The conference begins with the premise that the world is at a crossroads. We have a choice: cities can continue to grow haphazardly, without regard to human social needs and environmental consequences, or we can embrace a sustainable and equitable process that builds community, enhances quality of life, and creates safe and prosperous neighborhoods. We are convinced that in the future, the cities that utilize the social capital-building potential of their public spaces to the fullest will be the ones with the most dynamic local economies. The Future of Places will survey the field, and map out a path to a more people-centered urban development model for the globalized future.

Habitat III, the third United Nations (UN) conference to be held on Human Settlements, will bring together actors from across the globe, including local governments, national governments, the private sector, international organizations, and many others. This gathering, the largest of its kind in the world, will build on the first Habitat conference in Vancouver in 1976 and the Habitat II conference in Istanbul in 1996. The conference will re-evaluate the Habitat agenda and look at the role of UN-Habitat and sustainable urban development in the upcoming decade. It is therefore vital that the dialogue that will influence the Habitat III outcomes—and thus the future global urban agenda—commences today.

As many of you already know, the timing of the launch of this conference series is particularly exciting as, just three weeks ago, we announced the formation of the Placemaking Leadership Council, which will meet for the first time this April in Detroit to begin developing a global agenda around Placemaking in cities. To ensure a diverse, multifaceted group of attendees for The Future of Places conference in June, each of the three organizing partners for that event will be bringing a delegation of leaders from their respective realm of expertise. As such, PPS will be selecting members from the Leadership Council to attend the Future of Places conference.

This allows us to form a truly international Council by providing those who cannot travel to Detroit in April with an equally exciting opportunity to gather with peers for the discussion of the transformative agendas that are at the heart of this evolving movement. While the Detroit meeting will lay the groundwork for the Council’s future work, the role that Council members will play at The Future of Places conference will be critical in expanding the understanding of that work on the global stage. Due to this unique perspective, we will be looking for delegates with experience working internationally, and particularly in the cities of the developing world—people with a passion for addressing human, social, and community needs in ways that transform long-struggling areas into sustainable neighborhoods defined around vital, welcoming, and affirming public spaces.

If you believe that you would be a good fit for the Placemaking Leadership Council, and you are interested in attending either or both of the meetings in Detroit and Stockholm, we encourage you to review the criteria for joining the Leadership Council. Once you are up to speed on the agendas and criteria, you can then click here to tell us why you feel you’d be good addition to the Placemaking Leadership Council between now and April 1st, 2013. (Please note that, if you have already filled out this form, you do not need to do so again.)

If you want to stay up to date with news about the Stockholm conference, you can follow @FutureofPlaces on Twitter. We look forward to hearing from you. Perhaps we will see you soon, in Stockholm!

Pittsburgh’s brand may be rusty, but like every city, it has its bright spots / Photo: Brendan Crain

“At the heart of my argument,” writes Jim Russell in his response to last Wednesday’s blog post, “is the fact that [Placemaking] initiatives are intrinsically place-centric. Instead of place-centrism, I’m looking at talent migration through a lens of people-centrism…I’m convinced that placemaking is useful, but not for talent attraction/retention. People move for purposes of personal economic development.”

Focusing on talent attraction and retention is what leads to gentrification, the phenomena that people who voice concerns about Placemaking are most often trying to avoid. There is an oft-voiced belief today that there is a finite amount of talent and creativity available in the world, and that cities must compete to draw creative people away from rival communities in order to thrive. But truly great places are not built from scratch to attract people from elsewhere; the best places have evolved into dynamic, multi-use destinations over time: years, decades, centuries. These places are reflective of the communities that surround them, not the other way around. Placemaking is, ultimately, more about the identification and development of local talent, not the attraction of talent from afar.

A key difference in definitions here is that what some would call ‘place’, I (and others) would call branding. There’s an oceans-wide gap between those two things. “Young, college-educated talent is moving from decaying Pittsburgh (brain drain) to cool, hip Austin (brain gain),” writes Russell, explaining the Creative Class concept. “It’s a place-centric understanding of talent relocation.” In fact, what he’s describing is a brand-centric understanding. Pittsburgh’s brand is rusty (heh); Austin’s brand gleams with the silvery-green gloss of techno-optimism. But to categorize entire cities as singular places gets you nowhere at all. Pittsburgh has its bright spots, and Austin has its warts.

Looking at cities from what Jan Gehl calls the “airplane scale” is what allows proponents of cut-and-paste urbanism to do what the Modernists did, using lifestyle instead of architecture. Rather than suggesting that the city be reorganized into tower blocks amidst grassy lawns, today’s one-size-fits-allers call for cafes and artisan markets. They are presuming that the city as a whole will benefit from the indiscriminate application of a specific set of amenities. It won’t. Neighborhoods need to define their priorities for themselves; in so doing, they often discover that there are untapped opportunities to grow their own local economies, without needing to import talent from elsewhere. Even if your city’s brand is busted, your community is still capable of re-building itself. As Jane Jacobs once argued, “the best cities are actually federations of great neighborhoods.”

“The best cities are actually federations of great neighborhoods.” — Jane Jacobs / Photo: Brendan Crain

When cities jump into the talent attraction death match arena, they often wind up losing to win: they spend millions of dollars on insane tax incentives to woo corporate headquarters and factories; they drop millions more on fancy amenities that haven’t really been asked for, in the hopes that (since it worked elsewhere) each bauble will magically cause a crowd of American Apparel-wearing, Mac-toting graphic designers to materialize out of thin air; they sell their souls in order to “create” jobs that are, in fact, merely shifted over from somewhere else.

If “people develop, not places” as Russell argues, economic development and gentrification are one and the same. If your strategy for improving local economic prospects is to drink some other city’s milkshake, you won’t get very far. It’s economic cannibalization. To really grow an economy, opportunity has to be developed organically within each community, and that requires that people dig in and improve their neighborhoods, together, for the sake of doing so–not convincing Google to open a new office down the road.

As Aaron Renn put it in a recent post on The Urbanophile, “We need to be asking the question of what exactly we are doing to benefit the people without college degrees beyond assuring them that if we attract more people with college degrees everything will be looking up for them. We need to sell ideas like transit in a way that isn’t totally dependent on items like ‘enabling us to attract the talent we need for the 21st century economy.’ If I read half as much about providing economic opportunity and facilitating upward social mobility for the poor and middle classes as I do about green this, that, or the other thing, we’d be getting somewhere.”

Places aren’t about the 21st century economy. They are about the people who inhabit and develop them. They are the physical manifestations of the social networks upon which our global economy is built. Likewise, Place-making is not about making existing places palatable to a certain class of people. It is a process by which each community can develop place capital by bringing people together to figure out what competitive edge their community might have, and then working to capitalize on that edge and improve local economic prospects in-place, rather than trying to import opportunity from elsewhere.

Decades ago we, as a society, detached people from place. We decided that places should be shaped based on theories and ideas, rather than the needs of people who already lived, worked, and played there. The development of people and places is the same process. If we keep trying to separate the two, our cities will remain divided.

The first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council will take place in downtown Detroit, Michigan, home of the wonderful Campus Martius Park / Photo: PPS

For those of us who are passionate about the public spaces in our communities, this is an extraordinary time. The general awareness of the importance of a strong sense of place—to the economy, to our social fabric, to human health—is growing stronger every day. Placemaking is, at this moment, being transformed from a useful tool to a vital cause by people throughout the world. As one of those rare processes that can bring people with different objectives together under the same banner, Placemaking is uniquely suited to help us grapple with the complex challenges that we face in a globalized society. After almost four decades of working in this field, we are reaching out to peers new and old to form a Placemaking Leadership Council to consolidate and strengthen Placemaking as an international movement.

The goal of the Leadership Council is to build a culture of mutual support amongst the do-ers and deep thinkers at the forefront of the Placemaking movement, creating a community of practice around this important work. Through our work, we know many people who are actively engaged in creating great places today; many of these people—the ones we refer to admiringly as “Zealous Nuts”—have already agreed to join this Council. But there are also people we don’t yet know who should be involved. If you are one of these people, you already know who you are; you’ve achieved something beyond most peoples’ imagination, created one or more successful places, and are looking for an opportunity to share your stories and learn from others about how you might be able to raise the bar even more. If this is you, please read on.

At the inaugural meeting of the Council this April 11-12th, we will gather in Detroit, Michigan, the North American capital of resilience (Background on how Detroit and Michigan are leading the way on Placemaking), to debate, discuss, celebrate and develop a strategy for creating a global agenda around Placemaking in cities. Another gathering will take place in Stockholm this June, through our partnership with UN-Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. The Detroit gathering will be centered on case studies and demonstration projects, publications, films, and social media as ways of demonstrating the true power in place. Discussion will be structured around four agendas that we feel have the potential to transform cities if the focus is on the idea of place and Placemaking.

• Creating healthier communities and improving streets by redefining transportation planning;
• Improving our built environment by advocating for people- and place-centric design through an architecture of place;
• Supporting sustainable local economies by highlighting the central role of public markets;
• And strengthening communities by creating new urban development models that re-orient our cities and towns around great multi-use destinations.

