Andrew Howard

Andrew Howard is one of the founding members of Team Better Block, a group that works to implement Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies for the temporary revitalization of streets and public spaces in the short-term, to inspire people to think differently about how those places could evolve. Team Better Block recently took recommendations straight from PPS’s report on how to improve the hotly-contested historic plaza at the Alamo in San Antonio, and found LQC ways to do almost everything on the list to get the ball rolling on building a more cohesive constituency permanent change.

Now, we’re working with Team Better Block on plans for the temporary transformation of the Plaza de Armas, a forlorn public space at San Antonio City Hall, and the adjacent arterial, Commerce Street. In anticipation of that event, which will take place this Saturday, December 8th, 2012, we spoke with Andrew about how his team approaches their work, and how LQC strategies are changing the planning profession in Texas and beyond.

Alamo Plaza bustles thanks to a temporary market during Team Better Block’s last San Antonio project / Photo: Better Block

What Better Block does, in terms of short-term implementation, is a pretty important part of any implementation strategy, isn’t it? These interventions may only be around for a few hours, but changing peoples’ mindsets is often a major hurdle that needs to be overcome, that you guys have kind of cracked the nut on.

The Midwest and the South have a very auto-centric culture, so that is often the first step. The test for us with a Better Block is: can we get more advocates? That’s what they wanted in San Antonio. They only had this small group of folks coming to the table and talking about the Alamo, but it’s a public space for the whole city. How do we broaden the discussion about it? That’s where we said, let’s take the PPS study and go implement it temporarily and get some data while we’re there.

The first time we got a glimpse of working with PPS, we were still kind of in the guerrilla phase of Better Block. We did the Living Plaza on Dallas City Hall. William Whyte had done a study of that space about 25 years ago, and it was sitting on the shelf. We pulled it off and we built what he’d recommended in a weekend. That was where we started to see there the power of getting out and demonstrating this stuff.

At the Plaza de Armas, they did a study on downtown transportation [note: PPS worked on the Downtown Transportation Study, which can be downloaded here], and they want to test changes to a major arterial, Commerce Street, and take it down to one lane and add pedestrian and transit amenities to it. That’s our main focus with the Better Block coming up this weekend. We’re also going to activate the space with a pop-up coffee shop, a holiday market with vendors, movable seating, a food truck. The whole idea is to try to get folks to a part of downtown San Antonio they don’t often go to, and also to get them to walk a bit further.

Based on PPS’s recommendations, Team Better Block built this “ghost gate” to give visitors a sense of height and extent of the original fortifications of the Alamo fort / Photo: Better Block

In getting in and doing these things so quickly, can you hear minds changing, so to speak? That’s the core of what a lot of this LQC stuff is about: getting people to change their minds, and see spaces differently than they had before, and to see the potential in them. Do you hear people talking about that as they’re walking around?

Definitely. It’s great to eavesdrop and hear people, both the tourists who think a Better Block space is like that all the time, and then the visitors who say “I am so glad that we live in a city that will do stuff like this.” There’s a lot of negative talk around the Alamo. It is like fast-paced learning for folks to get into a Better Block and experience it. It’s also great for engineers and planners who are locked up, working on a desk, maybe reading theory on this stuff, to get out and do it. They learn so much more quickly, and they start getting the eye. They know how to look at a place, and how to make it better afterwards. You don’t get that from theory and drawing pictures.

In San Antonio, we caught this group of young folks that had just formed a downtown leadership group. They had had some meetings, and were trying to figure out what they were going to do. They did the Better Block with us our first time in San Antonio, and it changed the whole focus of their group! They started becoming doers, and having fewer meetings.

There’s clearly an emphasis, in Team Better Block’s work, on social networks, and the idea that what you call “rapid city-revitalization” happens by connecting people. Can you talk more about how that plays into what you do?

As a planner, I always thought that, if I made the best plan, that would attract the right people to come from somewhere else and make that plan happen. What I’ve realized through Better Block is that every community already has everybody they need. They just need to activate the talented people who are already there, and shove them into one place at one time, and that place can become better really quickly.

Better Block is like a big matching service, too, because when we start working together and we’re doing that “barn-building,” folks are talking, and making friendships, and business relationships. It’s very unlike what happens at a public meeting or a charrette, where you have your dinner table manners on and you’re talking formally. Better Block is like speed dating for doers. You start building furniture out of shipping palettes and, at the end of the day, it’s like “Well hey, let’s go build a building!” There’s so much courage, and people just feel empowered, like they could do anything.

Since the network-building that you do creates so many new advocates and doers, do you consider the human capital that’s created one of the biggest legacies of these projects that you work on?

