The
FIFA World Cup will be played next summer in 16 cities across North America, culminating with the final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. But opportunities for bringing people together for the 100-plus soccer matches aren’t limited to the 80,000-seat stadium.
The five-week tournament can provide placemaking opportunities across the region as communities gather to follow the tournament.
Gernot Riether,
Coordinator of graduate programs at the New Jersey School of Architecture, and Associate Professor, presented “Game On! Activating Public Spaces During the World Cup” to the NJTPA’s Regional Transportation Advisory Committee at its June 9 virtual meeting.
Riether, the incoming chair of NJIT’s
Hillier School of Architecture and Design, with funding from the NJTPA worked with a group of students in his Independent Study Studio to examine how a typical street or square could be transformed into an experience. “We started by asking how municipalities…can benefit from the World Cup,” he said, adding that there are huge opportunities for public spaces across New Jersey to offer unique experiences.
“It’s a great way to stimulate economic development and create community,” Blythe Eaman, Director, Environmental & Sustainability Planning, said, and tap into energy around the games. “We wanted to support communities to tap that spending potential and bring people together.”
Students devised a “kit of parts” with affordable, easy-to-install ways that could transform public spaces into environments where communities can gather. “It’s not just about viewing games," Riether said, but engaging communities through placemaking opportunities.
The group created a catalog of simple items, ranging from collapsable tents and street furniture consisting of medicine balls that look like soccer balls to more sophisticated interactive soccer games and ball pits. The elements can be combined in different ways in a typical street or a parking lot.
Ideas from the studio class will be packaged into an accessible guide for municipalities and business improvement districts. Staff will conduct outreach about how the NJTPA can offer technical assistance on potential locations, design services, and brainstorming, similar to what’s done with the NJTPA’s
Complete Streets Demonstration Library, with a targeted focus on the World Cup. “We imagine some of the ideas can be coupled with materials already in our demonstration library,” Eaman said.
Materials and ideas can be tailored to a municipality, Eaman said. “We tried to make it kind of generic to capture different street types but could work with you on how that could look in your community,” Eaman said.
The “Game On! Activating Public Spaces During the World Cup” presentation
can be found here.