Streetfilms: Turning Streets Into Community Spaces

Intersection Repair
Running time: 10:42

Have you ever dreamed of making the streets outside your home more livable, pedestrian-friendly, and community-oriented?

City Repair in Portland, Oregon hosts an annual Village Building Convergence where hundreds of people come together to build diverse projects for the benefit of their communites and to take back their streets via a process known as the Intersection Repair.

This involves painting streets with a high-visiblity mural to create a kind of public square for residents to gather for community activities. The mural projects also seem to encourage drivers to slow down when approaching these intersections. Over
time neighborhood volunteers further enhance the transformation by adding
amenities like benches, community bulletin boards,
gardens, artworks, bulletin boards and even “freecycling” centers. As you’ll see, the possibilities are endless.

Streetfilms visited three of the Intersection Repairs and spoke with Mark Lakeman co-founder of City Repair, Greg Raisman, the Portland DOT Liason, and scores of residents and volunteers about what they are doing and why.