The Council will be organized around four sub-committees, each of which will focus on one of these critical aspects of place-centered development. (Click here to read about the Transformative Agendas in greater detail). Their agenda-defining discussions will be guided by the three strategic themes of Place Governance, Place Capital, and Healthy Communities. Outcomes for each sub-committee will include research topics, benchmarks, potential partners, and implementation strategies that will drive progress and innovation amongst Council members and the wider global community of Placemaking practitioners and community change agents over the coming year.

If your interest is piqued, please review the five criteria below to see if you might be a good fit for the Placemaking Leadership Council. If you meet several of these criteria, we encourage you to reach out and tell us more about what you do, and why you’re passionate about the idea of place.

1.) You know about and understand Placemaking. You’re well-versed in the movement’s history, and can appreciate the uniqueness of the current moment. You understand that Placemaking is a process, not an outcome. Ideally, you’re also familiar with the Project for Public Spaces and the way that we work.

2.) You understand and agree with what we are trying to achieve. You get that the Council isn’t about making money or networking, but working with like-minded individuals to drive large-scale culture change to put place at the heart of public discourse.

3.) You have substantial experience with on-the-ground projects and initiatives. You’re driven and you’ve got a few success stories under your belt–and probably even some failures that you’ve learned a great deal from. We’re looking for people who don’t just think about how to create great places–they roll up their sleeves, head on out, and do it themselves.

4.) You think holistically about place. You’ve worked on a variety of different projects, and you understand how various (sometimes unexpected) pieces fit together to create a great public destination. The term “silo-busting” gets your feet tapping.

5.) You have your own networks and organizations. You’re not a rock, or an island. You have a track record of working with people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and communities, and you understand how important unlikely partnerships are to successful Placemaking.

If you are interested in joining the Placemaking Leadership Council and attending our first meeting in Detroit this April, please click here to fill out a questionnaire that will help us to learn more about who you are and what you do.

We welcome inquiries for this first round up until March 1st, 2013, and will work internally to shape a Council that will represent a diversity not only in professional experiences, but also in age, gender, cultural heritage, and international backgrounds. Please also indicate whether travel costs will be an issue, as we will be able to provide assistance to a limited number of Council members, based on need, through the generous sponsorship Southwest Airlines and contributions by other members.

We’re very excited to announce this new initiative, and look forward to working with more of the passionate Placemakers who make this movement so dynamic.

The Perth Cultural Centre is seen here in full bloom during CHOGM 2011 / Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

As much as we prize creativity in cities today, the cultural centers that we’ve built to celebrate it rarely hit the mark. Culture is born out of human interaction; it therefore cannot exist without people around to enjoy, evaluate, remix, and participate in it. So why do our cultural centers so often turn inward, away from the street, onto an internal space that is only nominally for gathering, and is mainly used for passing through? Why do these cultural centers physically remove culture from the public realm and plop it on a curated, often “visionary” pedestal instead of providing a venue for promoting more interaction among the people who create it? “Big Cultural Centers–think of Lincoln Center in Manhattan–they need to turn themselves inside-out and become about culture for all instead of culture for a few,” says PPS President Fred Kent. “Elitism is a big part of what’s going on in some of these places. They exude a subtle sense of who ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be there.’”

Perth’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority had a different vision. Their vision was to connect the 23 institutions within the Perth Cultural Centre (PCC) to each other by improving the public spaces that surrounded and connected them, and to extend the precinct past its formal edges, with cultural activity reaching out into the surrounding area like an octopus.  The PCC  is a cluster of institutions located at the hinge point between the city’s central business district and one of its burgeoning nightlife districts, Northbridge. The centre features a mix of historic buildings from the 1800s and Brutalist structures built in the 1960s and 70s, and includes art museums, theaters, a history museum, a major library, and a compact college campus.

The MRA got involved in 2008 by buying and renovating a number of storefronts along William Street, a major shopping corridor on the edge of the PCC precinct, and then carefully managing the selection of tenants. When PPS’s Kathy Madden, Alessandra Galletti, and Josh Kent were brought in back in 2009, the MRA’s understanding of the importance of careful management and cohesive vision proved to be key to developing a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC) plan that’s completely changed the public’s perception of the space in a very short period of time. “Compare something like Lincoln Center with the center of culture and diversity they have created in Perth,” says Fred, and you’ll find that the latter is “all about engagement, people, social interaction, a hundred different things to do–maybe nobody wins a design award for it, but that diversification of uses is a really big deal for the people who use that Place, and for their local culture.”

“One of the big things for us was to take the focus off the buildings and put it on the things that happen in the spaces between them,” MRA Executive Director of Place Management Veronica Jeffery explains. “That’s why what we call the ‘quick wins’ strategy was so important: it basically went from planning straight to implementation, and was really powerful. It didn’t leave time for contemplation, which meant that people could see their ideas transform into action.”

Volunteers work on the PCC's amazing "urban orchard" built atop a parking deck / Photo: CPSU/CSA via Flickr

The LQC plan included a working orchard on top of a parking deck, a wetland and play space focused on nature-based discovery, a large screen for projecting movies and digital art, seating, food vendors, etc. Major events like the Perth International Arts Festival and Fringe World Festival relocated to the center’s grounds, which also had the honor of hosting CHOGM 2011.

The culture of risk-taking and experimentation encouraged by the LQC plan has allowed for the MRA team to try some things that failed, learn from them, and move on. This has been greatly aided by the fact that, as part of the Placemaking process, the many once-isolated institutions located within the PCC have come to see their participation in the way that the site is managed as an opportunity to collaborate and enhance their own missions and events. As Alec Coles, Chief Executive Officer of the Western Australian Museum, explains it:

“The recent redevelopment of the Perth Cultural Centre as a ‘people space’ has helped us create the permeability around the Museum that we have long desired. The softening of the edges, not least with the popular sound garden, is making our historic ‘edifice’ a much more welcoming proposition…Too often, cultural centres become cultural ghettos; we are determined that by working with MRA and our many partners that this will not be the case in Perth.”

The good news, today, is that shifting attitudes are chipping away at the austere walls of yesterday’s “culture ghettos,” with people demanding more inspiring, interactive gathering places. Creativity is becoming one of the most coveted social assets for post-industrial cities with increasingly knowledge-based economies–and this is good news for culture vultures and average Joes, alike. “This idea of the ‘Creative Class,’” says PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin, an expert on cultural centers, “is about culturally-based industries, and creatively-engaged people. They could be making clothing, they could be in web or media design. The public’s definition of creativity is really changing to be about celebrating the creativity in all of us, and creating a public environment that supports and encourages that.”

According to Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class, pressure is mounting on traditional Cultural Centers–what he calls SOBs for ‘symphony, opera and ballet’–forcing more and more of them to adapt to meet the needs of an ever-broadening audience that is looking for ways to engage creatively with each other, and actually participate in culture instead of merely consuming it. “The real challenge for the ‘Big C’ centers,” he explains, “is how to reposition for this shift…these institutions are in trouble. Many teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.  They have to get with it, like universities and all the old school organizations. They have to become more fluid, more open, more accepting.  Less imposing. Think of it sort of like the difference between haute cuisine and great food trucks.”

The MRA's focus on becoming a place for people has created a destination where people can connect and learn from each other / Photo: Fred Kent

Put another way, great, engaging centers of culture are the product of great Placemaking. In Perth, various activities and institutions had co-located, but they hadn’t come out of their respective buildings to interact and make use of their shared space. The Placemaking process allowed the various stakeholders to come together and develop a collaborative vision for their shared site. “We think it’s important to debunk the myth around Culture with a Capital C and make the place inclusive and welcoming to different kinds of people,” Jeffery explains.

That inclusiveness–of organizations, of individuals, of businesses–is the lynchpin in the process of creating great places. Florida notes that Gallup & Knight’s Soul of the Community survey found that the quality of a place’s social offerings was the #1 factor that people said creates emotional attachment to their community. Openness to all sorts of people was #2. “I say the two go together,” he argues. “Our public spaces are perhaps the last vestige of democratic space in our cities.”

Today, we need those kinds of comfortable social environments more than ever. Encouraging creative exploration and experimentation is a great way to develop local talent. As studies (popularized by the writing of Ken Robinson) have shown, while the vast majority of children will answer enthusiastically in the affirmative when asked if they are creative, by the time most people reach high school just as great a majority will say that they are not. For our cities to thrive, we must develop participatory public spaces to re-spark latent creative spirits.

The PCC's openness and flexibility make the precinct ideal for everything from meeting a friend for coffee to meeting a few thousand friends for a concert. / Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

“When a cultural institution does programming out in public space,” says Nina Simon, an expert who consulted at museums around the world before taking the helm of the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz last year, “there’s a really powerful shift in the context.” Still, she cautions, it’s important that institutions remember that the shift is as important for them as it is for neighbors who attend an event or activity. “If you’re going to be out in public space, you have to have the attitude that this is about connecting to the community that you’re in, rather than just trying to figure out how to plug what you do inside the museum in somewhere else. When TV was invented, people didn’t just say ‘let’s put radio on the television.’ They had to re-think the way programming that was made in order to be successful.”

