Urban Spaceship Conference Celebrates ‘Streets of New Milwaukee’
Annual urbanism conference scheduled for Nov. 14.
M. Nolan Gray addresses the 2022 Urban Spaceship conference. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
Urban Spaceship will land in Milwaukee for the fourth time on Nov. 14.
The one-day urbanism conference, organized by NEWaukee, will focus on the “Streets of NEW Milwaukee” in 2023.
Confirmed speakers include Mayor Cavalier Johnson, Urbanism Speakeasy podcast host and publisher Andy Boenau, Urbanist Ventures founder Laura Fingal-Surma, City of Chattanooga marketing director Brian Smith and developers Joshua Jeffers and Kevin Newell.
The conference will be held at Wheel & Sprocket’s large Bay View store, 187 E. Becher St.
Tickets to the full day event start at $50. For an additional $20, attendees can fund the SOUP (Support of Urban Projects) micro-grant pitch program which will focus on tactical urbanism. The Better Streets MKE coalition will moderate the pitch contest.
The conference is a spiritual successor to the Empty Storefronts conference, which ran for five years in Milwaukee and Madison. The conference sought to serve as a platform to exchange ideas and strategies for filling vacant storefronts and addressing blight. Urban Spaceship has a broader focus and is intended to identify actionable items and spark new ideas that can improve cities.
Urban Spaceship was originally launched as a podcast in 2020 by NEWaukee’s Jeremy Fojut alongside fellow urban advocates Montavius Jones and Michael Bradley. The three hosts will interview Johnson as part of the closing session.
The 2022 theme was “growing Milwaukee to a million-person city, ” a nod to Johnson’s campaign goal of growing the city’s population to one million residents. Headline speaker M. Nolan Gray, research director for California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) and a former city planner, discussed how zoning damaged American cities and argued that it should be abolished. Gray published “Arbitrary Lines,” a book exploring the idea, in June 2022.
Tickets and more information are available on the Eventbrite event page.
Urban Milwaukee is an event media partner. Jannene will moderate a panel on designing pedestrian-friendly places.
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