“What makes the Cultural Trail unique is that it’s an urban exploration trail, as opposed to an urban escape trail.” / Photo: Indianapolis Cultural Trail

Back in 2007, we highlighted the Indianapolis Cultural Trail project in Bold Moves, Brave Actions, a feature that looked at five cities on five continents making exceptional strides toward becoming more people-friendly places. Indy, we wrote, was “taking what may be the boldest step of any American city towards supporting bicyclists and pedestrians” – an especially exciting thing to see happening in a city that may be most famous for speeding cars.

Now, five years later, the project’s big debut is upon us! Today marks the official grand opening of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. Tomorrow, May 11^th, 2013, the city will host Get Down On It, a massive, downtown-wide effort to stage 75 cultural and entertainment events all along the eight-mile trail route.

We are particularly thrilled to see this project come to fruition, and not just because we had the opportunity to serve as part of the design team. The Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a significant project in and of itself, but it gains even more significance when considered in the larger scope of the transformation taking place in this Midwestern state capital. Driven largely by the efforts of the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) over the past decade, Indy is fast becoming a city where Placemaking is a way of life for all citizens. The focus on place, from the top down and the bottom up, is creating a stronger, more vibrant city that doubles down on the local people and places that make it most unique.

To mark the opening of the Cultural Trail, we spoke with Brian Payne, the president and CEO of the CICF and the “zealous nut” who took this amazing project from inspiration to implementation. Congratulations to Brian and everyone at the foundation for this remarkable accomplishment! We’re lucky to have had the pleasure of working with him, and to have seen the potential that a community foundation can have in leading a Placemaking agenda for a city.

We’ve gotten to know many of the projects of his Inspiring Places Initiative through having PPS lead trainings and technical assistance, and are looking forward to starting work shortly on major transformation of Monument Circle (a project that Brian had us help kickstart back in 2008 with a concept paper), the heart of the city and the Cultural Trail.

Why don’t we start this off by having you tell us a bit about what the Indianapolis Cultural Trail is, and how the project came about?

The trail is, from an experiential perspective, a great way to experience all of the great stuff in downtown Indianapolis; it’s also meant to serve as a catalyst for areas that need a catalyst. It is a curbed, buffered, beautifully paved, richly landscaped, and artfully lighted bike and pedestrian pathway that connects to every arts, cultural heritage, sports, and entertainment venue in the urban core. The inspiration for the idea was that it was going to connect to five designated cultural districts downtown in order to make those districts more vibrant and viable by connecting them and giving people a way to get to them that was walkable and bikeable.

Most bike trails are greenways; they’re a way to escape the urban environment and experience nature. The Cultural Trail is actually an urban trail that connects you to everything that’s good in the city center. What makes it unique is that it’s an urban exploration trail, as opposed to an urban escape trail.

One of the big benefits of this project is that it’s changing what we value in Indianapolis. We value beautiful design more since the trail came up; we value bicycle culture; we value sustainability. It’s also a major amenity that the tourism and convention industry is selling and appreciating. It’s a unique experience that makes Indianapolis different or better than it was as a destination. Even in these tough economic times, it’s actually been a catalyst for over a hundred million dollars of new real estate development. People are even moving their offices in order to be on the trail. We’ve had three major nonprofits relocate so that they can connect to the vibrancy this project is generating.

How did you first come to realize the importance of focusing on place? Did you come to Placemaking while you were working on the trail, or was it something you were aware of before?

It’s funny…today, I’m considered a local expert on Placemaking, but it was actually the trail project that taught me what I know. It wasn’t like I was an expert going in. Before I joined CICF as the president and CEO, my career was in managing professional theater companies. A few months after getting hired at the foundation, I was appointed by the mayor at the time, Bart Peterson, to be a commissioner of a new initiative that was originally scheduled to be a five-year, $10 million effort called the Cultural Development Commission. The goal was to establish Indianapolis more as a regional or even national cultural destination city.

We wanted to make our own citizenry connect to our local cultural offerings at a higher deeper level, but also to establish ourselves as a cultural city. My perspective was always: what are we going to offer that’s different, authentic, or unique compared to the cities around us? Why would someone from Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis—or, thinking nationally, Denver, Austin, etc—why would they come to Indianapolis for a cultural experience if we just offer what every city offers: regional theater, symphony, dance company, etc? What was going to make us a destination?

There was this idea presented to us, as new commissioners, that there was a significant opportunity in  the historic retail villages that were either part of downtown or just outside of it. It struck me that, inherently, cultural neighborhoods are unique from other cultural neighborhoods. Focusing on drawing out those neighborhoods’ distinctive qualities seemed like a great way to make the city a unique destination that people would travel to. I tried to raise money for that and got nowhere, because everyone said it wasn’t going to work because these districts were too disconnected: from downtown, and from each other.