Over the years, PPS has seen how pulling cultural programming out into streets and squares has transformed not just those public spaces, but the cultural institutions that participated in their renewal as well: from Wade Oval in Cleveland, to Tucson’s Congress Street, to the Bronx River Arts Center in New York. And, of course, there’s the Perth Cultural Centre, where the MRA’s pioneering approach to transforming its precinct lights a new way forward for the formal, inward-focused capital-C Cultural Centers of yore.

“It’s been a challenging process, but the results have exceeded all of our expectations,” Jeffery says. “Ultimately, the centre is a public space, and we want everybody to feel comfortable here. They should be able to come in and feel like it’s theirs. If they happen to have a cultural experience in the process, that’s even better!”

Here in the US, we are part of several new partnerships and programs that will have us working in all 50 states, from big cities to small towns. The formation of major partnerships like Livability Solutions and CommunityMatters; PPS’s absorption of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking and the re-focusing of its Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference on the theme “Pro Place”; new work with federal and state agencies, including the EPA, NEA, and DOTs in multiple states–all of these events indicate a shift in the way that people are approaching their work, as they come to understand how focusing on place changes everything.

We are also working with the Ax:son Johnson Foundation and UN-Habitat to convene an international group of Placemaking leaders in Stockholm, Sweden, next summer. This event will be structured around the transformative agendas at the heart of our work, and will be the first of three major conferences leading up to Habitat III in 2016. We’re also bringing together the best and brightest place-centered minds for a Placemaking Leadership Council, which will meet for the first time at the end of the year, and will be instrumental in shaping our work as the Placemaking movement continues to grow.

These initiatives are the culmination of our work up to this point. We look forward to collaborating with our new partners on re-centering the discussion about sustainable, prosperous cities on Place, and to creating a “Town Square of Placemaking.” Below, we’ve rounded up photos from some of the most exciting work that we’re doing right now. There will be many opportunities in the coming months to plug into the growing global network of Placemakers. We’re looking forward to connecting with you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!

We traveled to Nairobi this spring as part of Transforming Cities through Placemaking & Public Spaces, our joint program with UN-Habitat. We continue to work closely with our friends there, and are looking forward to bringing Placemaking to a global audience at the World Urban Forum in Naples, Italy, this September. (Photo: PPS)

Just last week, we announced the exciting news that PPS will be leading the National Endowment for the Arts' Citizens' Institute on Rural Design as part of our work with the Orton Family Foundation and its new CommunityMatters partnership. We're looking forward to putting lessons learned from recent work in rural communities, like the above-pictured plan for the future of Windham, NH's Village Center, to good use! (Photo: PPS)

We’ve had the pleasure of working on some of the most treasured places in Detroit, including Eastern Market, the largest public markets in the country, where we developed a comprehensive outreach program to foster closer links between the market and the community. Michiganders have taken to championing Placemaking, as well, from the grassroots to the real estate community the governor's office. (Photo: PPS)

You’ll be able to learn from farmers markets and public markets around the world at the 8th International Public Markets Conference, which will take place in Cleveland, OH, this September 21-23. It will be a great opportunity to explore how “market cities” are revitalizing their neighborhoods by focusing on creating healthy places. (Photo: PPS)

Inspired by PPS’s work, Philadelphia’s University City District has created “The Porch,” a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper public plaza at a major transportation hub downtown. Philly is one of ten communities to receive free technical assistance from the Livability Solutions partnership on major Placemaking projects thanks to an EPA Technical Assistance Sustainable Communities Grant. (Photo: PlanPhilly via Flickr)

We’re looking forward to traveling to one of our very favorite places, Vancouver’s Granville Island, with a group of civic leaders from Salt Lake City to help Utah’s capital develop a leadership agenda around key destinations. We’ll also be hosting another round of Placemaking trainings at our office in New York City this fall—dates coming soon! (Photo: PPS)

Our team of transportation experts has been very busy working with cities and towns around the world. You can meet and chat with them at this year's Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach (Sept. 10-13, 2012), which will put a fresh spin on North America's premier event for bike/ped advocates and enthusiasts by focusing the conversation on how transportation can help create great places. (Photo: PPS)

San Antonio’s appetite for Placemaking has made turned it into what we like to call a “popping city.” We’ve recently worked on recommendations for Alamo Plaza (pictured above during the Luminaria festival), participated in the Downtown Transportation Study, worked with Rackspace on a public space plan for their headquarters, and participated in planning for the revamp of HemisFair Park—all within the past few months! (Photo: PPS)

We’ve been working on the Perth Cultural Centre in Australia, helping the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority to re-think the campus as a true cultural hub by focusing on Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper tactics (like the concert pictured above), busting silos and bringing art out into the streets. The results have been astounding! (Photo: MRA)

Says commenter Suzan Hampton of Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, which is in the Architecture of Place Hall of Shame: "It feels like being in an airport terminal in there." / Photo: heyskinny via Flickr

Over the past couple of months, we have written several times about the need to move toward an Architecture of Place, creating design that makes people feel empowered, important, and excited to be in the places they inhabit in their daily lives. Two blog posts generated some lively discussion around the subject, which has led to new insight about how those of us concerned with the current direction that architecture is headed in can steer things onto a more productive track.

One of the principal challenges facing architecture today seems to be the lack of understanding of how people relate to the context of a site. Words like “community” and “stakeholders” have been bandied around so much that they have become abstract, and the need for individuals to have agency and a sense of ownership of their surroundings is lost in the mix. Commenter Richard Kooyman, for example, argues that:

It’s a fad today to say that everyone is ‘creative’ or to use terms like  ‘stakeholders’ as if by doing so we are now all empowered to make the changes society needs. The reality is that not everyone is equipped or even cares to be creative and real stakeholders are still those that hold the purse strings of projects.

The idea behind good Placemaking, and using a Place-centered approach when designing a building or public space, is not that each individual within a given community is the expert on what that space should look like, but that the community, as a group, has an important expertise about how that space is used, and how the people most likely to enliven it on a day-to-day basis (themselves) are most likely to do so. Another commenter, Gil, makes this case quite well:

At the end of the day it is people’s perceptions of how great, or not so great, their places are that matters most…I have yet to attend a public hearing on a proposed project where anything resembling “community attachment” has emerged in the dialogue that emanates from the planners, or engineers, or architects, or those that interpret the rules.

There is a misconception of how community knowledge should be integrated into the design process that we have encountered often in our work around the world. The idea is not that the pen and paper should be handed over to community members to create a final design, but that their needs and concerns be treated as contextual factors that are just as important as the shape of the site, the surrounding buildings, or the site’s location within a city. People make a space into a place–or, as Cindy Frewen writes:

When integrated and understanding place and people, design can mean thoughtfully imagined, beautiful, remarkable, moving…Design can help place, if we understand the need to be relevant and connected.

Commenter Cindy Frewen cites Kansas City's River Market as an example of a "place based, grassroots, emergent" design process. / Photo: Scott Unrein via Flickr

A good designer is someone who thinks creatively about how to develop the most efficient and attractive solution possible to a given problem. For architects, this means creating places that are not just visually appealing, but that are also responsive to the needs that the people who will use those places–not the needs that the architect thinks those people want addressed. When design is responsive (not enslaved) to local needs, it’s better for everyone involved: the people who use a place, and the architects, who can point to a well-used and loved place rather than a pristine object. It is our belief that, if more architects were to take a Place-centered approach in their work, it would create a much broader constituency for their work.

It’s also important to acknowledge, though, that non-designers are part of the problem, too. Decades of top-down decision-making have led large chunks of the vocal public to be distrusting of architects and urban planners today. In some cities, this has created a culture where any change is seen as bad change, and community involvement can be, for designers, a headache at best. As The Overhead Wire writes, about San Francisco:

When there is an open piece of land, often times people don’t think it should be anything.  It’s kind of crazy, especially with housing costs so high.

While NIMBYism won’t disappear overnight, architects and designers can begin to counteract this knee-jerk fear of change by treating the communities that surround a project site as part of the context that informs the building or public space they are trying to create. It’s important to remember that, as Ben Brown writes in a recent post on the Better! Cities & Towns blog, most people are “driven by intuition first, reason second.” People are very good at intuiting whether or not a new addition to their neighborhood is saying “come visit” or “keep away!”

So how do we communicate the value of understanding people as a fundamental part of a site’s context–both to architects who would choose to operate as “lone geniuses,” and to members of the public who would rather fight development than try to improve it? As commenter Greg cautions:

I don’t think the argument [for an Architecture of Place] will be broadly persuasive until we find a way to take it out of the purely subjective. Because others can and will respond “but that building doesn’t make me feel that way,” and then there is an impasse.

Thorbjoern Mann, shortly thereafter, suggests that scale is the critical issue to be addressed:

The disconnect between ‘high architecture’ and the life of places can be traced to several factors. One is the habit of making decisions about projects looking at scale models of the proposed buildings. The larger the building, the more the viewer’s attention is drawn to its overall shape, form, geometry, and away from what happens at the ground level where people interact with it.