That’s a great way to put it. It’s definitely about the human capital. People focus so much on the monetary and the physical capital of a place; but with human capital, if you concentrate in a place, you can change that place. It used to be that we graded Better Blocks based on how many people came. “Oh, 5,000 people came, we won, we did it!” Now our main question is: how many advocates are still working for it a year later? Did anybody out of the Better Block become a leader?  That’s the win. We’ve definitely changed our idea about what the Better Block is supposed to do, and how to move from the temporariness to permanence.

Children play at an improvised LQC fountain at the Alamo Plaza Better Block event / Photo: Better Block

In addition to PPS, who are you working with for this Plaza de Armas project? Who’s part of the network that you’re working on developing right now?

This one is being done a lot with city council members. Every council member is having someone from their district operate a pop-up market stall. VIA is a part of this too, because they’ve got a bus stop on the plaza, so we’re going to jazz up their transit stop. I think a big part of bringing Better Block into a city is the acknowledgement of wanting to be progressive and wanting to be open to new ideas and new ways of the city operating. San Antonio’s City Hall is saying right now that they want to be one of the most progressive cities not just in Texas, but in the States. They’re open to trying new things, and they’re not going to be bound by the norms in Texas. They’re going to try out these crazy things that look like they’re from New York City.

That’s one of the best things about Team Better Block: that it’s not from a coastal city where you might expect to find a bunch of urban guerrillas; it’s from Dallas!

We’ve had to take a lot of these edgy ideas from the coasts and figure out how to recalibrate them for the south! How do we make it work in an auto-centric, hot, boot-scootin’ environment? But people are people. They like each other. They want to rub elbows.

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!”

These are just a few of the dozens of ideas that the people of San Antonio contributed by visiting the online PlaceMap that PPS created as part of an ongoing engagement with the city’s government and citizens to to help them bring back downtown as a vibrant, livable place for a new generation of residents. This interactive map, based on PPS’s core “Power of 10” principle, called on citizens to “Re-Imagine the Heart of San Antonio.” And they proved ready for the challenge.

It’s all a great illustration of the way that online community engagement — Digital Placemaking — expands and enhances the work that PPS does face-to-face with community members and municipal officials to create great places and to plan for more livable, sustainable communities.

San Antonio's downtown is filled with unrealized Placemaking potential. Photo: Matthew Egan via Flickr.

The PlaceMap was launched in June as one element of PPS’s “Placemaking Academy” for San Antonio city officials. Acting as strategic advisers, PPS led the city’s staff to completely rethink the way they think about planning — not only in terms of community outreach, but in the way they work together, and also in the way they see the places around them.

“PPS has really helped us to get our staff excited about Placemaking,” says Lori Houston, assistant director of the Center City Development Office for the City of San Antonio. “They’ve done a great job with that.”

In August, the first phase of the PlaceMap project ended with citizens coming together in meetings at the library and at a “Views and Brews” event hosted by Texas Public Radio (TPR) to discuss the results. Participants sifted through, discussed, refined, and expanded on the varied concepts that had come up, including many that fit into the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC) category.

Now TPR is planning a new campaign to solicit more LQC ideas via the PlaceMap, then have a vote on which one should be implemented, find a sponsor, and make it happen.

More and more cities are looking to enhance and open up their planning process, and Digital Placemaking is a great way to achieve that. In Baltimore, PPS added online mapping to the outreach mix to connect with a wider circle of voices, while making the community process more transparent. With the Institute for Urban Design in New York City, PPS launched a version of the PlaceMap that gathered ideas and raised awareness of urban design by leveraging the inherent “place-context” of online mapping.

For San Antonio, getting to the next level of public involvement in planning is key. The PlaceMap is part of an overall strategy to achieve the city’s goals of revitalizing its downtown in a holistic, community-led way. “I really think that the PlaceMap has given us an interface with the public that allows them to participate meaningfully,” says Houston.

She adds that having an online option expanded the city’s ability to include people beyond the usual suspects. “It allows people to come to the website on their own terms,” she says. “It allows for more thoughtful presentation. Public meetings are not convenient for everyone. You typically get the same stakeholders.”

Houston added that being able to submit pictures was another real plus. By uploading images to the map, users can share their vision for the city’s public spaces in a very concrete way.

Many of the San Antonio PlaceMap users illustrated their ideas with photos — some from the streets they wanted to see improved, some from other communities whose successes they’d like to emulate. “People are saying, ‘I saw this in another city,’” says Houston. And if other cities can have these things, the implication is, why can’t San Antonio?

