The Public Realm

Abstract

The Niagara River, connecting Lake Erie to Lake Ontario at the border of the United States and Canada, is the site of a collaborative planning and placemaking practice. The region is bounded by the eastern borders of Erie and Niagara counties in the United States and the Welland Canal in regional Niagara, Ontario, Canada. The Niagara Project, facilitated by the Urban Design Project of the University at Buffalo since 2001, seeks to engender a regional public space by eliciting a new imagination of the two countries as one place. The paper discusses a regional practice that accepts the indeterminate space of no client and little agency even while organizing a public conversation among a myriad of voices and perspectives. It proposes that designers are public practitioners who collaboratively move among projects varying in scale from individual interventions to bioregional planning. The Niagara Project seeks to connect the public material spaces of daily life with imaginal spaces of stories and histories while avoiding the negative connotations of theming. It seeks to weave voices and stories that acknowledge the diversity of experiences and histories and to find ways for residents and visitors to develop a new imagination of a regional civic life in the Niagaras.