Says The Alley Project's Erik Howard: "The best design is built around people." / Photo: youngnation.us via The Huffington Post

And Graig Donnelly points to an article on the Huffington Post about The Alley Project (TAP) in Detroit that beautifully illustrates how a participatory design process–especially one that builds off of existing community efforts–can create a more powerful sense of place than any of the buildings listed in our Architecture of Place Hall of Shame. Explains TAP’s Erik Howard: “Good design speaks to activities and people. Then those get translated into design solutions. The best design is built around people.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Looking north from the corner (Click to Enlarge) / Photo: Brendan Crain

In her 1958 essay “Downtown is for People,” republished online by Fortune late last year, Jane Jacobs noted the presence of a Park Avenue block that had been razed in anticipation of an office building for which the developer was struggling to raise capital. Jacobs (who had been invited to write the essay by none other than Holly Whyte) called the site “New York’s Mystery Plaza,” noting wistfully that “in the meantime, sidewalk planners can design some wonderful plazas.”

There’s a similarly ephemeral and provocative moment that one can experience in New York right now, a bit further downtown. For the time being, the block bounded by Astor Place, East 9th Street, and 3rd and 4th Avenues is sans structure: once the site of Cooper Union’s unassuming Engineering Building, is now home to a dirt pit and a couple of backhoes. The adjacent jumble of intersecting streets creates a number of thin triangular traffic islands that have long subbed in for a coordinated public space, with defiant success. In spite of the auto-centric planning so clearly on display, there are people here: coming and going, talking, performing.

The aforementioned dirt pit will be filled by a particularly egregious office block soon enough. Designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, it will feature an immense facade of dark glass that will glower over Astor Place, gobbling up more of the sky than its predecessor. But for the time being, there is a palpable sense of possibility here. The vaguely European 6-train entrance and Tony Rosenthal’s accidentally iconic Alamo sculpture appear enhanced, now seeming like hints of a grand public square in the making, backed by so much blue sky.

The same site, seen from the northeast corner (Click to Enlarge) / Photo: Brendan Crain

The buildings surrounding the site are of varying heights and colors, and with their facades open and turned toward each other across the open block, they look as if they were always meant to be seen this way, like friends chatting around the table. Even the “Sculpture for Living” is less standoffish within the context of a larger urban tableau, reading more like a comedic foil to the dignified Wanamaker block, and less like a caged peacock.

Like Jacobs’ original, this mystery plaza provides ample fodder for “sidewalk planners.” Perhaps it is a side effect of the frenetic density of its surroundings, but the block almost demands that passers-by imagine an alternate use here. It feels as if the grid itself is saying “Do you see this? I clearly intended for this to be a square.”

"New York's Mystery Plaza" in 1958 / Photo: Fortune

The mystery plaza at Astor Place will be gone soon. Long before Maki’s “Death Star” is occupied, its frame will zip the space back up. But as the city moves forward with plans to pedestrianize some of the surrounding blocks to create a more deliberate public gathering place, let’s hope that the sudden, bewitching openness created by the construction process inspires people to imagine not just what the site could have been, but how the adjacent spaces could better serve the people who use them–and to speak up. As Jacobs argued in Fortune, “planners and architects have a vital contribution to make, but the citizen has a more vital one. It is his city, after all.”

We’ll be talking more about Astor Place and its environs in the coming weeks as part of our ongoing discussion about moving towards an Architecture of Place. There is a great need, today, for more inclusive, flexible public squares and plazas that can serve as social hubs for the surrounding communities–spaces that strengthen neighborhoods and provide a rich context for architects and designers who use a place-based approach in their work. Stay tuned…

Houston’s Market Square Park

In September, I was interviewed for a piece in The Atlantic, in which I was able to speak to a wider audience about the power of Placemaking. We at PPS also were part of a big article in New York magazine about imagining a better New York. It was great to be able to get these ideas out for discussion.

A new radio show and podcast called “Place Matters,” hosted by Dr. Katherine Loflin, deals with the role of Placemaking “in building next generation cities that are economically successful, talent magnets and destinations where people want to come to live, work and play.” Our work at PPS was featured in the first episode.

There is definitely something brewing out there — a general realization of the importance of place on all sorts of levels, including the impact on the economy and the environment. And the response we’re getting when we go out into the field is phenomenal. We just got back from a trip to Perth, Australia, where a Placemaking approach is completely revolutionizing their cultural center. It was exhilarating to see (and we’ll be telling you more about it in the future).

One of the things we’ve read and appreciated the most in the last couple of months is a terrific article by Chris Turner at Mother Nature Network about Frank Gehry’s new buildings in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the destructive effect that starchitecture can have on streetscape. This is a topic we’ve talked a lot about in the past — Turner references our semi-infamous  ”smackdown with Frank Gehry” from the Aspen Ideas Festival back in 2009, an occurrence that was enlightening for the huge amount of debate and engagement that it engendered.

In his piece, Turner really gets to the heart of why urban designers are losing credibility: Urban design has been taken away from its connection to communities by designers who are imposing their own brand on people and neighborhoods. He doesn’t have anything against Gehry’s buildings per se — he thinks they’re great to look at — but he noticed immediately how dead the space around them was:

Wealthy, ambitious Düsseldorf has surrounded Gehry’s slouching cones and boxes with a showcase of iconic design and outlandish form: everything from a technicolor tower by Will Alsop to a sleek hyper-modern abstraction by David Chipperfeld to a plain old office building scaled by dozens of primary-colored stick figures. It’s stunning in photos, and it’s a fascinating neighborhood to walk around during the day. There’s even a stylish café cantilevered off the side of a pedestrian bridge in the middle of the harbor when you need a rest.

I was in Düsseldorf with a handful of journalists and designers on a tour, and we stopped in at the café for a midafternoon coffee-and-cake break. It was a fine summer day, a weekday, the offices around us full of busy workers. The café was empty. So were the streets and laneways in and around most of the iconic buildings. If you moved a block or two off the harbor, you found a few busy shops and restaurants, but Medienhafen itself was cold in that stage-set way starchitecture often is. It was a collection of exquisite sculptures with some offices inside, a magnificent art gallery and probably not such a bad work address, but it was not a place, not a neighborhood or real urban district.

In contrast, the older streets of Düsseldorf are magnets for people.

Powerful stuff. It speaks to an idea we’ve exploring here at PPS, the “Architecture of Place.” We think the design profession is ready for a new direction, away from the iconic buildings that have had the same deadening effect on streetscape as the Brutalism of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Instead we need an architecture that recognizes that a community’s people are the true urban designers, and what happens where the building meets the street is critically important to the health of our neighborhoods.

Another article that got us talking around the office appeared in The Line, a publication based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Titled “What’s Working in Cities: Placemaking,” it focuses on Detroit’s enormously successful Campus Martius project. The reporter, Michelle Bruch, talked to me and PPS vice president Ethan Kent about why Placemaking is becoming a new economic development strategy in cities (a trend we’ve seen most recently in Houston, which we named “North America’s Placemaking Capital”).

Here’s an excerpt:

 

Detroit’s Campus Martius Park

The strategy that built Campus Martius is called “placemaking,” and it’s a development approach gaining momentum across the country. The strategy gives local residents and stakeholders a major voice in shaping new development.

In the case of Campus Martius, the locals pressed for a park they could use all year long. They created a park with wireless Internet, 1,500 movable chairs, and more than 200 events per year, such as concerts, film festivals, and bocce ball tournaments…

Detroit’s $20 million park investment has paid huge dividends, according to Gregory, the Campus Martius president.

A software company called Compuware constructed a one-million-square-foot headquarters at the fringe of the park. Several hundred units of new housing went up a block-and-a-half away. Quicken Loans’ new headquarters arrived with 1,700 employees, the Westin renovated a historic vacant hotel, 35 retailers opened near the park, and the Ernst & Young accounting firm anchored the construction of another new 10-story building.

“$750 million in new development has happened around Campus Martius,” Gregory said. “And there is more coming.”

It’s not just Detroit and Houston that are seeing this type of effect. The article also looks at the positive impact Placemaking has had in Pittsburgh and in Bristol, Conn.

As you can see, it’s a great time for Placemaking! We’ll be keeping you up to date on future news and developments.

Photo of Gehry buildings in Düsseldorf: ign11 via Flickr. Photo of Düsseldorf street scene: maccusphoto via Flickr.

“State of the Art” Library Opens in Nova Scotia

Visitors say "The People's Place feels like a place to live"

For all those who feared the rise of the Internet would mean the fall of the library here’s a story of hope. Last week, June 26, the city of Antigonish, Canada, celebrated the grand opening of The People’s Place, the product of a community-initiated Placemaking process led by Eric Stackhouse, Chief Librarian of the Pictou-Antigonish Regional Library in partnership with local “Zealous Nuts,” PPS’ term for all the enthusiastic community leaders who get things done.

Computer stations at "The People's Place"

On the library’s opening day, organizers estimate about 6,000 people (out of a population of about 18,000!) showed up to celebrate. The vision for the library was guided by PPS’ principles and was designed to serve as a multi-use destination civic center- a place where people can read, learn, enjoy art, and get to know one another.

