MEDIA RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO – As part of a larger plan to redesign San Francisco’s main street, the city’s planning department has partnered with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to produce the Market Street Prototyping Festival, seeking ideas to help reshape 36 blocks of the city’s central corridor. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is providing $225,000 to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to support the festival toward creating a model for street redesign and neighborhood redevelopment in the communities where it invests.

Ideas to redesign the area will be accepted through July 3. Up to 50 proposals will receive $2,000 each to build a prototype of their idea, which will be showcased at the festival on Market Street from October 2 - 4, 2014.

Any individual, business or nonprofit can submit a proposal. The only requirement is that the idea should aim to improve public spaces in a way that engages the community and encourages them to think differently about the city’s streets and squares.

The city of San Francisco is redesigning Market Street through its Better Market Street project. One of its goals is to find ways to activate the sidewalks which have the most pedestrian activity on the West Coast. The festival will commission and exhibit up to 50 design projects selected by representatives from the city’s maker, design and arts communities that will inspire the city as it rebuilds Market Street in 2017.

“We have the opportunity to build the most vibrant street in America, but only if we invite our city’s creative spirit to do it with us,” said Neil Hrushowy, manager of the City Design Group in the San Francisco Planning Department and lead urban designer for the Better Market Street project. “This festival will engage an enormous number of people, and they will not just be talking about the future of Market Street, but designing it, forming it, touching it, and creating it together.”

Knight funding will help expand the project beyond San Francisco to other cities, as a model for neighborhood redevelopment. Support will go to prototyping of the winning designs and fund a group of civic leaders from the communities where Knight invests to learn from the planning and development of the festival.

“The festival is a great example of collaboration between city agencies and civic innovators of all kinds,” said Carol Coletta, Knight Foundation’s vice president of community and national initiatives. “We hope to see some important ideas emerge from the festival, but most importantly to promote it as a model for cross-city learning and development.”

The projects are expected to include a broad set of ideas such as creative forms of street furniture, interactive wayfinding schemes, and new types of lighting. Matched with one of five festival districts on Market Street, selected teams will work directly with community members and design leaders to shape their projects and take into account diverse community preferences. Autodesk, The Exploratorium, Gehl Studio, California College of the Arts and The Studio for Urban Projects are among the design leaders taking active roles in the festival.

“The creativity of our communities should be reflected in our streets. Offering the public the opportunity to use the city as their canvas will create places that are beautiful, meaningful, and inclusive,” Deborah Cullinan, executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, said.

Projects will be installed on Market Street for the full three days of the free festival. Afterward, select teams will work with the city to build out their projects. These will become permanent or semi-permanent fixtures throughout the street.

The festival will span nearly two miles in the heart of downtown, making it the largest of its kind. Based on the city’s average pedestrian counts along Market Street, the festival is expected to engage over 300,000 people.

The event’s model was inspired in part by the 2012 Urban Prototyping Festival, guided by San Francisco nonprofits Gray Area and Intersection for the Arts. The Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation will help direct the Market Street Prototyping Festival.

The call for proposals is open through July 3 and can be found, along with more information, at marketstreetprototyping.org.

About Better Market Street
The Better Market Street project aims to rejuvenate Market Street from Octavia Boulevard to The Embarcadero. It calls for reestablishing the street as the premier cultural, civic and economic center of San Francisco and the Bay Area – a vibrant and inclusive destination where people want to live, work and visit – and to make it easier and safer for them to get around. Bringing new life to the sidewalks, as well as providing more opportunities for adjacent neighborhoods to influence the look and feel of Market Street are core goals of the project. Better Market Street is led by San Francisco Public Works, in collaboration with the San Francisco Planning Department, the Municipal Transportation Agency, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. More information can be found at www.bettermarketstreetsf.org.

About Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), located in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena cultural district, is one of the nation’s leading multidisciplinary contemporary arts centers. With a belief that contemporary art is at the heart of community life, YBCA brings audiences and artists of all backgrounds together to express and experience creativity. The organization is known for nurturing emerging artists at the forefront of their fields and presenting works that blend art forms and explore the events and ideas of our time. As part of its commitment to the San Francisco Bay Area, YBCA supports the local arts community and reflects the region’s diversity of people and thought through its arts and public programming. For more information, visit ybca.org.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more information, visit KnightFoundation.org.

About San Francisco Planning Department
The San Francisco Planning Department, under the direction of the Planning Commission, plays a central role in shaping the future of our City by generating an extraordinary vision for the General Plan and in neighborhood plans; fostering exemplary design through planning controls; improving our surroundings through environmental analysis; preserving our unique heritage; encouraging a broad range of housing and a diverse job base; and enforcing the Planning Code. For more information, visit www.sfplanning.org.

Media Inquiries:
Gina Simi, Communications Manager, San Francisco Planning Department
415-575-9119, gina.simi@sfgov.org

Maureen Dixon, Communications Manager, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
415-518-7915, mdixon@ybca.org

Anusha Alikhan, Director of Communications, Knight Foundation
305-908-2677, media@knightfoundation.org

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