Mark Lakeman has spent 30 years turning intersections into gathering places.

One of the first was in his own Portland neighborhood.

In the 1990s, Mark and a group of neighbors in Sellwood began creating places where people could spend time together. That eventually carried into the intersection of SE 9th Avenue and Sherrett Street.

Neighbors painted the pavement. They added places to sit, a community information kiosk, a small library, and other pieces of neighborhood life.

They called it Share-It Square.

The project became the prototype for what City Repair calls an intersection repair: neighbors working together to turn part of the public right-of-way into a recognizable gathering place.

Mark co-founded City Repair around that idea.

Over the years, the organization has helped Portland residents paint intersections, build benches and kiosks, plant gardens, create gathering spaces, and make other small changes to the places immediately outside their doors.

The work also helped change what Portland allowed people to do in its streets. Today, the city has a formal permitting process for community street paintings, giving neighborhoods a legal path to create the kinds of projects City Repair began experimenting with decades ago.

City Repair carries the approach forward through the Village Building Convergence and other community-led projects. Mark has continued the physical design work through Communitecture, the architecture and planning practice he founded in Portland.

Across both, his work has returned again and again to the same scale.

A street corner. A block. A group of neighbors. A place they pass every day.

Mark has spent his career showing how much those small pieces of a city can hold when the people living around them are invited to shape them.