But as a foundation that is built on the belief that informed and engaged communities are essential to strong democracies, Knight wants to understand how design – and specifically, the design of our communities – can influence civic engagement.

For answers, Knight Foundation turned to the Center for Active Design. The center has led the development of design guidelines for promoting physical activity. Now the center, under the leadership of Joanna Frank, is exploring how design can promote civic engagement.

But libraries today are as likely to be occupied by people studying for their GED, applying for jobs, figuring out small business startup procedures, and watching movies on computers as they are with people discovering new books to read.

It makes for a complex set of services and a confusing future.

Miguel Figueroa is trying to figure out what that future looks like. Miguel heads the American Library Association Center for the Future of Libraries. The center promotes innovative and future-oriented thinking to position libraries for long-term sustainability and success.

In most American cities, that used to mean heading down to the neighborhood pool where you found familiar faces and lots of strangers. In fact, prior to 1940, private swimming pools were almost exclusively the province of the extremely wealthy. In 1950, the U.S. had only 2,500 private, in-ground pools. But by 2009, there were 5.2 million private pools in the nation.

Ben Bryant is a self-professed fan of Philadelphia’s public pools, and he is determined to make them, once again, convivial places for people to hang out and enjoy the company of neighbors and friends. Ben, who is with Group Melvin Design, is a winner of this year’s Knight Cities Challenge with his Pop-up Pool Project.

It’s a thorny question that communities are trying to address with all sorts of new legal, financial and taxing mechanisms. One such mechanism is a Community Benefits Agreement.

Ralph Rosado is an expert on the subject, particularly when agreements are used for affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. He is president of Rosado and Associates and a fellow at the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University. He has a forthcoming book on the subject, to be published by Penn Press.

Roberta also wrote “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.” With Jane Jacobs, she founded the Center for the Living City. She splits her time between New York and New Orleans.

Enter Lindsey Scannapieco, principal with Scout, Ltd. and now the enthusiastic developer of the Edward Bok Technical School in South Philadelphia. It is a mammoth undertaking – an eight-story, 340,000-square-foot hulk of a building with two gyms, one of the city’s largest auditoriums, science labs, a commercial kitchen and more.

Enter Scott Bernstein. As president and co-founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, Scott is working on detailed plans to show cities how they can reduce the cost of living for people with low incomes and at the same time, put those same people to work to make the changes that reduce their cost of living.

It’s an approach that defies conventional thinking, and I talked to Scott earlier this week to learn more.

The Citizen hopes to convince Philadelphians that citizenship is something they must actively and urgently claim.

Jeremy Nowak is chairman of the Citizen’s board of directors and an opinion writer for the organization.

But with its Market Street Prototyping Festival, San Francisco inverted the traditional planning model and turned its main street into a canvas for testing ideas submitted by citizens.

The result, on display for three days in early April, was a collection of 52 passion projects up and down Market Street that the public could experience and play with.

Neil Hrushowy, program director with the City Design Group, led the effort for the City and County of San Francisco Planning Department.

Erma Ranieri is working hard to prove otherwise. As commissioner for public sector employment in South Australia, she is leading Change@SouthAustralia to speed change in government. For her efforts to make government bureaucracy creative and responsive to citizens she was named 2014 Telstra South Australia Business Woman of the Year.

Change@SouthAustralia initiatives, such as the Public Sector Values, 90-day projects and High-Performance Framework, encourage change and contribute to a vibrant public service that works together and solves problems for and with the community.

Kathryn Ott Lovell is responsible for one of the nation’s largest non-commercial public-private partnerships. She is executive director of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, an independent nonprofit organization that champions Philadelphia’s vast park system, where she orchestrates the daily dance of balancing public and private concerns and responsibilities to produce quality parks for citizens.

Kathryn is also responsible for managing the collaboration of five civic assets in Philadelphia—neighborhood parks, a library, two trails and a Discovery Center—as part of a recent grant from the William Penn Foundation and Knight Foundation to reimagine Philadelphia’s civic commons.

Shawn has been an aggressive advocate for better planning, design and land use practice, for model planning initiatives, and for capital investments that demonstrate quality design. Most recently, the William Penn Foundation and Knight Foundation joined in an $11 million investment in five civic assets – old and new – in Philadelphia neighborhoods.

The Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative will support these model projects—Bartram’s Mile, Centennial Commons, Discovery Center, Lovett Library and Park, and Reading Viaduct Rail Park—as they help people reconnect with their neighborhoods and each other, and help us learn about the value of collaboration in making our cities better.

That’s why on Saturday civic leaders and innovators from nine Knight communities will head to Copenhagen for a working tour on building better, more livable cities. Leading the tour will be Gil Penalosa, executive director of the Canadian nonprofit 8-80 Cities. Gil is the former commissioner of parks, sport and recreation for the city of Bogota, Colombia, and has been an outspoken and persuasive global champion of cities for all — for people ages 8 to 80.
 
Before heading to Copenhagen, Gil talked with us this week on “Knight Cities.” He dismissed much of what cities are doing to increase cycling and walking — maps and stripes on the street for bike lanes — and instead urged quick-start actions that are bold but affordable.  And he explained how to win over public officials to the cause.

Note: This is episode 2 in the series.

The conversation with Theaster embodies all the reasons I wanted to start this series. Theaster’s work is remarkable in so many ways, but it’s not always easy to decipher what’s going on, even when you visit the Grand Crossing neighborhood where much of his work is centered. And it’s certainly not easy to understand how he does it. That’s why a conversation with Theaster is so valuable. He is the best interpreter of his own work.

For me, the new interviews are a continuation of the conversations my guests and I had on “Smart City,” a public radio program I produced and hosted for nine years. It’s my way of identifying civic innovators and getting their stories unfiltered, all in an attempt to make us smarter at Knight about our work in the community and national initiatives portfolio and to share that broadly with the people who are trying to remake their cities. We hope the result will be an exciting network of people doing important work for cities learning from one another.

In our conversation, Theaster speaks of his work on Chicago’s South Side with surprising modesty. Rather than worry about labeling it as art or civic engagement or something else entirely, he says simply that the work is about finding creative solutions to everyday problems.

He offers a three-step approach to fostering this kind of work in other communities. “One, there have to be people who really believe in the place where they’re working and where they’re living,” he told me. “Combined with that, those people have to be armed with strategy and knowledge about how transformation happens.

Note: This is episode 1 in the series.