The possibilities of Placemaking in San Antonio were clear to Janet Grojean of Texas Public Radio as soon as she heard a presentation from PPS’s Phil Myrick back in June. “I really liked what Phil was saying, when he was talking about Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper particularly,” says Grojean, the station’s director of corporate and community outreach. “I raised my hand and said, You can count on your local public radio station. We’re in.”

Grojean is a lifelong San Antonian, and she is well aware of the problems faced by her city’s downtown. It’s a place that has for a long time held little appeal for residents. “Locals only go downtown when there are relatives in town who want to see the Alamo or the Riverwalk,” says Grojean, with a laugh.

The nature of the problem — a city that had its heart hollowed out — made a Placemaking approach resonate with Grojean. “That’s what Placemaking is, right?” she says. “Taking something that isn’t and trying to turn it into something that is.”

PPS’s Myrick says that the PlaceMap was a great way to spread the news about the Placemaking approach to revitalizing San Antonio’s downtown — an effort that PPS has been involved with for several years now.

“We wanted to use the Power of 10 as one of the ways to talk about downtown strategy,” says Myrick. “We liked the idea of having an online component that invites the community to participate. It’s simple but structured. It’s a way to get community input into a variety of planning initiatives. I’d recommend it as a framework even on a regional planning level — it helps communities have concrete conversations about where investments and growth should occur, in ways that puts the sense of place back in our most cherished places.”

Grojean says that for her and her colleagues at TPR, the community-led Placemaking process, enabled in this case by the PlaceMap, is a natural fit.

“Radio is community,” says Grojean. “Placemaking resonates with who we are. We are community, trying to make a difference.”

We’ll be watching to see what the San Antonio community and TPR come up with in months to come, and we’ll keep you posted!

Contact Phil Myrick or Dan Latorre if you’re interested in incorporating Digital Placemaking into your community’s Placemaking practice.

Photo: Matthew Egan via Flickr

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.

But Zuccotti Park is just one of dozens of POPS around the city.  Just how public are these places? How accessible and welcoming? How pleasant and well-maintained?

Now The New York World, an online publication just launched by the Columbia School of Journalism, is partnering with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show to do a crowd-sourced map that will look into exactly those questions. Each of the city’s POPS is marked on the map and given a number; citizens are encouraged to visit the places and report back on what they see, noting also what time of day and day of the week they went.

To judge by some early reports, not all of these “public” places are quite as public as they are supposed to be. Here’s what a user named Charles had to say about the Broadway Atrium in Lower Manhattan:

I’ve tried several times to walk through this lobby (to avoid having to detour around it) and have been stopped and instructed to provide ID, which I regard as an inappropriate infringement. I’ve also asked if, in future, I would be permitted to walk through with a bicycle, and have been told No…Do I not have the right to walk through (with or without a bicycle), unimpeded?

And here’s what a user named Julia reported about East Winds, a space on East 80th Street:

Does not appear to be a public space at all. Seems to be simply ingress and egress to the building. I walk by this corner daily (numerous times) for over a decade and had never known it was public at all…There is no seating and no reason to believe it is public.

Other spaces got better marks. Dianne wrote this about the plaza outside the Claridge House apartments on the Upper East Side:

This is a really nice little space that is used and enjoyed by a diverse group of locals — nannies with baby carriages, young people gathering after school, people eating lunch, dogs and their humans. It is kept clean and the Claridge doormen keep an eye on things.

The project runs through November 9. If you’re in New York, get out there, investigate and contribute. It’s easy.

And it’s important, too. If we’ve learned anything from the last few weeks in Zuccotti Park, it’s the power of a truly public POPS.

The Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Ore.: Jump right in and have a good time. Photo: Ralph Huntington via Flickr.

So, what makes a place great? Well, we look for four very simple but critical qualities: accessibility; comfort and positive image; a range of activities and uses; and sociability.

In other words, it should be an attractive place you can easily get to (and get into). A place where there are a lot of engaging things going on. A place where connecting with other people happens naturally and often. A place that makes you feel good. You know the kind of place we’re talking about.

When last we checked, Roanoke City Market, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and New York’s High Line park were leading the pack. But not all the choices are big and famous — take the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Ore. (which turns out to have a pretty interesting history: Jane Jacobs attended its opening).

Karja Hansen provides a video and says this about the place:

This one-acre downtown Portland fountain from 1970 may not be the most classically beautifully thing ever, but it does evoke the crashing Oregon streams and rivers nearby and is a wonderful place to passively engage with (reading a book) or actively engage with (splashing around). Well designed into the site it is a great little pocket amid the 70′s era bad buildings in downtown PDX. And one of the best things about the Ira Keller Fountain is that is has somehow escaped the extreme liability concerns that have plagues America’s public spaces — everyone is free to walk right up to the edges, swim in the pools and splash around.

