Challenger Cities EP105: Coming to Play with the Downtown Denver Partnership

Challenger Cities EP105: Coming to Play with the Downtown Denver Partnership

Kourtny Garrett, Gretchen Hollrah and Aisha Ahmad-Post were among 71 Denver leaders who spent 48 hours in Montréal this year, studying how a city makes vibrant neighbourhoods through play. On their last morning, while I ran a workshop with the group, Greg Lindsay borrowed the microphone and pulled the three of them aside.

Kourtny, CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership, explains why play became the headline of Denver's new downtown plan, and why her truest measure of success, after all the foot traffic data, is watching people's faces. "It's simply a feeling." Gretchen, executive director of Denver Arts & Venues, runs a city department that pays its own way through Red Rocks concerts and touring Broadway, which is how Greg came to call her the Robert Moses of the arts. "I would prefer to be from Toronto and the Jane Jacobs, but I am an American, so I guess I'm stuck with Robert Moses." Aisha, executive director of the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, talks about why cities default to public art, and what it takes to make performance happen again and again.

In between, Greg and I compare notes on the workshop, honest pilots, and a 32-foot glowing-eyed blue horse called Blucifer.

In this episode:

• Downtown as a venue, and where a city can start to bend the rules
• What Montréal puts in the ground so organisers pay for the programme instead of the plumbing
• "Play is a tool, but the outcome is connection."
• Why public art gets a 1% budget and repeat performance gets nothing
• Would a forty-year-old do this without feeling stupid?
• How a once-creepy airport sculpture became a festival name nobody commissioned
• Aisha's smallest thing: "Once you finally get through that first chance, the next time it's gonna be easier and easier until it becomes tradition and ritual."

Greg, Lev Kushner, Jasmine Palardy and I will be in Denver on 5 and 6 November to turn all of this into something the city can go and do. If you're in Denver, we'd like to see you there.