Valeria Menendez and Katherine Wegrzyn leading Building Places and Trust: Conflict Resolution for Better Community Spaces workshop
Centering people in cities means building places that make all feel welcome and hopeful. Though we often frame our work as transportation or community engagement projects the work that Horizon 54 does embodies the core principles of placemaking. According to the Project for Public Spaces, the hosts of Placemaking Week, placemaking is defined as “a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value.” Whether we are collecting data, facilitating community engagement, developing recommendations, or transforming public spaces through projects like asphalt art, Horizon 54 ensures that community voices shape the places where people live, work, and gather. By putting residents at the center of planning and design, we help create communities that are more welcoming, resilient, and reflective of the people who call them home.
We (Valeria Menendez and Katherine Wegrzyn) traveled to Placemaking Week 2026 to lead a workshop titled Building Places and Trust: Conflict Resolution for Better Community Spaces. The session challenged nearly 40 planners, designers, public officials, and community engagement practitioners to rethink conflict, not as something to avoid, but as an opportunity to build stronger projects and more inclusive communities.
Using a realistic planning scenario, complete with competing stakeholder interests and potential tension points, participants stepped into the role of community engagement consultants. After exploring best practices for navigating conflict, small groups worked together to develop the first steps of an engagement plan designed to build trust, reduce tensions, and ensure that as many voices as possible were meaningfully included. The room was filled with thoughtful discussion and lively debate as participants tested different approaches and learned from one another.
Building Places and Trust: Conflict Resolution for Better Community Spaces workshop
Outside of the workshop, we immersed ourselves in the conference experience. Placemaking Week highlighted the many dimensions of Detroit through mobile tours of destinations such as Eastern Market and Belle Isle, while each day of the conference was hosted in a different neighborhood, giving attendees the opportunity to experience the city’s unique history, culture, and public spaces firsthand. The event also brought together practitioners from across the United States and around the world, creating opportunities to exchange ideas, build relationships, and learn from innovative placemaking efforts in communities of every size.
Michigan Central
One of the conference’s strongest takeaways was that today’s community challenges cannot be solved through a single discipline. Creating vibrant, resilient places requires planners, engineers, designers, artists, public health professionals, local governments, and residents to work together toward a shared vision. As a small but nimble firm, we at Horizon 54 have long embraced this interdisciplinary approach by integrating planning, community engagement, communications, and implementation into every project. Placemaking Week reinforced that this holistic, people-centered perspective continues to shape the future of the profession.
Downtown Detroit from newly completed Ralph C. Wilson Centennial Park
Being selected to lead a session at a national conference was both an opportunity to share our experience and a reminder that Horizon 54’s approach resonates with practitioners across the field. We returned with new ideas, valuable partnerships, and renewed inspiration to help communities create places that foster connection, belonging, and opportunity.
Thank you to Project for Public Spaces and Downtown Detroit Partnership for hosting an inspiring week in Detroit. We look forward to bringing what we learned back to the communities we serve.
Valeria Menendez
Katherine Wegrzyn