Is your city’s best place on the list yet? This is your chance to get it on the map.

If you need ideas, head over to our database of Great Public Spaces.

Tell your friends and get out the vote!

Photo by Ralph Huntington via Flickr.

A huge interactive map was part of the exhibit in Sofia's central square. Photo: Architects for Sofia.

As civil society has become more vibrant and the new social institutions have become more robust, people have begun to see the potential of their public spaces in a completely new way. There is a growing eagerness to make those places better. It’s a revelation for people to realize that they can take ownership of these places and make the change happen themselves.

I recently returned to my hometown, the capital city of Sofia, at the invitation of Architects for Sofia, an association of younger architects. They invited me to lead a series of discussions and workshops introducing local leaders, architects, designers, and planners to the theory and practice of Placemaking, and to begin developing a strategy for improving public spaces in the capital and for strengthening the network of public spaces in Sofia. (PPS activities in Sofia were supported by the Municipality of Sofia, the Sofia Development Association, the Chamber of Architects in Bulgaria, and industry partners.) The annual Johns Hopkins Conference of International Urban Fellows Association was also taking place in Sofia at the time, with a focus on the management of public spaces. It was a great chance to get a glimpse of where the city could be headed.

The public realm: It belongs to us
For many years in the post-communist era, efforts to change cities were focused on “big” infrastructure, with public spaces and parks seen as a “fluffy” amenity that didn’t require immediate attention. But as Bulgaria has stabilized, that, too, has changed. Now ordinary people and professionals alike are seeing the potential and importance of public spaces, and asking how they can take an active part in making their cities more livable.

People came up with plenty of ideas for improving Sofia's public spaces. Photo: Architects for Sofia

The architectural legacy of communism includes huge apartment blocks with surrounding green space whose ownership isn’t always clear. It is in these places that the first citizen-led and volunteer initiatives in Sofia sprang up. Some of the efforts are small-scale — like parents who got together to plant gardens or repaint playground equipment (made out of Soviet tank steel, these Bulgarian playgrounds are one piece of public infrastructure that won’t break!). Larger groups have organized around issues such as improving conditions for bicycling.

Looking outward
Bulgaria has always been a geographically provincial place, at the outer edge of one empire or another. And so change has come more slowly here than it has in the Soviet bloc countries of Central Europe, such as the Czech Republic, Poland, or Hungary.

But since Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, the country has been looking outward more and improvement appears attainable. People can travel easily around Europe now. They see residents of cities around the world — not just Paris, but also former communist capitals such as Budapest and Prague — who feel pride in their places. They even see smaller towns around the country sprucing up their main streets and central parks to the delight of their citizens. And they ask themselves, why not in Sofia? A few years back the answers were: “It’s always harder in the big cities; people don’t care as much; they don’t feel ownership; the bureaucratic barriers are too great; and so on…”

Today things seem different. A younger generation, with almost no memory of “the old way” of doing things, is coming of age. Expatriates are returning from abroad, seeing their homeland as a place of opportunity for the first time. Even city councils and municipal governments seem to be poised for experiments and ready to do things differently in the public realm. Bulgaria’s citizens are coming to demand more of their government and a much higher quality of life in their cities. And they are ready to be a part of making it happen.

Young architects, planners, and designers in Bulgaria are open to new ways of doing things. Photo: Architects for Sofia.

Professionals are also shifting their focus. After years of breakneck residential and commercial development fueled by the rapid privatization of the economy, there’s a renewed interest among architects and designers in the public realm, in part because that’s where the money is now. Urban planning as an independent academic discipline is young in Bulgaria — it’s only been around for 5 or 10 years as a field of study distinct from design and architecture. No longer the poor stepchild of architecture and social policy, the discipline has broken away from its dogmatic socialist past and is growing. Today, there’s a new crop of professionals who are young, energized, and ready to contribute their skills to improving their cities.

Using Placemaking to improve Sofia’s public spaces
It’s that new generation of architects, designers, planners, landscape architects, artists and NGOs that fuels some of Bulgaria’s most promising experiments in Placemaking. Architects for Sofia, my partners on this trip, is a nonprofit created in May 2010 that advocates for great public spaces around the city. Their website, Sofia 2020, is dedicated to generating ideas from the public and from other architects about improving Sofia’s public built environment.