Stackhouse says “we managed to include every idea the consultations came up with, which resulted in community ownership and the result is a 100% community thumbs up. [The library is] a green building, designed to integrate into Main Street and support the businesses, and flexible. Best thing I ever did was learn the process from PPS.”

The People’s Place is a $5.5 million joint project of the Municipality of the County of Antigonish, the Town of Antigonish, and the Pictou-Antigonish Regional Library. Funding was obtained from both Federal and Provincial government sources as well as significant contributions from the community at large and the Friends of the Antigonish Library to make sure that when the library was completed it would be true to the community’s original vision.

Many local non-profits also use the library- making The People's Place a destination for people of all ages.

As well as a modern, welcoming public library, the facility hosts a Community Access Program (CAP) site, the Antigonish County Adult Learning Association (ACALA), and Health Connections. Also, several multi-purpose meeting and gathering spaces are included which can be used at no cost by non-profits. All these agencies and spaces are combined together in order to share resources and provide a single point of access by users.

Public Art is a Major Component
Throughout several visioning sessions, community members agreed that public art should be a major component including over 20 pieces of sculpture, woodworking, visual art, textile, poster art, and more, including a mural by Alan Syliboy titled “The Dream Canoe”.

Libraries can change the world! Resources to make your libraries and civic centers great community places:

• Libraries that Matter
• Library Placemaking in Action
• How to Make Your Library Great
• A Library Instills Community Spirit in Nova Scotia
• Libraries at the Heart of our Communities (a featured article from our partner, the Planning Commissioner’s Journal)
• Public Library Design: Working from the Inside Out and the Outside In (MP3 of seminar) featurung PPS VP Ethan Kent speaking in Melbourne on Libraries as a Catalyst for Placemaking
• Civic Centers in a Paradigm of Place: Reinventing the Courthouse

Get inspired by all the ideas the Antigonish community generated on this page.

• Placemaking and Consultations
• Antigonish Library Site Plan

Plans for the library were sensitive to its context within the rest of the town. Site plan prepared by Archibald and Jones Architects Ltd.

Tell us about your community’s library: how are you making it a great place?

Because of a unique cooperation among Allegheny College, PennDOT, and the city of Meadville, this chain-link fence has become a welcoming piece of art that fosters a strong sense of place.

PPS’ partner Wayne Senville, Editor in Chief of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal, reports in his monthly contribution:

Too often these days, you hear about frictions between colleges and the communities they’re located in. But my visit to Allegheny College in the northwestern Pennsylvania city of Meadville (population 13,253) proved this doesn’t have to be the case. Indeed, the relationship between Meadville, Crawford County, and Allegheny College is best viewed as a partnership that brings benefits to all.

Let me back up first. Allegheny College is a small, well-respected liberal arts school, with an enrollment of 2,100. Meadville is a city with a strong industrial heritage. County Commissioner Morris Waid described to me how the area was stunned back in the mid 1980′s when two of its largest manufacturers closed down, putting over 2,000 people out of work.

The1.4 million square foot American Viscose plant in Meadville has undergone a rehabilitation through Pennsylvania’s first brownfields restoration project. Over 20 businesses employing 900 workers now occupy 900,000 square feet of the area of the former plant.

Over the past decade, the paths taken by the city and county in their efforts at economic recovery and by the college in its focus on student “service learning,” have become increasingly intertwined.

Amara Geffen

Amara Geffen is an artist and professor of art (since 1982) at Allegheny College. Twelve years ago she became involved in the creation of an interdisciplinary environmental studies program. And, before you ask the question, the answer is “yes, there’s a link between art and the environment.” Many of the faculty participating in the environmental studies program were interested in applied learning opportunities. This led, in turn, to the creation of the Center for Environmental and Economic Development, or “CEED” as its called, which Geffen now directs.

“A Place-Based Education”
As Geffen explained, the CEED program was aimed at linking students with the Meadville community, with a focus on projects involving “sustainability.” “CEED has provided a mechanism for place-based education tied to the educational curriculum,” she told me. When Geffen saw my puzzled look, she added, “think of it as an applied liberal arts education where students learn by being engaged with the community while working on different projects.”

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One point that nearly everyone I met with in Meadville made is that the community has a strong “sense of place.” Indeed, the CEED program and Allegheny College’s commitment to the city and county is evidence of the value it puts on this place. As Crawford County Planning Director Jack Lynch added, “this is also a pretty pro-active place, with strong collaboration between government, business, and the academic community.”

Using a Fence to Bring the Community Together:  Gateway Art

Amara Geffen’s background as an artist and art teacher may have helped her see an opportunity for beauty that many might have overlooked.  Today, thanks to her leadership, and the hard work of her students, as you enter the city on U.S. 6/322 you see a beautiful mural composed of hundreds of feet of recycled road signs lining the side of the highway, hiding the view of the DOT’s maintenance facility.

"The Fence"

But you wouldn’t know they were recycled road signs unless you got out of your car (which, Geffen told me, several visitors do every day) and took a closer look.

Over the course of several years, this wonderful project — known informally as “The Fence”– has been growing along the main gateway into Meadville. For a complete scrollable view of The Fence, and more on its history.

Putting it together has involved not just Allegheny students but local high school students as well. Penn DOT has also been an enthusiastic partner in this project, even helping out with some of the welding. The art serves not just to highlight different features of Meadville, but to hide from view Penn DOT’s maintenance facility, which used to be set off by an unattractive 6 foot high chain link fence.

Art, college, community. There’s much to learn from Allegheny College and Meadville.

• Check out these pictures of phase 2 !
• Learn more about the process and partnerships that made this project happen!

Downtown Traverse City, MI in early July during the National Cherry Festival. Image © Traverse City Convention & Visitors Bureau

Interest in the idea of Placemaking and Place-based Governance has been ‘percolating’ around the world during the past several years as people are looking for new models for economic growth and for creating place capital, the shared wealth that drives thriving communities.

One center of this ‘percolation’ is in Michigan where the new Governor, Rick Snyder, used the announcement of his first Special Message to the Michigan Legislature to demonstrate the important role that Placemaking could play in the state’s future.

Recognizing the successful efforts of various organizations including the Michigan Municipal League, The Michigan Land Use Institute, and the Michigan State University Land Policy Institute, the governor’s Director of Strategic Planning, Bill Rustem, helped craft a Special Message with an unprecedented focus on Placemaking at both the state and local levels:

The Governor’s Special Message on Community Development and Local Government Reforms to the Michigan State Legislature, March 21, 2011:

“Neighborhoods, cities and regions are awakening to the importance of ‘place’ in economic development. They are planning for a future that recognizes the critical importance of quality of life to attracting talent, entrepreneurship and encouraging local businesses. Competing for success in a global marketplace means creating places where workers, entrepreneurs, and businesses want to locate, invest and expand. This work has been described as a “sense of place” or “place-based economic development” or simply “placemaking.”

Economic development and community development are two sides of the same coin. A community without place amenities will have a difficult time attracting and retaining talented workers and entrepreneurs, or being attractive to business.

Each community contributes to the overall success of its region. People, companies and talent do not move to specific communities- they move to regions. Being globally competitive as a region requires understanding, mapping and pooling regional resources and assets. Local governments, the private sector, schools, higher education and nongovernmental and civic organizations must collaborate to make Michigan’s economic regions, and ultimately the state, competitive.”

According to Arnold Weinfeld, director of Strategic Initiatives and Federal Affairs at the Michigan Municipal League, “Placemaking is a positive approach to recreating our economies and communities for the 21st century.”

PPS and Placemaking in Michigan

In early 2011, Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces gave the keynote address at Michigan’s first Placemaking Summit.  And over the past decade, some of PPS’s signature projects have been in Michigan.  The new Campus Martius Square in downtown Detroit has become a community magnet and has attracted over $700 million in new investment around it. Most significantly, Compuware, a computer firm, moved its headquarters and 4000 employees from the suburbs to a new building adjacent to the square. “Compuware would not have come downtown without the park,” notes Bob Gregory of Detroit 300. “They didn’t want just a building. They wanted a lively district, where their workers would have things to do.”

Campus Martius, Detroit

The revitalization of Eastern Market, underway today, was made possible by PPS’s planning and technical assistance dating back in 1998.  More recently, with the support of the Ruth Mott Foundation, PPS has completed a three year Placemaking program in downtown Flint, and new vitality is emerging in places ranging from Riverbank Park to the Flint Farmers Market.

Over the last 5 years, PPS has also given keynotes at the Michigan Association of Planning, the Michigan Municipal League and to the Michigan health community.   PPS has also facilitated and led many Placemaking trainings and workshops in Midland, Dearborn, Detroit, Holland, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and other cities.

