LEWISTON — Canal Street will get a serious but temporary makeover Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Volunteers and demonstrators will narrow the road from two lanes to one after Ash Street, replacing one of the lanes with angle-in parking.

But the biggest changes come a block later, just past Pine Street. The southeast corner of Canal and Pine will be converted into a developed block, with a temporary building facade, food trucks, vendors and other enticements.

“It’s hard to explain. You really have to experience it to see how it works,” said Kara Wilbur, one of the organizers of the Build Maine Conference, to be held at Bates Mill Building No. 1 on Wednesday and Thursday.

The demonstration, called “Imagine People Here,” is meant to show how a city block can be converted to be more pedestrian-friendly and livelier.

“You’ll see: It is messy,” Wilbur said. “But there are pedestrians and bikes and cars moving through, and it all works out fine.”

This will be the third time Lewiston has hosted the conference. The first time, volunteers made Pine Street more bike-friendly with temporary bicycle lanes. Last spring, they narrowed the road around Simard-Payne Memorial Park and test-drove city plows and other big equipment to see how they fared.

This year, organizers are working with the national Build a Better Block foundation and local groups on the demonstration project.

And they want feedback. They’ve set up an online survey to gauge user response to their installation.

The conference will bring different types of urban planning professionals together to discuss modern urbanist theory: how building scale, road planning and development can affect communities’ future growth opportunities, economy and overall health.

It’s sponsored by the Congress for the New Urbanism, the Maine Municipal Association, the Maine Real Estate and Development Association and GrowSmart Maine.

Roughly 250 planning professionals, developers and urban architects attended the first conference in Bates Mill No. 1 in November 2014, and they came back six months later in May 2015 for the second conference.

This year, Wilbur said, organizers are planning for a warmer June main event, with spillover events organized by other groups expected a couple of days before. Last year, a group of Bates College students hosted a concert in Simard-Payne Memorial Park and experimentally narrowed Oxford Street near the park.

Things kick off Wednesday with two higher-level presentations, meant as development-level programs for planning and urban design professionals.

A workshop later in the day Wednesday will feature Asheville, N.C.-based planner Joe Minicozzi, who will discuss urban planning costs and economic benefits.

Yhe parking project and Minicozzi’s talk cost $50 each to attend.

A beer garden, hosted by Baxter Brewing, is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and is open to the public.

The main event kicks off at 8 a.m. Thursday and includes presentations by nationally renowned urban philosophers, designers and entrepreneurs at the Bates Mill.

Tickets for that event are $75 and are available online at the Build Maine website, www.build-maine.com.

Featured speakers include Burlington, Vt., Mayor Miro Weinberger, Saco City Administrator Kevin Sutherland, author and social critic James Howard Kunstler and Buffalo, N.Y.-based urban preservationist and real estate developer Bernice Radle.

A special evening keynote session will wrap up the conference at 5:30 p.m. at the Agora Grand Event Center, 220 Bates St. It will feature Minicozzi, who will discuss mistakes in building and financing cities. It’s free and open to the public.

“We are trying to make it more accessible, especially to people who can’t make it during the day because they have jobs,” Wilbur said.

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Build Maine 2016: “Imagine People Here” traffic plan by Scott Taylor