The Streets of New Milwaukee Is Theme at Conference

Andy Boenau presents at the 2023 Urban Spaceship conference. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The annual Urban Spaceship conference gathered more than 150 people for a day-long examination of what’s working and what’s not to help build a better Milwaukee.

A series of panel discussions delved into topics like street design, mass transit, cycling and pedestrian advocacy and how tax incremental financing works. Many panels tied back to the theme “The Streets of New Milwaukee,” a nod to the old Milwaukee museum exhibit.

Urbanism Speakeasy founder Andy Boenau gave a mid-day keynote presentation about how “Infrastructure is Crumbling Our Minds and Bodies.” Boenau, a built environment and transportation communications expert discussed the need for creating people-friendly environments to encourage walking and social interaction. The Richmond, Virginia-based storyteller also shared a clip of his upcoming documentary.

The Midtown Neighborhood Alliance community group won a micro-grant pitch contest, securing a $2,000 prize to fund its “Heart of the City” beautification effort. The group will use the funding as seed money to fund neighborhood identity signs, improve its community gardens and work to expand access to home maintenance efforts. The neighborhood, not to be confused with the Midtown Center, runs between W. North and W. Highland avenues from N. 20th Street to the 30th Street railroad corridor. The Better Streets MKE coalition moderated the pitch contest, known as SOUP (Support of Urban Projects). The prize was funded by $20 tickets purchased by individuals wanting to vote on the winner. Other proposals included a picnic area at Pulaski Park, a bus stop bench campaigned inspired by the late Bill Sell and a sound-focused public art installation by Mitchell Street Arts.

Department of City Development Commissioner Lafayette Crump, long-range planning manager Tanya Fonseca and senior planner Amy Oeth presented the city’s Growing MKE plan designed to make it easier to build more housing types in the city. For more on the proposal, see our coverage from earlier this month.

Developer Joshua Jeffers served as chair of the conference, which is hosted by NEWaukee. Jeffers in a conversation with NEWaukee’s Jeremy Fojut endorsed the idea of replacing Interstate 794 through Downtown with a boulevard, new route or tunnel.

The conference was held at Wheel & Sprocket’s large Bay View store, 187 E. Becher St.

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.

The 2022 theme for Urban Spaceship was “growing Milwaukee to a million-person city, ” a nod to Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s campaign goal of growing the city’s population. 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.

Urban Milwaukee was a media sponsor of the event.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article referred to the ‘neighbor alliance,’ not the ‘neighborhood alliance’