Welcome to PCDC!

*Favorite scenes this summer: group downtown bicycle rides, street art, salon talks, and some urban greening.*

Welcome to Word on the Street – the newsletter for the Pittsfield Community Design Center. Thanks for staying in touch. These newsletters are designed to be short and sweet; keeping you up-to-date on what’s going on at PCDC.

For our first newsletter, it’s a perfect opportunity to reiterate our goals, mission and plan of action. We need your help to make PCDC a success! If one or more of the goals below sounds like something you are passionate about, please do get in touch. We need organizers, artists, writers, fundraisers, planners, and doers. This work isn’t just focused in downtown Pittsfield. We want the whole community to be an example of what a 21st century post-industrial city is capable of.

Our Four Strategic Goals:

Placemaking: Bring life and vibrance to public spaces in Pittsfield in creative ways.
Education: Tell stories, provide examples, and pique curiosity about our infrastructure.
Direct Action: Make a real-world impact, demonstrate ideas, and show what’s possible.
Workspace: Provide a physical space for pursuing our goals and an HQ for action.

Our Mission and Plan:

The mission of PCDC is to inspire positive changes to Pittsfield’s urban design, in order to build more connected, authentic, neighborly, and strong communities around the city.

Our plan of action is to be an “urban room” that is open for anyone wanting to make a change for their street and neighborhood; to be a hub of resources, knowledge, and action for community design.

Pittsfield's Newest Salon

It's not the kind of salon where you get your hair and nails done.

Before those existed, a salon was simply defined as a gathering of people invited by a host, with the goal of "either to please or to educate." Pittsfielders had the pleasure of being educated at the first of Hot Plate Brewing Co.'s Salon series, held last Wednesday evening with city Commissioner of Public Services, Ricardo Morales.

This first Salon gathering focused on the topic of the 10-Minute City: a city with daily necessities that are reachable within a 10-minute walk or bike ride. Though the idea of having daily necessities within a close distance is nothing new, the concept has gained traction in recent years as a general bulwark against modern single-use zoning in urban planning - favoring a return to mixed-use neighborhoods where a car is not required for daily travel and crossing long distances for necessities is uncommon. When long-distance travel is needed, a robust transit network fills the gaps where travel by foot or bicycle would be less practical. Having options available is the fundamental goal.

We'll do a deeper dive into mixed-use zoning and how Pittsfield is already well equipped to be a 10-minute city in the future.

Coming soon: Activity Calendar

Watch this space for opportunities to get involved with our mission and vision!

Word of the the week: Infrastructure

Coming from the Latin root of infra, meaning “below,” infrastructure broadly refers to the “underlying structure” of a system. When thinking about a city, it’s usually referring to everything under our feet (with some exceptions). Think of roads, sewers, water pipes, sidewalks, electricity, and gas. If it’s something that helps make a city run, it’s probably infrastructure.