By Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

East Somerville kicked off summer and the 2015 SomerStreets season last week with the sixth edition of SomerStreets: Carnaval. People took over East Broadway for an afternoon of dancing, playing music, hula hooping, drawing chalk art, and more. But events like SomerStreets are more than great parties and great opportunities for enjoying healthy ways to get active. They bring people together, build community and are a source of pride for our neighborhoods; if there was one takeaway from Carnaval, it was: “This Is East!” And SomerStreets in particular speaks to one of our shared values and hopes. As our city evolves and we strive to meet the community’s goals of more public space in the most densely populated city in New England, we believe the design and function of our public spaces, streets and otherwise, should be people-centric.

That’s the underpinning for starting SomerStreets six years ago, creating our own take on the Open Streets concept and reclaiming our roadways as public spaces that both give us a chance to move and get healthy and to connect us with our neighborhoods, our local businesses and each other. Somerville has 93 miles of public roadway and 6.5 million square feet of public sidewalks. That’s a lot of paved space. The roads themselves mean a sizeable chunk of our 4.1 square mile community is devoted to vehicles. That’s the way our city evolved—sometimes out of necessity, but other times out of the mistaken belief at the time that increasing the number of vehicle lanes will decrease traffic congestion. Now our community is evolving once again as people return to the urban core, with more than half seeking the vibrancy of walkable urban neighborhoods, places where you can safely bike from square to square, that are connected to the region through public transit.

We see the future of Somerville as a city built for people. Building a city like that requires planning, which is why we undertook two years of intensive, community-driven engagement to create SomerVision, a document that captures our shared values and hopes for the kind of city we want to be and become. SomerStreets speaks to two of SomerVision’s goals that the community charged us to make a reality: shifting half of all new trips to walking, biking and public transit, and the addition of 125 acres of new acres of public open space. When we close down a roadway for a SomerStreets celebration, we’re asking ourselves to rethink the way we view our streets—not as pipelines for rush hour car traffic, but as connections between neighborhoods, and as part of the public space that makes a community vibrant.

What makes a great city? It’s when people aren’t only blurs seen through car windows as they go whizzing by. It’s when we see our neighbors’ faces as they push strollers down the sidewalk or are biking to the store or work. It’s when our kids are playing ball in a park or on a side street in their neighborhood, a retired couple sitting on a bench sharing a cup of ice cream, and a musician in a square filling the atmosphere with melody. All the action in these scenes share one thing in common: They’re all outside in public. What makes a great city is great public life.

That is why we continue to work at reimagining our public spaces and streets to build the kind of community where public life happens. Our Somerville by Design team is working with Gehl Studio right now to measure public life in Somerville because with so little space, we have to get creative. While we can continue to explore creating traditional parks, particularly in areas that will be transformed in the coming years like Boynton Yards, people and businesses in already built-out areas need and deserve more public space in their neighborhoods, too. That compels us to look for innovative ways to create public space across the city, providing its benefits to all our residents and businesses, and for the various needs of our community. We’re working with this U.S. office of the internationally renowned design firm Gehl Architects, because we want to better understand how the public spaces we have today support—or don’t support—a vibrant community. By knowing how we currently use our public spaces, we can be innovative in building the public spaces of the future that allow our vision for a vibrant urban public life together to flourish, whether a new park, a parklet in a reclaimed parking space, or a redesigned sidewalk in one of our squares.

We will continue to build streets that accommodate all forms of travel based on our Complete Streets Ordinance, the first comprehensive ordinance of its kind in Massachusetts. In an already-densely built community, we’ll continue exploring innovative ways of enhancing public life, as our Somerville by Design team has done through tactical urbanism ideas like pop-up plazas, which test how changes to our physical environment can spur vibrant public life. And of course we’ll continue to hold events like SomerStreets, along with a host of other festivals and events throughout the summer. When we plan for people, our parks, streets and sidewalks are filled with them. We encourage that public life that’s better for the health of the planet, for our personal health and happiness, and the health of our local businesses. I hope to see you out there this summer.