Special Opportunity: “Cool Spots: Shade”
Artists, Designers: Create Cool Spots to Address a Warming World
The City of Cambridge is looking for interdisciplinary teams or individual designers to create Cool Spots that provide shade and serve as places for community gathering. We're seeking projects that provide cooling for people in our warming world and use the power of design to prompt imagination, community-building, social interaction and action to address climate change in cities. Each approved project will receive a budget of $80,000 to $95,000.
Submissions are due July 2, 2026.
To learn more about the project and application process, the City will be hosting an Information Session for interested artists. The Information Session will be held on Wednesday, June 17 at 6 p.m. Please register for the Zoom session.
Cool Spots is an initiative funded by the City of Cambridge's Participatory Budgeting program. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process where community members directly decide how to spend part of the City's budget to improve Cambridge. To date, the City has set aside over $10.5 million for more than 80 PB projects since 2014. Cool Spots, which was funded in the tenth cycle of PB, began in the summer of 2025 using different methods to provide shade and cooling in the city.