Coordination/Collaboration : Featured Stories

The Makers Coalition is supporting a new generation of industrial sewers and the local makers movement. The coalition brings together 60 businesses, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and service providers to fulfill its mission: To bring back industrial sewing skills, which largely disappeared in America decades ago.

Public art has evolved into an essential element of urban placemaking and social engagement. From murals on vacant buidlings to art in laundormats to temporary art installations that invite public participation, we take a look at public art and how it's changing cities.

Get ready for some changes in our already-stellar park system that will expand your ideas about recreation, ecology, and economic development.

In a Q and A with The Line, marketer and theater maven Mayer asks: with nearly eighty professional theater companies in town, why don't we do more to promote theater as an attraction that sets the Twin Cities apart?

It's been an article of faith since Central Corridor light rail (Green Line) construction began that, despite all the disruption and traffic chaos of the building stage, the line would eventually become a magnet for local entrepreneurs. That scenario appears to be playing out; here are three entrepreneurial ventures that were lured to the line by light rail's promise.

"If urban planning is musical composition, then placemaking is improvisational street performance." Five tested tips for doing the much-talked-about, rarely defined, improvisational, street-level, people-oriented form of urban design that's rapidly replacing the old top-down paradigm in the Twin Cities and across the country.

If you're on the board of directors of HUGE Theater in Minneapolis, you have to improvise. That is, you have to actually go onstage and do improv in a three-evening run that is also an official series of board meetings.

Your editor helps run a meditative labyrinth-walking project amid the cheerful madness of the Northern Spark one-night, all-night arts festival--and points out another cool artfest that's ongoing.