Which City Did Winter Best?
10 cities that beat back the cold with spectacle and sport
How do you talk to your kids about what’s happened in the first two weeks of the Trump administration? I was flipping through a kids news magazine we subscribe to for some help with explaining what DOGE, ICE, and USAID mean. That’s when I saw a photo of a huge pink man.
This inflatable sculpture, Monsieur Rouge, created by French artist Philippe Katerine, is part of Boston’s Winteractive program. For the second year, Downtown Boston Alliance has been featuring a free, walkable art experience with 15 artworks and interactive play elements throughout downtown. We could all use something bright and playful in dreary winter — and especially this year.
No matter what the Trump administration brings, we still have the basics of streets, and buildings, and housing, and more to contend with. Placemaking can seem silly when the country is in chaos — but it’s not. When I worked at Penn Institute for Urban Research, I witnessed how a graduate level class worked with Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, Ukraine, through a program called Diplomacy Lab [fittingly, this website is “under review”], on designing a new urban plan. Here was a city that had witnessed some of the worst atrocities of the war in Ukraine — and what the citizens wanted, as part of their healing process, were some bike lanes and better public spaces (and of course, a way to memorialize the war).
Who knows what we’ll need to cope with the exhaustion and despair that comes with each news alert? In this sense, cities like Boston that try to enliven winter offer a fine metaphor for how to cope with difficult times.
How do you take the hardship of short days and brutal weather and turn it into something that can make you smile? Here are 10 international cities using different strategies to reinvent winter, often using art, spectacle, and physical activity.
I’ll be publishing more politics-focused commentary soon, but for now, here’s some counter-programming to remind us of the local urban realm that remains under our control.
Monumental public art
In a digital age when we’re constantly looking at little screens, there’s something really refreshing about seeing stuff that is oversized in real life. While Winteractive is compelling for pedestrians, I see the deeper purpose here: Boston has a decent return to office rate, but its office absorption rate has been slipping. Public art can help people to reimagine the downtown and maybe help stoke demand for office space.
Next level outdoor recreation
In Sapporo, Japan, an annual snow festival also features monumental art work: it celebrates the city’s below-freezing temperatures with 50-foot snow sculptures. But Sapporo also combines its public art festival with next-level public recreation — snow tubing and sledding. I love this combination of urban contexts and active recreation.
Ice skating rinks are nice, but what about skating around your city? In Winnipeg, Canada, they’re also combining recreation and art: you can skate through the city along the city’s Nestaweya River and stop in warming huts designed by local artists along the way.
For subscribers
I’ll discuss design competitions in Calgary and Toronto, light shows in San Francisco and Amsterdam, and Vienna’s ball season, all of which make winter more bearable. And at the end of each email for the foreseeable future, I’ll be adding in about 10 job listings, too. Subscribe here!