How do you talk to your children about what’s happened in the first weeks of the Trump administration? I was flipping through a kids news magazine we subscribe to for some help with explaining what DOGE, ICE, and USAID mean. That’s when I saw a photo of a huge pink man.

This inflatable sculpture, Monsieur Rouge, created by French artist Philippe Katerine, is part of Boston’s Winteractive program. For the second year, Downtown Boston Alliance has been featuring a free, walkable art experience with 15 artworks and interactive play elements throughout downtown. We could all use something bright and playful in dreary winter — and especially this year.

No matter what the Trump administration brings, we still have the basics of streets, and buildings, and housing, and more to contend with. Placemaking can seem silly when the country is in chaos — but it’s not. When I worked at Penn Institute for Urban Research, I witnessed how a graduate level class worked with Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, Ukraine, through a program called Diplomacy Lab [fittingly, their website is “under review”], on designing a new urban plan. Here was a city that had witnessed some of the worst atrocities of the war in Ukraine — and what the citizens wanted, as part of their healing process, were some bike lanes and better public spaces (and of course, a way to memorialize the war).

Who knows what we’ll need to cope with the exhaustion and despair that comes with each news alert? In this sense, cities like Boston that try to enliven winter offer a fine metaphor for how to cope with difficult times.

How do you take the hardship of short days and brutal weather and turn it into something that can make you smile? Philadelphia has made strides to activate public spaces in winter, with ice skating at Dilworth Park and Penn’s Landing, as well as a winter market in LOVE Park. But we could always do more. Here are 10 international cities using different strategies to reinvent winter, often using art, spectacle and physical activity.

Monumental public art

In a digital age when we’re constantly looking at little screens, there’s something really refreshing about seeing stuff that is oversized in real life. While Winteractive is compelling for pedestrians, I see the deeper purpose here: Boston has a decent return to office rate, but its office absorption rate has been slipping. Public art can help people to reimagine the downtown and maybe help stoke demand for office space.

Next-level outdoor recreation

In Sapporo, Japan, an annual snow festival also features monumental artwork: It celebrates the city’s below-freezing temperatures with 50-foot snow sculptures. But Sapporo also combines its public art festival with next-level public recreation — snow tubing and sledding. I love this combination of urban contexts and active recreation.

Ice skating rinks are nice, but what about skating around your city? In Winnipeg, Canada, they’re also combining recreation and art: you can skate through the city along the city’s Nestaweya River and stop in warming huts designed by local artists along the way.

Design competitions

Both Calgary and Toronto have employed design competitions to determine who gets to design the city’s seasonal art works. In collaboration with Chinook Blast, Calgary produced two kiosks that draw attention to the unique winter environment. The “Serenity Passage,” below left, features 200 blown glass pieces that muffle the sound of the surrounding cityscape, creating a peaceful enclosure. While “Dot Spot,” at right, uses traditional blue saucer sleds to create a fun, nostalgic kiosk.

Toronto’s Winter Stations is an annual, month-long international design competition to reimagine existing lifeguard towers located on the city’s beaches while they’re not in use during the winter. I particularly admired this year’s “Slice of Sun” which provides “a place where people can escape from the outside world, a quick break to bathe in the warm orange tones provided by the illuminating materials.” I would love to see Philadelphia host a design competition to create kiosks and art works for our city parks.

Recasting space with light shows

After six years, Philadelphia ended its wintertime “Deck the Hall” light show at City Hall. Still, nighttime light shows can be a civic winner, and San Francisco and Amsterdam are showing just how transformative illumination can be.

In San Francisco, Let’s Glow SF returned to the city for what the Downtown SF Partnership calls the country’s “largest holiday projection event.” Across eight locations, 16 artists reinvented the built environment while a block party, clothing drive, and restaurant deals sweetened the experience.

But perhaps outside of the U.S., the largest light festival might be the one in Amsterdam, where 40 installations line the canals. Here, the festival goes beyond illumination to include illuminated visual art and sculpture.

A last novel idea: hundreds of balls

Finally, perhaps my favorite winter intervention: a season of dancing.

I was amazed to learn that Vienna has something called “ball season” every winter, during which there are more than 450 balls in the city. According to the city’s website: “Each year, the Ball of the Viennese Chimney Sweeps kicks off the ball season. If you’re wondering about this ball: in Vienna, it is quite normal for virtually every professional guild to have its own ball. They range from the Confectioners’ Ball to the Ball of the Weightlifters.”

I ended up reading a fair bit about ball season and the variety of events that take place, from the Sweatpants Ball to the Vegan Ball. But there’s one thing they seem to have in common: many of these events go until 3am or thereabouts:

The end of the ball also follows a traditional ritual: the light in the ballroom is dimmed, the band plays a slow waltz as everyone leaves. In Vienna, lively nights at the ball end at a sausage stand or over goulash in a coffee house.

Especially in these times, it all sounds extremely dreamy.

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.

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