Place MakingTrip to Orvieto, Italy

Place Making

Dates: May 11 - 17, 2008
Instructor/Leader: Bill Steiner

Trip Description
Bill has been leading this trip since 2003 as a powerful way for people to learn the ingredients and steps needed to create a human-centered public realm. Active, vibrant public places touch our humanness, giving us a sense of belonging and place. It is what we all want from the location we call home.

Transforming existing public spaces in the United States is neither impossible nor mysterious. The Place Making Tour uses simple exercises that put participants on the street observing, studying, and learning what fills public spaces with people. Participants take notes, measure spaces, observe interactions, catalog uses, examine design details, redesign a piazza, talk with local officials about policy and incentives and strategies, and compare observations with one another. It is a highly interactive, eye opening, and fun week.

Participant Comments
“The trip opened my eyes to a new set of possibilities about how a city can exist differently from what we are used to.”

"I felt more connected here in an afternoon than I do at home where I live."

"You really taught us to slow down and appreciate our towns and cities, wherever they may be."

May 11 - Arrive Orvieto, group dinner
May 12 - Meet with City, Italian culture, wine tasting
May 13 - Field exercises, discussion, cave tour
May 14 - Field exercises, cooking class
May 15 - Field exercises, vineyard tour
May 16 - Field exercises, group dinner
May 17 - Final review, and depart Orvieto

Meet Bill Steiner
Bill loves a great public realm full of people enjoying themselves. Helping create such places has been his work. He began by preserving the character of communities through historic preservation. Then, he moved into downtown revitalization, community planning and community building.

He has been leading “civic design” training since 1994. This was done for eleven years via a design institute he created for the Municipal Association of South Carolina, through “Lovable Communities” a regional conference he developed in 1997, training trips to Italy begun in 2003, and at numerous conferences.

Bill has an international background. He was born overseas, and has been traveling ever since, living in Afghanistan for four years. He participated in a 10 day technical assistance visit in Scotland to help “Rob Roy Country” build on and protect its cultural resources. He did the same for Columbia University's US-China Arts exchange in the Yunnan province in China.

First visiting Italy in the 1960s, Bill has been traveling here regularly since 1993, Bill loves the country, its people, and the people-filled public realms of its cities.