So, I thought, let’s connect them! I was a new bicyclist at the time, and was enjoying this rail trail that we had called the Monon Trail. And I thought well we can just connect these downtown districts by creating an urban version of the Monon Trail. Over the years, the idea got more and more ambitious. We could have connected the districts with a five mile trail, but the trail wound up being eight miles. It also became a bigger idea, to connect every significant venue downtown. It’s also now the hub for an entire countywide system of trails. It connects the three other major trails in our multi-county area.

Placemaking has played a major role in transforming Indianapolis / Photo: Indianapolis Cultural Trail

There are a lot of other exciting new public space projects happening in the center of Indianapolis. Can you talk about the role that the trail has played in driving that shift toward the Placemaking idea?

PPS was certainly a big influence, but what’s happened is that, at CICF, the trail became the first of what we now call community leadership initiatives. The foundation used to be a straightforward, donor-advised grant-making organization. But we saw the trail project as a community leadership opportunity, and we started tying other community leadership efforts to what we were learning while working on the trail.

In 2005 (the trail idea started in 2001) we created two community leadership initiatives, one of which was called Inspiring Places, which has played a major role in encouraging people in Indianapolis to care more about Placemaking. We now have this idea that we should be a leading city in America for creating access to art, nature, and beauty every day, for everybody. Today, many of the people who cared about this trail project have been emboldened by the success of the Cultural Trail and Inspiring Places; they feel like they can get their ideas done, too. They feel like it’s worth being an advocate and having big ideas because they know there’s momentum around that now. There is now a huge, huge focus, and a lot of energy and people who are spending their creative time and resources making Indianapolis this great place.

You said something interesting earlier about cultural neighborhoods, and how each one is inherently different from other neighborhoods. How has the trail’s development affected the city’s neighborhoods? Is this energy spreading out from downtown?

It really is. Since we took on the Cultural Trail project we’ve been making sure that we balance that with our neighborhood efforts. We’ve had opportunities through that to work with some great partners. We have a very dynamic LISC in Indianapolis, and they had this idea of doing neighborhood quality of life plans. They’ve gone in and worked from the grassroots, doing neighborhood organizing around this idea of what the neighbors want to do to improve their local quality of life. The trail created major awareness, so among other things these neighborhoods want walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, they want cultural assets, and beautiful green spaces. All of these things reinforce each other.

Another great partner has been Keep Indianapolis Beautiful. They used to just be a neighborhood beautification initiative, but over the past ten years KIB has become a major community development organization. They use their principles of enhancing nature, expanding the tree canopy—the tools that they’ve always used—but they frame it with a much bigger ambition. Now, their work is about transforming neighborhoods and quality of life. They think much more comprehensively about what they do. All of these great organizations, we’re working together from different angles, but we all reinforce each others’ work.

You’ve been talking about connectivity; how do the Cultural Trail and the Inspiring Places initiative improve connectivity in Indianapolis?

At our foundation, we think that connectivity is the theme of the 21^st century. Whether it’s physical connectivity, digital, social, community—we think that a city that creates connectivity at all different levels is going to be a successful city. We’re big believers that innovation and creativity come from the collision and connection between different sectors and different kinds of people. We organize all of our work around connectivity.

The trail project is all about the journey, and the idea that the journey should be as exciting and inspiring as any of the destinations in our city. In fact, the journey itself should be a destination. The journey needs to be a great inspiring thing to do.

“We’re trying to create a city where the journey is as powerful and inspiring as the destinations.” / Photo: Indianapolis Cultural Trail

Downtown Madison, NJ, in full swing during the Bottle Hill Day festival / Photo: Borough of Madison

PPS heartily congratulates the Borough of Madison, New Jersey, whose downtown was recently named one of the 2012 Great Places in New Jersey by the state chapter of the American Planning Association. It is an affirmation of the Borough’s unwavering dedication over the past 30 years and demonstrates the power of a community to transform a place through persistent efforts over time.

Here at PPS, it has been exciting to witness the “before and after” of Downtown Madison, beginning with a plan we created in 1980. “It was one of my first projects at PPS,” recalls Senior Vice President Steve Davies. “Since I had grown up in a similarly sized town, I immediately felt an affinity for the community. It’s been wonderful to have worked periodically with Madison over such a long period.”

In 1980, Downtown Madison, located on hour by train west of New York City, was in better shape than other small town centers across the U.S., though it was sliding downward. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, located in nearby Morristown, had a special interest in Madison, given that it had been the original home of the Dodge family. It was their support, and other support which followed, that helped reverse the downward momentum and get the wheels going in a positive direction. But it was the citizens and leadership of Madison that really drove the transformation over time.