An important component of building a Placemaking strategy for Sofia was to conduct a demonstration Placemaking workshop in a prominent public space in order to show the potential of this methodology for eliciting ideas, building consensus and identifying “lighter, quicker, cheaper” improvements that could be implemented right away. On the second day of my visit, local planners, architects, landscape architects, sociologists, psychologists, artists, anthropologists, and journalists came together to brainstorm ideas and build a vision in a demonstration Placemaking workshop focused on one of the most central public spaces in Sofia – the plazas and park spaces surrounding the National Palace of Culture.

The ideas started popping up right away — repurposing a derelict monument from the communist era into a place for rock-climbing and graffiti art; transforming a parking lot into an event area, complete with a carousel and games for kids; clearing up overgrown green areas and turning them into gardens, dog runs, and tot lots; refurbishing water fountains; replacing amenities; creating areas where youth and seniors mix and learn from each other; and many more.

Following the workshop, Architects for Sofia staged an outdoor exhibit in one of the discussed spaces and invited citizens to re-imagine all the places around the Palace of Culture. They created a huge and beautiful rendering of the ideas generated in the Placemaking workshop and then invited people to leave their comments and suggestions directly on the plan. (The place where the map was hanging was actually on the map itself.) The Bulgarian National News Agency covered the exhibit, a sign of changing attitudes toward public participation in the planning process.

The next generation of Bulgarians is ready for change. Photo: Architects for Sofia

The exhibit is just a first step in demonstrating the benefits and potential for Placemaking in Sofia. I am hoping to return soon to help with developing an implementation plan for some of the ideas that came out of this very public process, and to continue a discussion about the best practices and most appropriate models for managing important public spaces in Sofia. Among the ideas we hope to pursue with city council members and municipal administrators is the concept of establishing a conservancy or nonprofit association to manage, program, maintain and develop the public spaces of the Palace of Culture.

As we gear up for this continued effort,  one thing has becomes clear: The people of Sofia are ready to make a better city for themselves — not an imitation of other European capitals, but an authentically Bulgarian great place.

A variety of Canada Day activities brought the crowds out to Mississauga's brand-new Celebration Square this summer. Photo: ammiiirrrr via Flickr

Back in June, we told you about the triumphant opening of Celebration Square, in Mississauga, Ontario. The unveiling of the square was the culmination of years of efforts to create a sense of place and identity in this city of 734,000, which has long been defined by its proximity to Toronto — and its enormous mall.

Back in 2006, the City Council voted to approve PPS’ master plan for using Placemaking to bring new life to the city, “Building Mississauga Around Places:  A Vision for City Centre Park and Open Spaces in the 21st Century.” Now that vision has become a vibrant, exciting reality, and the square has turned into a hub of activity, with concerts, fireworks, movies, art exhibits, and much more bringing thousands of people out to enjoy the space.

But that’s not all. Now, as we learned from a posting on our Facebook page, some City Council members are considering the benefits of permanently closing City Centre Drive, which runs through Celebration Square, to motor vehicle traffic.

From an article in the Toronto Star:

After the city opened its downtown Celebration Square in June, pedestrians previously hemmed in by a blur of cars on Hurontario St. and Burnhamthorpe Rd. suddenly had a space to themselves.

During the square’s construction, City Centre Dr., the street that ran through its centre, was closed to traffic for almost two years.

What happened next was unexpected.

“Having the road closed really made it a vibrant square and it was great to see,” said Councillor Frank Dale. “Having seen how well it worked by having the road closed, one would say why don’t we close it forever.”…

“I feel very strongly that (City Centre Dr.) should remain closed,” Councillor Pat Mullin said at last Wednesday’s council meeting.

“(Opening it) goes against everything we’re trying to do in the downtown core and that’s to make it pedestrian friendly. I don’t know of a square anywhere that has been successful with a road going up the centre.”

Councilors remain concerned about the possibility of traffic congestion in the area, but according to the Star, the closure will be extended until October. Monitoring of traffic levels will continue through the winter, and there is a chance  that the square could be made permanently car-free.

The positive response to a car-free Celebration Square is validation of the vision Mississauga citizens started developing with PPS — at the initiative of our longtime friend and collaborator Gil Peñalosa — years ago. And it shows that despite the city’s autocentric reputation, big change can happen. We’ll keep an eye on developments.

Photo: ammiiirrrr 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?

The Square is the Center of City-wide Placemaking Campaign

Mississauga's new Celebration Square opened 5 years to the day after City Council approved PPS' Master Plan

PPS is proud to have helped develop the community’s programmatic vision for Mississauga’s new Celebration Square as part of a city-wide Placemaking campaign and capacity building effort.  Yesterday’s opening was exactly 5 years after the City Council voted to approve PPS’ master plan, “Building Mississauga Around Places:  A Vision for City Centre Park and Open Spaces in the 21st Century.”

