We are a group of design, architecture and urban planning professionals who have a passion for making Tacoma a better place for everyone who lives here. To this end, in 2009 we began organizing public conversations throughout Tacoma to provide information, provoke thought, and create a dialogue about the city’s built environment. Hosted each Spring and Fall, we focus on issues relevant to Tacoma’s urban neighborhoods and downtown core. Take a look below to see what’s been discussed in past events.

Our next event will help us to see the city’s design through an equity lens. All built environments exclude–sometimes by design, though too often it’s because we fail to imagine all the ways people may experience the spaces and places comprising the city once they’ve been built.  As Tacoma continues its efforts towards equity, we take this opportunity to examine how particular spaces and places variously include and exclude on the basis of race, gender, class, age, and legal status.

In particular, we examine how “open” and “public” are not guarantees, and look for ways of capturing and understanding exclusivity and inclusivity in our neighborhood spaces and places.