A Year in Practice: The Musicant Group 2025 Recap

The Practice of Place is dedicated to sharing tools, strategies, and frameworks to help you create thriving active places. These insights are born of direct experience and repeated application and refinement. As we share, we continue to practice.

So as we close out 2025 and wake up to 2026, I want to take a moment to reflect on what’s been a genuinely transformative year for our work at the Musicant Group. Each project incorporates several of the strategies that we’ve written about here in past posts.

This was the first year of our refocused services. Where we once activated spaces for others, we now work with public and private owners of spaces to craft place strategies and build their internal capacity to activate their own places — teaching people how to fish rather than catching one for them.

We brought this approach to bear on turning around a struggling downtown park, reenergizing a business district, and shaping a new community from the ground up.

Along the way, we continued to share what we’ve learned for the benefit of practitioners and communities alike through our Practice of Place Substack, which has grown to more than 2,000 subscribers.

Our work this year reinforced what we’ve always believed: when you create places where people want to be, everything else follows.

Here’s what we accomplished together in 2025.

Kellogg Mall Park in downtown Saint Paul had a beautiful tree canopy and a prime location — but no real reason to spend time there. That void was often filled with negative behavior that made people feel unsafe.

Over three months in the summer of 2025, we were brought on by the City of Saint Paul Parks Department to change that. Through a comprehensive approach combining new amenities (including a dog park, ping pong, and moveable furniture), on-site ambassadors, weekly programming, and strategic communications, we completely shifted how the space was used.

The impact:

• The daily share of non-male visitors increased from ~40% to 60%+ (a best-in-class safety indicator).

• Those reporting feeling unsafe in the park dropped from 50% to zero.

• Average visitor frequency increased from 7.6 to 12.4 visits per month.

“I never actually thought I would want to spend time in Kellogg Park or bring my grandkids there … but now, if it continues on the path it is on, I look forward to spending more time there, too.”
— Downtown resident

The City now has a replicable model for downtown park activation that can be expanded to other sites.

Following years of disruptive road construction and the launch of a new pedestrian network, the City of Chaska invited us to develop a downtown activation strategy spanning the built environment, business partnerships, and the operations of both city departments and the Downtown BID.

We created a comprehensive 12-month activation plan focused on:

• Business recruitment, with streamlined processes for destination dining and unique retail.

• Piloting a new event series, including weekly concerts, vintage markets, and family programming.

• Physical transformations of centrally located but underused public spaces — and a vacant lot — into daily gathering spaces.

• Enhanced marketing through dedicated capacity, a relaunched newsletter, and a refreshed website.

• Improved access via parking wayfinding and pedestrian connections.

• Refocused district meetings that prioritized strategy and evaluation over updates.

• Revisions to the BID’s workplan and P&L, modeling the benefits of increased assessments in future years.

With our model combining strategy and implementation support, many of these recommendations became reality before the ink was dry on the report, including:

• Hiring a third-party marketing firm and increasing social impressions by 1,000%

• Piloting a new ongoing event series in a formerly underused plaza

• Increasing average monthly meeting participation by 300%

“Collaborating with The Musicant Group has been an absolute joy. Max’s insights, experience, and thoughtful recommendations have sparked a renewed sense of excitement and momentum in our downtown. Their clear, actionable recommendations have equipped us with the tools and confidence to keep building on this momentum.”
— Julie Grove, City of Chaska Economic Development Department

Working with Monarch Development Partners, we’re shaping the public realm for Downtown Victoria West from the ground up. From the physical environment to governance and programming, every element of this new retail and housing district is centered on a dynamic public space designed to work as a whole.

Through experience-focused strategy, we:

• Identified core constituencies and personas, along with their needs and pain points

• Translated these experiences into recommendations that shape the public realm

• Developed comprehensive, year-round programming concepts — from daily habits to annual traditions — and ensured they can be supported through design choices

Everything revolves around a core principle: positive experiences lead to frequent use; frequent use establishes habits; habits create relationships with places; and those relationships generate lasting value.

By incorporating operations, governance, and programming into the design process, we’re maximizing the likelihood of creating a true community gathering place from day one.

In partnership with The 106 Group, we developed three bundled enterprise scenarios to support both economic and cultural outcomes as part of a broader cultural tourism strategy for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.

This work recognizes that authentic cultural tourism isn’t about extracting culture for economic gain. It’s about creating enterprises that strengthen cultural practices while building sustainable economic opportunities.

Our scenario planning helped the Band evaluate pathways forward that honor their heritage while creating meaningful economic development.

Throughout 2025, we continued sharing lessons learned through our Practice of Place Substack, which has grown to over 2,000 subscribers.

We explore the intersections of design, organizational incentives, events, and operations — unpacking strategies for bringing life to public and shared spaces.

Great places don’t happen by accident. They require intentional strategy, thoughtful design, consistent care, and ongoing adaptation. And through hundreds of projects, we’ve learned that the culture of the organization in charge is the single biggest determinant of a place’s long-term success.

As we move into 2026, we remain energized by a fundamental question:

How do we create places where people genuinely want to be?

Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

— The Musicant Group
Creating places where people want to be

Want to explore what’s possible for your place? Let’s connect.
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