Transforming Tom McCall Waterfront Park: Learning from Memphis

City of Possibility is honored to present Carol Coletta as part of its ongoing programs devoted to the revival of downtown Portland. Carol has spent a lifetime focused on public space and its impact on cities. As CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership, she led the creation of a new riverfront public space concept and the award-winning Tom Lee Park, a transformation of underutilized waterfront into a vibrant, inclusive, world-class public park that fosters joy, rest, connection, pride, and meaning for all visitors.

As Portland develops plans for rethinking Tom McCall Waterfront Park and its connections to downtown, Carol’s experiences will offer lessons learned and inspiration.

Tom Lee Park is merely the most recent of a long career of fostering urban innovation. As Senior Fellow at Kresge Foundation, Carol led implementation of the Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative, a national collaboration of foundations, nonprofits and governments to more fully use and democratize civic assets – such as parks, libraries, and other public spaces – to yield increased and more widely shared prosperity for cities and neighborhoods. She is currently a Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University where she is developing Innovative Approaches to Foster Connection in Public Space, a Community of Practice to systematically test prototypes for optimizing social connection in public spaces in orderto develop a pilot framework for public space leaders.

Tom Lee Park, designed by Studio Gang as architect and master planner and SCAPE as landscape architects, features a variety of distinctive spaces for gathering, sports, food and drink, respite, habitat, and more. It has won prestigious recognition from Urban Land Institute Americas Awards for Excellence, a 2024 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the Urban Design Honor Award from AIA New York. The park has also achieved SITES certification for sustainable urban design.

Coletta has previously served as Vice President of Community and National Initiatives for the Knight Foundation, led the start-up of ArtPlace, was president/CEO of CEOs for Cities, and led the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. For almost a decade, Coletta created and hosted the nationally syndicated public radio show, “Smart City.”She was named one of the top 100 urbanists by Planetizen in 2017 and 2023.

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