Michigan State and Local Authorities to Prioritize Placemaking

Mike Finney, director of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) and leader of the Economic Development Executive Group, was directed to engage state agencies and authorities to prioritize the following points and to issue a report on their progress by the end of the year:

• Identify ways to foster and promote collaboration among entities engaged in economic development and Placemaking activities.
• Maximize under-utilized resources throughout the state, particularly in urban communities and rural communities.
• Establish a process for evaluating the performance of economic development and Placemaking activities.
• Support investment programs that deliver measurable, positive results.
• Encourage new initiatives that support local and regional programs involved in economic development and Placemaking.
• Recognize successful state, regional, and local economic development and Placemaking programs that can be role models for groups around the state.
• Promote best practices for local and regional economic development and for Placemaking activities.
• Partner with local economic development and civic groups to fully understand the needs of the community

The Potential for a New Michigan

Orienting the state’s economic development strategy around creating and sustaining great places and using a new, collaborative approach towards economic development built on broad, community-based partnerships makes it possible for the creative entrepreneurial spirit of Michigan’s citizens to emerge.

Crowds at the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, MI. Image © Traverse City Convention & Visitors Bureau

Placemaking is a catalyst that provides a way of not only playing off the natural assets that exists within every community but also strengthening partnerships between communities and government.  Because Placemaking is holistic, it breaks down silos between government agencies that would not usually communicate with each other.  It may very well be the best way to re-create our economies and communities for the 21st century.

The Grand Traverse Bay Region, mentioned by the Governor’s Special Message, could lead the way in establishing a Place-based agenda in the state.  Its citizen-led Grand Vision, a blueprint to guide the region’s growth for the next 50 years, provides a vision for cooperation on building transportation, education, and broadband infrastructure to renew the region’s downtowns.

As Jim Lively of the Michigan Land Use Institute explains, the process of drafting the Grand Vision was one of asking what citizens wanted for their region.  He also said that “the regional visioning process clarified that people who live here want to see new growth in our existing cities and villages. That helps us now to put a focus on working within those communities. What’s so cool about Placemaking is that it offers ways to enhance our communities with ‘lighter, quicker and cheaper’ approaches, because we can see that there’s not going to be a lot of government money coming in. You have to change your mind set to figure out how you can do things yourself.”

According Nigel Griswold, Regional Planner with the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments , “the power of a Placemaking approach is also that it’s a sexier way to find solutions to traditional problems with land-use and investment strategies.”  Sexy or not, PPS has always known that thinking in terms of creating great places brings together a wide range of skill sets and professions around a common goal.

In Michigan, Griswold thinks the greatest Placemaking opportunity in the region is to “create a package to unite the area’s most beautiful assets, especially among Michigan’s coastal and waterfront communities.  The region is home to world class inland lakes and streams and fantastic freshwater resources and governments of all scales must take steps to weave together and leverage and preserve these assets.”

Michigan’s struggles are not unique: budgets everywhere are tight- and citizens are starting to see that they can’t wait any longer for investments to come from the top to fix or improve their neighborhoods.   To create the changes they want to see, they will have to take the lead.

And while the shift to place-based strategies for economic development in Michigan might have been motivated by the state’s severe budget deficit and the need to make each tax dollar do more, the place-based strategy for economic development is actually a wonderful, positive way to encourage citizens to take an active and creative role in co-making the places where they will live.

For more information about Placemaking in Michigan, feel free to contact:

• Fred Kent, President, Project for Public Spaces, fredkent@pps.org
• Arnold Weinfeld, Director, Strategic Initiatives and Federal Affairs, President, Michigan Municipal League Foundation, aweinfeld@mml.org
• Jim Lively, Program Director, Michigan Land Use Institute , jim@mlui.org
• Nigel G. Griswold, Regional Planner, Northwest Michigan Council of Governments, nigelgriswold@nwm.cog.mi.us

Justice Sachs will discuss the innovative design of the new court house building–which is a model and symbol of openness and transparency–as well as the challenges in establishing a sense of restorative justice in South Africa. Following his presentation, a panel of leaders from Dayton will respond to his comments as a way of opening up a dialogue with the audience around the importance of public spaces around federal buildings and the “Architecture of Place.”

Justice Albie Sachs

Justice Sachs, a civil rights lawyer and political and cultural activist, who was twice detained in solitary confinement by the apartheid authorities and was a victim of a car bomb, has gained world recognition for his support for reconciliation and his role in helping to create South Africa’s new constitution.

Currently retired from the court, Justice Sachs played a key role in developing a different process for building a new court building that would represent the authentic values of the country, tap into the talents of its citizens and result in a strong sense of community and place in Johannesburg. The site chosen was the Old Fort Prison, where both Gandhi and Mandela had been locked up. He wanted the new building to be welcoming, open and comfortable and engender a sense of pride to all South Africans. He felt strongly that even the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens should be able to feel a sense of wonder and awe about their new country without feeling oppressed by the overwhelming authority that large and magnificent public buildings often have on the human psyche.  The new building was opened in 2004.

Constitutional Court building, Johannesburg, South Africa “This is the most beautiful court building I have ever seen.” said US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The result is one of the most impressive public buildings in South Africa, maybe the world. The combination of art and structure are so woven together and so integral to the building that that they have become one and the same. Local artists and people with long held expertise in different crafts were responsible for bringing character and a sense of local ownership to the building. The pieces of art create special zones within the building, and the flow of spaces with carefully thought-out rooms are used to help people to feel comfortable and deeply aware of the broad change that happened from apartheid to today in a country that has become a remarkable example of how fundamentally a country can change in a few short years.

A billboard in L.A. Flickr photo by Awecelia.

A recent issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal (PCJ) includes a valuable article by Ed McMahon, “Billboards: The Case for Control.” McMahon, who is a Senior Resident Fellow at the Urban Land Institute, is a nationally renowned authority and speaker on sustainable development, land conservation, and urban design.

In his PCJ article, McMahon argues that billboards are not only unsightly, but damage community character. He also responds to arguments commonly heard in favor of allowing billboards.  I asked Ed McMahon to take a few minutes to discuss some of the points he makes in his article:

Wayne Senville: Billboards have been a long-standing form of advertising. In fact, many older readers may have fond memories of Burma Shave signs along our roadways. Why have billboards become such a problem today that you’re advocating that communities shut the door on all billboards?

Ed McMahon

Ed McMahon: In a relatively short time, outdoor advertising has gone from Burma Shave to Blade Runner; from small and folksy to huge and intrusive. We have now entered the era of digital billboards – huge outdoor TV screens wasting energy while degrading the landscape and distracting drivers.

Today commercialism — particularly in the form of outdoor advertising — pervades our world to an extent unimaginable, even several decades ago.

Wayne Senville: One of the arguments in favor of having billboards is that they provide motorists with useful information. Isn’t that often true?

Ed McMahon: No one needs billboards. The vast majority of billboards advertise products or services that have nothing to do with motorist information: beer, cell phones, strip clubs, you name it. What’s more there are alternatives to billboards that provide motorist information at far less cost without degrading our landscape. For example, we have all seen  highway “logo signs” that advertise roadside services such as gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions. What’s more, information on roadside services is now readily available on smart phones, Blackberries, and vehicle information systems, like Onstar.

Wayne Senville: Is it really appropriate for government to be telling businesses how they can or cannot advertise their products? Why should advertising on billboards be treated any differently than advertising on TV, in magazines, or on web pages? Isn’t this just a question of government imposing its aesthetic tastes?

Billboards can overwhelm the landscape

Ed McMahon: Billboards are the only form of advertising you cannot turn off or ignore.  There is a vast difference between seeing an ad — even the same ad — in a magazine, newspaper, on television, or on the internet. The difference is freedom of choice. When you buy a magazine or turn on the television, you exercise freedom of choice. You can easily turn the page or change the channel if you don’t want to see an ad.

In contrast, you have no power to turn off or throw away a billboard. Billboards force advertising on individuals and communities whether they want it or not. What’s more, billboards are on enormous structures that litter the landscape, cover entire buildings, block access to scenic vistas, and create a strident, hectic atmosphere in our cities and countryside.

Wayne Senville: Isn’t it an unlawful taking of property rights for local governments to prohibit billboards? What about billboard that are already up?

Ed McMahon: Courts have long held that billboards do not derive their value from the private land they stand on, but from the public roads they stand next to. Courts call this the “parasite principle” — because billboards feed like a parasite off roads they pay almost nothing to build, use, or maintain.

Carefully drafted billboard ordinances have met legal scrutiny for more than 50 years. Billboard regulation is not a legal problem, but a political problem. Curbing billboards is not easy, but it can and is being done.

Wayne Senville: In your article you mention several states, such as Vermont and Hawaii, that ban billboards. Doesn’t this hurt local businesses who are trying to attract customers?

Ed McMahon: Vermont, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii all ban billboards, so do thousands of cities, towns and counties. These communities have found that beauty and placemaking are good for business; ugliness and excessive commercialism are not.

The former head of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce summed up this point of view, when he said “One of our greatest resources is our scenic beauty. Although there was some initial sensitivity that removing billboards might hurt tourism, it has had the opposite effect. Tourism is up for all  businesses, large and small.”

Wayne Senville: Do you find that the newer digital billboards represent a major change in the nature of outdoor advertising? If so, is it for the better or for the worse?

