City of Marquette Shoreline Cultural Trail

Project Description

The City of Marquette is developing a Cultural Trail along seven miles of shoreline. This trail celebrates the community’s whole cultural heritage, history, and environment through public space design, art, and interpretive signage. The trail highlights historic sites, natural features, and landmarks, promoting education and cultural understanding. It encourages mutual respect and cooperation with federally recognized tribes and the local Anishinaabe community, featuring Indigenous public art, dual language signage, and the honoring of village sites. This investment in cultural infrastructure was made possible through national grant funding that has leveraged state, local, tribal and private funds and inspired sustainable partnerships across public and private sectors. The project includes interpretive sites, digital information systems and a new Cultural Trailhead Center. Rooted in place-revealing, Marquette’s Cultural Trail Project showcases a vibrant, resident focused community that aims to foster a sustainable future by reexamining our relationship with the natural and built environment.

Is your project easy to replicate in other communities (clear in its impact and execution for other communities)?

While Marquette’s Shoreline Cultural Trail is incredibly site specific in its final result, the process is a partnership-driven and community-inspired strategy that could and should be applied in every municipality. Marquette is a community of just over 20,000 residents, home to Northern Michigan University, and largely regarded as the cultural epicenter of the Upper Peninsula; however, it is still a rural small town that needs to be innovative with leveraging connections and resources. Collaborative power is what has fueled the cultural trail project. The replicable process other cities should consider is as follows:

Step 1: Activate Public/Private Partnerships – The Cultural Trail Project is steered by a committee of eight representatives from all of the major local cultural institutions including the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. While a city-administered project, the driving force of decisions are these stakeholders. This committee ensures partnership in not only the development process but the sustained content and future vision for the trail.

Step 2: Work with professionals – We secured professional consulting for a design and plan for the trail as a whole, not just sign designs. Budgets that may not permit hiring a design firm for the specific project can still replicate this step in doing your research. Find other projects that are similar to and inspire you.

Step 3: Activate your Community – The Cultural Trail has embraced “place-revealing” rather than place-making as a philosophy that strives to simply improve access to or highlight what already exists in our community. Whether a natural or built feature or a group of people, it’s important to take the time to talk to residents and service organizations that are already doing the work your project is centered in.

Step 4: Avoid Silos and Leverage Your Assets – Ensure that within the municipality, you are working across departments as early as the ideation process. This takes time, but results in doing things right the first time with full city support. It can also open up funding doors through pairing projects and strengthening an ask via wider and more meaningful impact.

Step 5: Patience is Key – Collaboration and partnership is logistically difficult and time consuming, but will result in sustainable partnerships and a unified vision.

What is the Community Wealth Impact (based on one or more of the categories you selected) of your project?

In all honesty, Marquette’s Shoreline Cultural Trail serves every area of Community Wealth Building.

Lifelong Learning: Education serves as the central mission of the trail, providing a catalyst for dialogue and a platform to build cultural understanding. Sites are designed for all abilities and ages and the trail and cultural trailhead will become a resource for our closely partnered education institutions to explore, play, and learn. Grade school “Artists in Excellence” program plans to contribute a piece of student-led public art. NMU will connect their campus to the trail and use its sites as real-world examples for classrooms of all disciplines. Our city’s senior services office is thrilled to expand the outdoor recreation program to include outdoor based cultural tours on the improved accessible pathways and resting places. Most importantly, all ages will discover opportunities to connect with the living local Anishinaabe culture and other untold storyways.

Public Health: The shoreline trail is primarily a recreational multi-use trail. Already a massively vital public health asset as a safe and beautiful route to be physically active; the cultural trail project considers access to the lakeshore and these cultural assets for all people, no matter their ability. The new trailhead center will also provide year-round, warm, community gathering space which is essential for building community and sustaining mental health in the dark months of winter. In the summer, sites and special events will draw people out into green spaces to experience arts, culture, the natural world, and connection with others.

Arts & Culture: The most obvious impact, the core of the Cultural Trail is to not only tell the facts of our community’s history, but to build empathy with the stories and life ways that others have experienced on the same land we stand on today. The trail’s sites honor our non-human relatives as well, paying special attention to the plants and animals that inhabit the land and how they have come and gone throughout time. The Anishinaabe stories are highlighted for the first time in our recent history, honoring and building relationships with our neighboring Tribal nations. The City of Marquette values its creative community and unique identity, and the trail is a physical manifestation of that community value.

Financial Security: One of Marquette’s major economic industries is tourism. Specifically outdoor recreation tourism. Blessed with pristine shoreline and miles of hiking and biking trails, Marquette is also conscious of losing itself to tourists and residents feeling pushed out of their own community. The Cultural Trail and projects paralleled and partnered with it have ushered in an era of intentional growth. Curating where weekend visitors should go while preserving some of the more hidden gems for locals or those curious enough to earn a recommendation is a core part of Marquette’s sustainable tourism strategy. Improvement projects county-wide have enhanced access to certain places in the spirit of saving other paths from an irreparable beating. This trail will continue to secure Marquette as a premier travel destination, but do so with a conscious plan for educating visitors through the stories told and journeys mapped.

Sustainability: The Trail preserves and celebrates the unique built and natural environment of Marquette’s shoreline. Not long ago, Marquette’s downtown harbor was an industrial port, littered with coal and traintracks. Now it is a thriving green space, restored through environmental projects such as daylighting the Whetstone Brook and the ongoing coastal resiliency project that looks to a future of increased storms and erosion. The City closely partners with local environmental organization, Superior Watershed Partnership, to secure grant funding and administrative support for these environmental restoration and resiliency projects. A primary aim of the Trail is environmental education and awareness of our past and advocacy for a healthy future.

Infrastructure: The Cultural Trail has been adopted by the City, its Commission and its Community as a piece of “Cultural Infrastructure”. Cultural infrastructure contributes to the social fabric of place, giving people creative experiences, an opportunity to learn about history and connect with others in their community. Marquette has a unique value system in that natural features are also held close by the community as a core part of the city’s identity. The Trail helps define that distinctiveness of place and blend of the built and natural environment. While waterlines and streets help the city survive, for a city to experience true community wealth, it must thrive. That is the role of cultural infrastructure. Places that people feel they belong and can access with ease to gather, exercise, explore, and reflect.

Describe the creativity and originality of your project.

Marquette’s Shoreline Cultural Trail refines a destination already renowned for its culture and natural beauty. The approach however is far more than a few interpretive signs. The vision is a continued mission of deepening the storylines and future phases of access based cultural infrastructure building. The heart of the trail project is to inspire and connect residents and visitors to their surroundings and each other. It builds empathy through storytelling and prompts curiosity about the way things were or could be. The trail is a recreational corridor that accesses curated experiences, offering intentional places of rest, reflection, and gathering. Public art activates the mind in ways a paragraph of text cannot, and the Cultural Trailhead will offer an inviting living-room space for the public to gather and grow year-round. Already years in the making, the trail aims to weave into the Marquette experience as an ever-growing resource for many years to come.