🥑 Food Placemaking: The Secret Sauce to Vibrant Places!
How can we use Food Placemaking to celebrate local cultures, spark joy, and turn our cities into deliciously fun, heartful, and synergistic places? 🍕🎉
🎙 In this mouthwatering episode of the Hopeless to Hotspot Podcast, I chat with the amazing Ryan Smolar – director of Thrive Asheville, co-director of Long Beach Fresh, and co-director of Placemaking US – about his passion for food as a tool for transformation.
Ryan’s journey started in creative arts Placemaking, but he quickly hit a wall: cities were too busy importing generic trends instead of embracing their own authentic flavors. So what did he do? He hit the road! 🚐💨 A three-year food-fueled road trip across the U.S. led him to discover incredible ways communities support creative and food systems.
✨ In this episode, you’ll get a taste of:
✔️ The surprising connection between food & creative arts as cultural glue
✔️ How to engage communities in celebrating their local flavors
✔️ Delicious examples of Food Placemaking done right
✔️ Subtle but powerful tweaks that make food places more inviting
✔️ The #1 ingredient for creating heartful, magnetic places
Warning: this episode may cause cravings—for both food and better cities! 😆🍩
Enjoy & let me know your thoughts!
Radiant greetings,
Sandra
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p.s. Because of Ryan’s broad expertise, we recorded not only this podcast together, but also podcast #28 Ryan Smolar about Utilising Improv For Placemaking.
