Shaping vibrant neighborhoods with infill development with Shruti Shankar and Roberto Jenkins

Big visions for our cities often start with ambitious master plans—20-acre sites, sweeping infrastructure, and promises of transformation. But as exciting as they sound, these projects can struggle under the weight of financing challenges, shifting market cycles, and the difficulty of sustaining community engagement over decades.

On the other end of the spectrum are smaller, more incremental interventions: storefront upgrades, parklets, infill housing, and neighborhood-scale design moves that reshape our everyday experience of place. These fine-grained efforts can feel more organic, more participatory, and often create some of the most beloved neighborhoods we know today.

In this episode of Building Better Cities, host Kate Gasparro is joined by Roberto Jenkins and Shruti Shankar from RDC and Studio One Eleven to explore this tension between top-down master planning and bottom-up placemaking. Together, they talk about how incremental projects in places like the Long Beach Design District are reshaping communities, what it means to design at the human scale, and how partnerships can unlock lasting urban change.

Resources:

Inside RDC-S111's Transformative Long Beach Headquarters (Work Design Magazine)

Infill Development Supports Community Connectivity (APA)

How to drive urban infill development in your city (C40)

Mapping the Parklet Craze (SPUR)

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