauna, which is the first mobile, cooperatively owned sauna in the world, or maybe at least in the country. I'm a member and helped get it off the ground. It travels between parks and breweries around town and is open to anyone.
Any favorite coffee shop, pub garden, public art — anything like that?
My favorite bookstore right now is Birch Bark Books, which is owned by the famous author Louise Erdrich. It's a very small store and it is just full of magic. I've found so many books there that have really transformed my life — none of which I was looking for or even knew existed before I walked in. Best kind of bookstore.
Max, thank you so much for coming on the Bottom Up Revolution podcast and sharing your story and your insights. It's been a pleasure.
Yeah, likewise.
Thank you to our listeners for joining me for another conversation. I'll be back soon with more insights to share. If there's someone in your community who you think would make a great guest for the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form. That's how we find out about a lot of the guests that we bring on, and I'm so grateful for those of you who take the time to fill that out. I'll be back soon. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.