Building a Vision for the Heart of Mississauga

From the intense involvement of more than 1500 Mississauga citizens in several rounds of community workshops and visioning sessions, it was clear everyone wanted their new Square to become the heart of the city- a place full of events that give people a reason to come enjoy their downtown. Just months after the initial workshops, citizens and local organizations came together to undertake a series of experiments and short-term actions (that we now call “Lighter, Quicker Cheaper” strategies) to implement many of the ideas that the community came up with. They created an ambitious summer schedule of programs and events that ranged from Farmers markets to Vintage Car Club Thursdays- and put public seating and tables out in the square right away.

That vision has really translated into the Square’s current programming:  check out this calendar of amazing events coming up this summer in Celebration Square.  The Mississauga City Council has even started to hold its meetings in the square!  And there are big plans for Canada Day 2011: this year’s festivities in Celebration Square include performances by These Kids Wear Crowns, pop artist Fefe Dobson and the chart-topping Shawn Desman. The square will also feature fireworks, an aerial cirque show and and unique art, dance and music fusion performances in the amphitheater.

Right after the initial visioning process, Mississauga tested lighter, quicker, cheaper programming like this Canada Day celebration to inform the current design.

The plans for Celebration Square were just one part of a comprehensive City of the Future Campaign, where we led training sessions for city staff, a Power of 10 plan for the whole city and a detailed concept plan for the city center.  Many of the ideas that emerged from these processes are reflected in Mississauga’s comprehensive Downtown 21 Plan.

How the Placemaking Process Created a New Square for Mississauga

As the City of Mississauga explains, Celebration Square came about as a “… result of extensive public engagement conducted in 2005 and 2006 by the City’s Community Services department, in collaboration with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) of New York City, using the principles of “Placemaking” — turning public spaces into vital community places. Community stakeholders, including citizens, arts and sports groups and businesses were consulted to develop a Vision Concept Plan for public space surrounding the Civic Centre. As a result of public meetings, workshops and web-based reviews of draft plans, the final document, “Building Mississauga around Places: A Vision for City Centre Parks and Open Spaces in the 21st Century,” was completed in January 2007.”

Placemaking has Paid Off in Mississauga’s Celebration Square

Bruce Carr, Director, Strategic Community Initiatives for the City of Mississauga wrote to PPS to update us about the positive changes that the Placemaking process brought to Celebration Square- and the new investments the square has catalyzed:

“The excitement [PPS] helped create in the community resulted in the Federal and Provincial governments partnering with us to invest $43 million in the complete reconstruction of the Square… It is spectacular. Don’t worry we have taken your advice and have also invested substantial dollars into the programming of Celebration Square. As you recommended it is being operated as an outdoor community centre.

I am totally amazed at how the seeds (and petunias) we planted, with your help, just a few years ago have grown into what in just a few short years will be something that will be cherished and enjoyed for generations to come.

Without PPS’s help and guidance we would not have had our new and beautiful Celebration Square. The people and especially the children of Mississauga will forever be in your debt. The events planned for this summer are going to be out of this world. I can hardly wait!”

As the Globe and Mail reports, “the centrepiece of the square is a stage flanked by JumboTrons, to be used for concerts and other events. A long trellis on one side will provide shade for vendors during festivals and markets. On the upper level, closer to City Hall, is a shallow reflecting pool with water jets. In the winter, it will serve as a skating rink.”

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.

"How to Turn a Place Around" now in Albanian

We’re thrilled to announce the release of PPS’ book “How to Turn A Place Around” in Albanian. Making this important Placemaking guide available to an Albanian audience builds on PPS’ work in the Eastern European Region, including “Community Development through Public Space Improvements,” a Placemaking training and pilot program conducted in Kosovo with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

This week, PPS’ Elena Madison travels to Pristina, Kosovo to join Eliza Hoxha (architect, urban designer, and Founder of Urbaniac) in hosting the book’s launch on March 1 at 6pm at the Modelarium of the Civil Engineering and Architecture Department of the University of Prishtina.

At the event, Elena will speak about the principles and practice of Placemaking in the context of Eastern Europe and about PPS projects in Kosovo, Serbia, and Croatia.

To get an English copy of “How to Turn a Place Around,” visit the PPS bookstore.

By Jay Walljasper

The influence of the new digital commons in democratic uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain has been chronicled at length in news reports from the Middle East, with Facebook, twitter and other social media winning praise as dictatorbusters.

But the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands. To celebrate their victory over the Mubarak regime, for example, protesters in Cairo jubilantly returned to Tahrir Square, where the revolution was born, to pick up trash.