Ed McMahon: In addition to being intrusive and a major expansion of commercialism, digital billboards are huge energy hogs. Digital billboards make a mockery of efforts to go green. A chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council recently found that one digital billboard use 49 times the energy of a conventional billboard. Even the spokesman for a major outdoor advertising company acknowledged that a digital billboard use roughly five times as much energy as a single family house.

A community littered with ugly energy guzzling digital signs is the antithesis of a sustainable community.

—

Learn more about PPS’ partnership with PCJ.

For more on the distraction posed by digital billboards, check out this article from the New York Times.

In Oak Cliff, Texas, community members initiated the process of right-sizing their street by orchestrating a temporary street re-design event. Photo from Go Oak Cliff.

It used to be that only transportation professionals decided how wide a street should be. Not anymore. Communities of all shapes and sizes are beginning to play a larger part in determining the design and network of their street system.

This new, active role helps ensure that transportation projects contribute to broad community outcomes, including local social, economic, and environmental well-being.

One primary way in which communities are playing an active role in the planning process is through grassroots efforts to “right-size” local streets. These right-sizing efforts take the form of low-cost experiments that are intended to demonstrate potential benefits of place-based transportation and informing long-term decision-making.

What is Right-Sizing?

Right-sizing is a technique to re-design streets to make them context sensitive. Through right-sizing, streets can be transformed so they are safer, sustainable, and more functional from a mobility and a community perspective.

For more detail on some examples of right-sizing techniques, read this recent post on Safer, More Livable Streets through Bike Lanes, featuring PPS Transportation Initiatives Director, Gary Toth.

Community-led and Action-Oriented Approaches to Right Sizing

When it comes to right-sizing a street, there are several approaches that range in cost, time commitment, and impact. Of all these approaches, community-led and action-oriented tactics are consistently lighter, quicker, and cheaper than traditional, capital-heavy alternatives.

Around the country, and with a little help from organizations such as PPS, The Street Plans Collaborative, and Go Oak Cliff, community members are realizing that the network of streets permeating their neighborhoods are not sacrosanct territory, but are public space that they can play an active role in planning and shaping.

Build a Better Block: A Great Example of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper Right-Sizing for Lasting Change

One example of community-led right-sizing is the Build a Better Block project in Oak Cliff, Dallas, TX. By leveraging local creative talent, creating a retail space program, engaging the public, and cooperating with local government, the organizers of the event held a very successful right-sizing and community revitalization event – but with the long-term impact of demonstrating a new permanent vision for that particular block, and for similar streets throughout the community.

The middle turn lane (which is only needed at the intersections but runs the entire length of the block) was reclaimed with 100 shrubs that gave an extra layer of safety. Photo from Go Oak Cliff

Oak Cliff is not alone in leading right-sizing efforts. Communities in disparate places have mobilized to launch similar community-led right-sizing events such as Houston, Waco, Memphis, and Oyster Bay, Long Island.

In fact, in Fort Worth, Texas, the experimental traffic and bike lane configurations that Fort Worth’s Build a Better Block effort first showcased are now being made permanent in four areas of the city’s Near Southside.  More than just street fairs, Build a Better Block events can demonstrate the power of temporarily re-envisioning a particular block and provides inspiration for streets around the community- and country.

The Benefits of Right-Sizing

This new trend of community-led right-sizing has a great deal of potential to change the results of traditional street planning/design. By allowing the community to alter the street, even temporarily, a high-yield experiment is carried out that in one short period of time.  And the positive impacts aren’t limited to improving traffic flow.

Community-led right-sizing has the added benefit of:

• providing a visual representation of what a context sensitive and community appropriate street can look like
• demonstrating how a new street design would impact the flow of traffic, not only for cars, but also for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit
• cultivating  buy-in from community members and practitioners alike
• bringing together diverse group of participants to problem solve transportation issues
• planting seeds for future change

PPS and Right-Sizing Projects

Recently, PPS helped facilitate a community-driven right-sizing effort in Brunswick, Maine. As part of our project with the city to develop a Placemaking master plan for downtown, we worked with the city and an involved group of citizens, to temporarily right-size Main Street in order to test concepts that had been floated in community workshops we facilitated earlier in the week.

Citizens in Brunwick, ME experiment with street widths to measure traffic impact, as well as a potential increase in usable public space.

By using orange cones – so, not exactly what you’d call heavy and expensive infrastructure – the community narrowed Main St. by two lanes to see how the flow of traffic would be altered, and to help visualize how the street could be redesigned so it worked towards the Placemaking goals for Main St., while also providing adequate throughput for cars.

We want to hear from you!

We’ve seen Dallas do it. We’ve seen Brunswick do it. Other communities are planning an event as we speak. So, how can you improve your streets?

The Human Cities project, founded in 2006, seeks to promote and transform urban planning processes in order to enhance sustainability and build human capital through civic engagement and grassroots movements.  As contributors Anna Meroni and Paola Trapani attest, “public space is the accessible field of opportunity and interaction, where people can meet to share experiences and visions, where they can try out new paths to solve their own problems and improve the quality of life.”

Human Cities is a collaborative effort among four different research institutions in four European capitals – Brussels, Milan, Glasgow, and Ljublana – and serves as an invaluable resource center for individuals and organizations looking to transform their communities from the bottom up.  They also host an annual festival, which features a number of representatives in the fields of architecture, planning, design, academia and public service discussing a variety of approaches and case studies for thinking about and fostering sustainability and quality public space.

This focus on public space reflects a growing understanding of the need for places that encourage people to congregate and ultimately enhance the lives of citizens.  In the introduction to the book’s second section, “Public in Place,” PPS Senior Vice President Kathy Madden advocates for a different approach to designing public space – specifically through observation and community outreach – in order to influence the work of designers, government officials, and others who make decisions about the public realm. “Only then,” she writes, “will public spaces achieve their full potential to positively impact the lives of citizens in every community in the world.”

Traditionally, planners and architects have aspired to create eye-catching designs that focus on the physical structure of the city.  However, Human Cities reflects a shift in European design culture from an aesthetic-oriented approach towards a place-based, civic engagement model.  Contributing author Ezio Manzini maintains that while communities and social networks cannot be engineered like material infrastructure can, planners can craft the urban environment to encourage a “convivial, welcoming, safe city created by its own inhabitants.”  By encouraging a holistic, interdisciplinary way of thinking about public space, “the material city and the social city generate each other.”  This concept of social design is a key component to bridging the gap between the physical nature of a space and its functionality.

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Human Cities: Celebrating Public Space is now available for purchase.

PPS hosted a Placemaking Training with MGM staff to envision short-term, low-cost strategies to accelerate the maturation of City Center’s urban character.

A  recent review by Bill Ordine in the Philadelphia Inquirer put it this way:

“[CityCenter’s] streetscape is sterile, and pedestrians find little to browse and no real outdoor oasis for relaxing….[D]ecorative elements, while attractive, fail to engage.   It would be unfair to compare the urban environment of CityCenter with real cities. The personality of a metropolis develops over decades — or centuries — while CityCenter is in its infancy. . .So perhaps the grand design of providing a sense of place is achievable with maturity. In CityCenter’s case, what works are the traditional elements of a vibrant, sophisticated casino-hotel. What’s missing is the vitality and character that define a community.”

At the IBM Plaza in New York, the Claus Oldenburg sculpture anchors a vibrant public gathering space where flexible tables and chairs enable users to modify the environment to fit their needs.

Lacking comfortable amenities, City Center patrons are forced to dine on bollards which distance them from the art.

This summer, PPS traveled to Las Vegas to  introduce MGM executives, Crystals managers and tenants to the fundamentals of Placemaking, then lead the group in a Place Performance Evaluation to assess the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to invigorate Crystals through low-cost, short-term Placemaking interventions. Recommendations centered on ways to enhance existing spaces with short-term physical improvements and public space programming to transform the use and perception of the public spaces.  Suggestions included a weekly concert series, a farmer’s market, rotating public art displays and a many more activities intended to make the most of City Center’s existing assets.

With a few, low-cost Placemaking interventions, this dramatic form can become an authentic town center.

35 safety planners, police commissioners, and government leaders from South Africa, Kenya, and Namibia gathered in Pretoria, South Africa to learn from Cynthia about ways Placemaking can help build safer, more resilient cities.

Placemaking offers techniques for a new approach to crime prevention which goes beyond environmental modifications and traditional surveillance and policing techniques.  Placemaking builds safer cities through holistic improvements that generate strong local economies and vibrant public spaces.

Crime prevention has always been an integral part of PPS’ work and a quality inherent in every great, vibrant, community-based place.  In fact, PPS got its start turning New York City’s Bryant Park around after the area had been taken over by drug dealers and other criminal activities. In many ways, this workshop kicked off a larger discourse about the way Placemaking can enrich many crime prevention strategies, including Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED.

