Portland Presentation: Engaging the Public in Civic Placemaking
Read Time: 2 minutes
It’s just around the corner! The 2022 SEGD Conference Experience is set to take place June 16–18 in Portland, Oregon, and SEGD has engaged some exciting speakers to present at our annual gathering of experiential designers from around the country and the world.
Included in this year’s roster of speakers will be Robin Abad Ocubillo, Director of Shared Spaces for the City and County of San Francisco. Robin will speak about urban design as a multidisciplinary set of practices at the nexus of civic innovation, democratic governance, and storytelling. Through the lens of public space, he will share how government institutions can center local wisdom in planning and placemaking efforts by facilitating narratives of personal and collective meaning that infuse the built environment. This entails new formulas for civic engagement, participatory mechanisms that empower communities, and amplifying social capital that accrues to everyone.
More about Robin Abad Ocubillo:
Robin is a dedicated public servant with a passion for civic innovation in public space design, planning, evaluation, and policy. As Director of Shared Spaces in San Francisco, he helps communities leverage the public realm for economic recovery, civic and psychological wellbeing. Robin has extensively developed research methods and metrics for human-use evaluation of public spaces, manages San Francisco’s “Public Space–Public Life Program” and is co-author of the Global Public Life Data Protocol. Before joining the SF Planning Department, Robin served for several years as a Project Manager in the Golden Gate National Parks, working on cultural landscape and visitor access projects at sites throughout Bay Area parklands. Robin is also producer and curator with the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, bringing communities together around civics and storytelling. He recently edited an edition of Open Space Magazine at SFMOMA titled “Participatory Urbanism” which interrogated the promise and problematics of public space, asking who participates—and how—in constructing urban places.
Want to attend the Portland conference and meet Robin and other engaging speakers? Visit the SEGD website and make your plans today