Tahrir Square in Egypt, by Jonathan Rashad on Flickr

It’s the same story all over the Middle East.  In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, people express their aspirations and face bloody reprisals in Green Square and Martyr’s Square. In Bahrain, they boldly march in Pearl Square in the capital city of Manama. In Yemen, protests have taken place in public spaces near the university in Sanaa, which students renamed Tahrir Square. Kept out of the central Revolution Square in Tehran by the repressive government, Iranian dissidents gather in Valiasr Square and Vanak Sqaure.

Last week in Tunisia, they changed the name of the main square in Tunis to honor Mohammad Bouazizi, an unlicensed street vendor whose suicide in December in response to government harassment sparked the revolution that toppled the regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

The course of recent history was rewritten by events happening in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as dissidents ousting an oppressive regime in December 1989 helped bring down Communism. Those protests were inspired in part by events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that seized the world’s imagination earlier that year when democracy activists unsuccessfully challenged the power of China’s dictatorship.

This is not just an Old World thing. The Boston Common has been a sight of protests, and public gatherings for three centuries. In 1713, two hundred Bostonians protested food shortages in the city and in 1969 100,000 protested the Vietnam War.

The state capitol in Madison, where thousands of workers now protest the Wisconsin governor’s fierce attacks on collective bargaining rights, represent another case of a public commons becoming a staging ground for political resistance. The capitol, which sits right in the heart of downtown Madison, was nominated to our list of Great Public Spaces of the world.

The people rallying behind public sector union workers at the Capital are actually protected by the Wisconsin state constitution, which forbids the legislature from denying public access to the building when it is in session. State law does permit capitol groundskeepers to clear the building in an emergency, presumably on orders of the governor, but those groundskeepers are presumably members of the same union the governor wants to crush.

This all shows that the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park or other public space that is open to all.

Tahrir Square Egypt on January 26, 2011

An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate run shopping malls replaced downtowns as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, who almost certainly will say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls, which limits our abilities to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens.

Of course, public spaces enrich our lives in many ways beyond protests. Local commons become the site of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services and other expressions of a community.

The moment when I first became aware of the importance of public spaces was when the Minnesota Twins won their first ever World Series in 1987. I did not have tickets to the game but gathered hopefully with thousands of others outside the stadium in Minneapolis to share in the joy of the victory. When the Twins won the game, thousands more poured out of the ballpark into the streets and we all marched to…where? Minneapolis has no downtown square or landmark gathering place so we milled around the streets for a while—an unsatisfying way to celebrate a World Series championship. If it had been the Red Sox, everyone would head for the Boston Common. We weren’t so lucky.

I’ve often wondered if this lack of a central commons in Minneapolis and most other American communities somehow inhibits our civic expression. With no place to voice our views as citizens, do we become more passive about what happens to our country and our future? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine Hosni Mubarak wishes he had built a shopping mall in Tahrir Square.

—

This piece also appeared as:

• From Middle East to Madison, Justice Depends on Public Spaces on On the Commons
• From Tunisia to Egypt, Democratic Expression Depends on Public Spaces on the Huffington Post
• People, Power and Public Spaces on Yes! Magazine.org

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.

The public spaces around Queens Courthouse have been improved but are not yet a gathering space.

Sweeping changes in the judicial system and society call for courts to become civic gathering spots [T]he story that a building tells through its design may be as important to the community it serves as is its function. By shaping our thoughts about ourselves and our institutions, it will directly affect our efforts to work productively together. — Justice Stephen G. Breyer (United States Supreme Court, 1994–present)

The courthouse used to be a cornerstone of the community, a source of local pride and the nexus of social life and ritual. But today, courthouses and the public spaces that surround them are often physically and programmatically disconnected from public life, even though they usually occupy central property in a community. Citizens don’t visit their courthouses unless compelled to do so, and very few serve as public destinations.

The good news is that court properties have much potential for resurgence when there is positive leadership, open-minded management, and the desire for change. Courts have the opportunity and responsibility to serve as integral places, key parts of the communities in which they reside. Courts are, after all, the people’s houses of justice, and only by becoming engaging places can they live up to their potential.

While early American courthouses often shared space with other public institutions (like the post office or the county clerk) and were heavily used, more recent court design has encouraged segregation and specialization of uses, so that citizens have little reason to enter the doors of court buildings. The design of court facilities has shifted from welcoming to foreboding, and from public to monumental. The resulting diminution of the courthouse’s community role is indicative of a larger trend: a widening disconnect between the judicial system and public life. While courts are busier than ever, trials are vanishing, and more cases are resolved by private settlement or in non-public forums. Through such privatization, court spaces are no longer truly civic, and don’t support community vitality.