Placemaking and CPTED have many points of intersection. For example, one of the central tenants of CPTED is that crime can be prevented by creating environmental conditions that encourage Territoriality and Natural Surveillance: in other words, spaces can be configured to permit or discourage certain activities and users. PPS knows that when communities come together to improve the spaces at the heart of their neighborhoods, this energizes what Jacobs famously termed “eyes on the street,” an authentic and spontaneous form of “surveillance” that goes a long way towards making places safer and more sustainable. The links between safety and Placemaking are even more clear after a quick glance at PPS’ Benefits of Place Diagram.

Learn more about the intersection of Placemaking and CPTED by reading Cynthia’s article, featured on the front page of the International CPTED Association‘s recent newsletter.

In addition to equipping local community members to build safer communities, the workshop had a much larger purpose with a broad international impact.  According to Juma Assiago, Urban Safety Expert at the UN Habitat Safer Cities Programme, the workshop’s overarching goal is to review the legacy and the impact of mega sporting events ont he safety of the host cities with a key mottive to initiate debate towards divesting national and international expenditures on security provisions for large international events towards investment in local culture, educational, health, and public space programming, infrastructure, and other mechanisms that make cities safer and more livable; that address urban vulnerability, reduce crime and violence, and enhance social cohesion.”

Community facilitators from Korogocho (pictured here above), one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, attended the Capacity Building Workshop. Flickr photo by Carlosjwj

One part of the event, A Capacity Building Workshop, brought together community facilitators from Korogocho (one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya). Facilitators from three pilot projects in South Africa learned from each other about strategies for local crime prevention.  One participant, Daniel Onyango, shared his experiences as the founder of a musical social empowerment group called Hope Raisers that uses music and performance to enrich the lives of the kids living in Nairobi’s slums. Another event included a session on Local Safety Partnership Building, which brought together many different organizations to share approaches and work, explore ways to build and formalize coalitions and partnerships and develop joint funding proposals for collaborative work.

Cynthia  discussed the role urban spaces play in safety and how transforming a public space through Placemaking can create sense of ownership, and how that space can become an asset for the community. The popularity of the Fan Parks all over South Africa during the World Cup spoke eloquently to this point.  Parks, plazas, vacant lots, backyards, areas around transit stations were turned into places where fans watched matches, international teams alighted from buses and started pick up soccer games with local kids, people stayed out past dark.

During her trip, Cynthia also introduced participants from Namibia, Kenya, and South Africa to PPS’ hands-on evaluative engagement processes including activity mapping and observation techniques, place evaluation and people-focused collaborative visioning exercises. More than 35 safety planners, police commissioners, and government leaders learned how to facilitate a community planning and visioning process; identify local leaders and stakeholders; the importance of running a visioning meeting; and how best to capture and utilize input.

UN Habitat has expressed interest in enlisting the help of PPS with a “Safer Cities Roundtable” as part of the Sixth Session of the World Urban Forum in Bahrain in 2012. PPS will help to identify safer city candidates; that is, those cities made safer by improving their public spaces such as New York City (which by some measures is now safer than London). Suggestions for best practices are welcome, so please do share! Contact info@pps.org.

PPS will stay involved in these efforts by developing scenarios for bringing place-based discussions of urban safety and social cohesion to the community of planners and public space architects as part of the road map toward a safe and sustainable Brazil for the 2016 Olympic Games.

At PPS’ upcoming Conference on Sustainability and Placemaking, Scott Taylor will shed light on a new way of thinking about creating great multi use destinations that attract visitors, businesses, and other investment.

Glasgow's Downtown Draws Visitors from Across Europe. Flickr photo by Ray Devlin

Scott’s talk will focus on how “Place Marketing” creates a visual identity for cities and has transformed Glasgow by using the city’s history, heritage and culture to define destinations that are authentic and attractive to both locals and tourists. For Scott, “Place Marketing” emerges naturally from the shift to the “experience economy” where people no longer value commodities, goods, or services, but experiences. The future of successful places and projects will be defined on the ability to host and market these exchanges.

Scott Taylor

Scott setup the Glasgow City Marketing Bureau (GCMB) four years ago and has been at the helm since the beginning.  A recent interview in Drum Magazine lays out his strategy for taking advantage of the experience economy. The strategy has secured £140m worth of conference business for the city this year, and £4 billion of investment money is being spent in the city at the moment, a figure Taylor describes as unthinkable only a few years ago.

Investments have come under Scott’s guidance, from the branding “Glasgow, Scotland with style.” The city’s style grew out of the architectural movement of 1910 which has helped define the city for over a century. The brand offers opportunities for experiences related to arts, culture, and shopping and has succeeded in creating a sense of place where bookstores, outdoor markets, and coffee houses act as places where locals and tourists can gather around a combination of activities, keeping local retail alive and creating a wonderful experience for visitors.

At PPS’ upcoming Conference on Sustainability and Placemaking in Norway, Scott will join other a remarkable group of international placemakers, including Carol Binder and Eric Reynolds.  Register now for your chance to meet and learn from these and other pioneers in building great places.

Connect with See Glasgow on Facebook and Twitter.

Industry still dominates many waterfront cities- but change is coming (Flickr photo by Sweethardt)

As PPS gears up to host its Waterfronts Synopsis Conference next month on sustainability and Placemaking in Stavanger, Norway (Sept. 15-17),  waterfronts have been on our mind.   In today’s evolving economy, many urban waterfronts have recently been liberated from heavy industrial uses and are on the verge of transformation. Often a central and beautiful part of any metropolis, urban waterfronts have enormous potential to provide an identity to cities and to host activities that attract diverse groups of visitors.

PPS pulled together seven great resources to help Placemakers everywhere turn their waterfronts around:

1. The Waterfront Renaissance Waterfronts are inextricably linked to the identity and vitality of cities. As many cities rediscover their roots on the river, lake or sea, we have a remarkable opportunity to create a new generation of great public spaces.

2. How to Transform a Waterfront As more cities envision their waterfronts as lively public destinations that keep people coming back, PPS outlines the following 13 principles to make that happen.

3. The Waterfront Hall of Shame Most of the world’s great cities boast exciting waterfront settings, yet have blown the opportunity to create lively public destinations where people will naturally want to gather.

Waterfronts thrive when they keep people coming back, like this promenade in Venice, Italy

4. Nine Steps to Creating A Great Waterfront Guidelines to help you avoid common mistakes and make your waterfront shine.

5. Ten Qualities of a Great Waterfront Look at your waterfront development with fresh eyes.  Which of these qualities is it missing?

6. Putting Our Jobs Back in Place Authentic development along waterfronts can spur economic revitalization and create lasting jobs.

7. Great Waterfronts of the World:  A truly great urban waterfront is hard to come by.  PPS staff has examined more than 200 urban waterfronts around the world, here are a few dozen of the best.

We hope you’ll join us in Norway to meet pioneering Placemakers like Eric Reynolds and others as they share stories  at the upcoming Waterfronts Synopsis Conference in Norway next month.

Eric Reynolds

“Lighter, quicker, cheaper:”   three words to sum up a revolutionary, low-cost, high-impact strategy to development, one behind all of Eric Reynolds’ projects at Urban Space Management (USM), a firm known for driving the economic renewal of run down or under-utilized spaces in imaginative and cost effective ways.  Reynolds urges a movement away from “mega-schemes” which make development unsustainable because they require long time frames to assemble large sites, large teams and large sums of money- all of which can be risky in today’s volatile economy.

Eric and his business partner, Eldon Scott, promote and use an entirely different development model; one that is lower risk and lower cost and which can be an interim solution for a site that is in transition- techniques especially relevant to the thousands of evolving post-industrial waterfronts around the world.  Eldon used Urban Space Management’s approach in his work setting up the Union Square Holiday Market in New York City.

At this market at Camden Lock, Eric Reynolds kept rents low to attract a wide range of tenants

Urban Space Management’s Projects (which include Camden Lock, Gabriel’s Wharf, and Chelsea Farmers Market in London, and several seasonal markets in New York City) have not only been able to not only “catch the moment” but also have created greater profit per dollar of capital expended than other, traditional development schemes.  Last June, Eldon Scott shared USM’s unique approach at a PPS Forum attended by developers of Public Multi–Use Destinations at Granville Island in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Eldon shared his years of experience on how a combination of creativity and local talent can be used to add uses to a site and make money in the short term, even in small spaces.

USM brought in set designers to add colorful facades to concrete structures at Gabriel's Wharf, a former parking lot.

Gabriel’s Wharf, now one of London’s thriving public multi-use destinations, was just another parking lot until USM asked a set design company to create colorful facades to decorate the concrete garages already present on the site, transforming them into studios for local artists who began displaying (and selling) their creations.   The same concept was used at other USM developments, including The Chelsea Farmers Market, located off Kings Road in London:  USM began by adding temporary structures, both timber and re-used containers, to keep costs low and attract an interesting group of tenants.  USM uses the concept of a “Coral Reef” in their development practices.  In other words, for USM, high design is not the focus. The color and vibrancy of their developments come from the tenants and visitors who occupy the space.

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Eric spoke at PPS’ Waterfront Synopsis Conference,  Sept. 15-17, 2010  in Stavanger, Norway.  PPS has worked with NUDA to compile the proceedings from the event.