Better Block helps communities build the change they want to see.

It started on a struggling block in Dallas in 2010.

Jason Roberts, Andrew Howard, and a group of neighbors took a street with vacant storefronts and temporarily remade it. They added bike lanes, cafe seating, landscaping, pop-up businesses, and other pieces of the kind of neighborhood they wanted to live in.

They did it quickly and with very little money.

For a few days, people could walk through an alternative version of the block. Residents could see how the street worked with different uses. Entrepreneurs could try businesses in empty storefronts. Public officials could experience changes that might otherwise have existed only in a rendering or planning document.

Some of those experiments stuck. The original effort helped spur changes to local regulations, put its temporary bike lane into Dallas planning, and helped a pop-up art business become permanent.

The idea spread.

Today, the Better Block Foundation works with communities to temporarily transform streets, vacant lots, plazas, and other overlooked spaces. A project might include seating, shade, bike infrastructure, art, local vendors, games, landscaping, or a new use for an empty storefront.

The temporary nature is part of the point.

People get to use an idea before a city spends years and significant money making it permanent. What works can be improved. What does not can change. And residents who might never attend a planning meeting can participate simply by showing up and using the place.

Better Block has also made many of its tools available for other people to use. Its Wikiblock library offers free designs for benches, planters, stages, bus stops, kiosks, and other pieces of public space that communities can fabricate themselves.

A better neighborhood can begin with a much smaller question.

What could we build here this weekend?