PPS's work with Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square has included efforts to connect the courthouse to the Square.

What is needed – and a real opportunity – is a fundamental reconsideration of how we think about and design court spaces. If courts find ways to recapture their relevance and resonance within communities, they could once again become civic destinations that engage with and respond to their users.

Project for Public Spaces is committed to playing a key role in facilitating these discussions. PPS has worked extensively to revitalize many types of civic centers, including courthouses, post offices, museums, libraries, and seats of government. Since 1999, PPS has partnered with the General Services Administration’s Good Neighbor Program in helping communities envision public spaces that will draw a variety of people, uses, and activities. PPS has worked in this capacity in almost two dozen cities.

PPS’s extensive placemaking experience with civic centers, and our history of collaboration with GSA, give us a strong foundation on which courts of all types can build in fulfilling their potential as true civic destinations.

* * * * *

By Karen Levy with Fred Kent, President and Cynthia Nikitin, Civic Anchors Program Director for Project for Public Spaces, Inc. Karen Levy is an attorney and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology at Princeton University. Karen has been working with Project for Public Spaces as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Summer Fellow, a program sponsored by Yale Law School and Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.

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Metropolis Magazine

Power of Place

1. Creating a local play commission or task force;
2. Designing an annual action plan for play;
3. Conducting a play space audit;
4. Outlining a financial investment in play for the current fiscal year; and
5. Proclaiming and celebrating an annual“play day.”

The founding members of Playful City USA have activated powerful citizenship by creating play agendas with deep and lasting impact on public policy issues including childhood obesity, public safety, and quality of life issues. Through the collaborative support of corporate and community resources, these civically-grounded cities are inspiring and transforming lives; building strong and healthy communities, and fostering brighter futures.

“Playful City USA reflects the hope, opportunity and possibility inherent in municipal collaborations anchored by a shared vision for play,” said Darell Hammond, Co-Founder and CEO of KaBOOM! “The innovative practices these cities adopted are a call-to-action for other municipalities across the country to rally behind proactive, city-wide agendas in support of broader physical activity and play.”

Founding members of Playful City USA include:

Ankeny, IA, Atlanta, Ga., Canton, Ga., Cedar City, UT, Chandler, Ariz., Creedmoor, N.C., Dothan, Ala., East Cleveland, OH, El Paso, TX, Gilbert, Ariz., Greenbelt, Md., Jamestown, N.Y., Kenner, La., Kerman, Calif., Kingsburg, Calif., Lake Charles, La., Lake Worth, Fla., Longview, Wash., Mountain Grove, Mo., New Lenox, Ill., New Roads, La., Norfolk, Va., Phoenix, Ariz. , Portsmouth, OH, San Francisco, Calif., San Jose, Calif., Shirley, Mass., Spartanburg, S.C., Tucson, Ariz., Wapello, IA, Yuma, Ariz.

A number of Playful City USA founding members have created and implemented pioneering play commitments.  In San Francisco, the Department of Parks and Recreation, along with the non-profit National Parks Council and Mayor Gavin Newsom, created Parkscan to assess the conditions and safety of the city’s playgrounds. In a city where identifying and maintaining open space can be a challenge, communities are now working together to improve and enhance failing playgrounds and play spaces.  City Council members in Creedmoor, NC have enacted legislation to ensure developers include playgrounds and open space in every new neighborhood.  Each May residents in El Paso, TX gather for the annual Ciclovia celebration which closes major thoroughfares and opens them up for walking, family time and safe connections to the city’s playgrounds and open space.

Along with receiving national recognition for blazing a playful trail for other cities, 2007 founding members are eligible to apply for a grant of up to $25,000 to help support one of their playful initiatives.

For cities interested in applying for Playful City USA 2008, KaBOOM! is teaming up with America’s Promise Alliance 100 Best Communities for Young People to provide one lucky city with a brand new KaBOOM! playground. 100 Best is an annual competition that recognizes those cities and towns across America that go above and beyond for children and youth.  Communities who are named one of the 100 Best, and also apply to be named a Playful City USA, will be eligible to receive a new playground in their area.

KaBOOM! is a national nonprofit organization that envisions a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America.  Since 1995, KaBOOM! has used its innovative community-build model to bring together business and community interests to construct more than 1,200 new playgrounds, skateparks, sports fields and ice rinks across North America.  KaBOOM! also offers a variety of online resources, regional and national trainings, and the KaBOOM! National Campaign for Play which includes Playful City USA and the Playmaker Network- a national network of individual advocates for play. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., KaBOOM! also has offices in Chicago, Atlanta and San Mateo, CA.   For more information, visit www.kaboom.org.