Culture
A Print-It-Yourself Toolkit for Street Furniture
An open-source catalog boasts downloadable plans for plywood benches, kiosks, and more.
Last week, a group of neighbors snapped slatted benches into place in a vacant lot in St. Paul, Minnesota. In about two hours, 10 volunteers had fully assembled a pop-up outdoor theater. They propped up kiosks for concessions, secured tabletops to bases, and strung up lights.
“When you’re trying to gather the community together, you often hear, ‘We knew there was a problem, but we didn’t know where to start,’” says Jason Roberts, the founder of Better Block, which aims to transform areas one street at a time. That refrain, he says, often speaks to a bigger problem: a dearth of easy ways for people to kick off local changes.