The revitalization of downtown Madison has focused on key public spaces and thoroughfares: Main Street (a state highway, which made it more challenging), Lincoln Place, Waverly Place, and the train station. Madison’s downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places, so amidst all of the physical changes and improvements, the question was always about how to build on downtown’s distinctive historic character and make it even better.

While much of the effort has been on improving the design of streets, sidewalks, and public spaces, the effort has been multi-dimensional. Based on PPS’s recommendation, Mayor Elizabeth Baumgartner created the Downtown Development Commission (DDC) in 1981, which took the opportunity to involve all stakeholders, from landlords and merchants to residents and the arts and non-profit communities – tapping into the inherent passion of the 16,000 people who call the place home. Playfully underlining the later feat, Davies adds, “No one agreed with anybody in 1981. Merchants thought that the problem was with parking.”

The commission, in turn, hired the first downtown manager in New Jersey, and one of the first in the country. “You know, we didn’t say it this way in 1980, but 80% of the success of public spaces is in the management,” says Davies. “In recommending they hire a downtown manager, the outcome in Madison was trendsetting.”

The manager began with programming, marketing, filling retail, and getting everyone on the same page. Programming was launched to highlight what is local and seasonal, and has also been an important kernel for spurring Madison’s renewed vibrancy. Today, the downtown is marketed under the banner of the Love Madison Shop Madison campaign.

Madison went beyond great programming and well-designed spaces to earn its distinction as one of the state’s Great Places. In another move, the Police Department created a “town man” post with an officer stationed at the intersection of Main Street and Waverly Place. The town man acts as a local ambassador, giving directions, making suggestions, and helping shoppers cross the street. Good management practices like this have been indispensable to the revitalization of downtown and the experience of Madison as a safe and welcoming place.

The road to establishing successful programs is not always a straight one and usually requires experimentation. One of PPS’s recommendations back in 1980 identified Waverly Place as an ideal spot to get a farmers market going in downtown. A market was created, but it started as a smaller affair sited in a parking lot outside of the center. When the lot needed to be repaired, the market was relocated to Waverly Place and became an even bigger hit. Mary Anna Holden, Mayor from 2008 to 2011 and long time community advocate, sent an email to PPS at the time saying “It took 25 years to follow the recommendation, but it worked!”

In addition to the now hugely popular farmers market, the DDC and community partners organize other programs throughout the year. These include Bottle Hill Day, a community festival celebrating local culture and downtown businesses, and May Day, a town-wide streetscape beautification day to improve Madison’s parks, business districts, and public spaces. The DDC also links with local colleges to provide shuttles and welcoming tours of downtown for students.

Easterly view on Lincoln Place from Madison’s train station showing roadway, sidewalk, accessible crosswalks, curb, drainage, lighting, shade tree and landscaping improvements / Photo: Robert Vogel

More recently, the Borough came to PPS because they had to replace utilities under Lincoln Place, where the train station, post office, and movie theater are all located. Davies notes, “It felt like a back alley, not a major entrance into downtown.” Following ideas generated at a public Placemaking workshop, PPS prepared a plan to remake the street – which had to be completely torn up in any case – to make it more walkable, including a planted center islands to calm traffic in front of the train station, new sidewalks, and simple interventions at problem intersections with stop signs. Construction was completed in 2011.

“I always knew this was one of New Jersey’s great places, so it’s nice to have it recognized” said current Mayor Bob Conley about the recent APA designation. “The process we went through with Lincoln and Waverly Places was well thought-out; using PPS resources to help, we brought in residents and merchants to all have an input, and it’s obvious that it came out beautifully!”

The work of creating great places is never over and done, but step-by-step communities like Madison are making huge progress. Congratulations, Madison, on this exciting milestone. We look forward to more stories about the life of your public spaces yet to come!

Click to purchase from Powell’s

Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, is worth a read for its acerbic wit, alone. The author fits a remarkable collection of data and anecdotal evidence from his long career in urban design (which included a four-year stint at the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts’ design department) into a mere 260 pages while maintaining a tone that is both punchy and urgent. It’s not often that I’ve found people who can make the discussion of parking minimums entertaining, but Speck has a way with words.

Walkable City begins with Speck’s General Theory of Walkability, before proceeding on to an overview of the challenges facing our built environment today. The author’s deep understanding of the topic at hand thus becomes clear early on, and by the time the book launches into its meatiest section—a detailed breakdown of the Ten Steps of Walkability—the author-reader bond is already established. Barely a fifth of the way through the book, it is hard not to already feel engaged, like a comrade-in-arms.

But this is not the next great book on American cities; Speck says so himself in the prologue, arguing that “That book is not needed. An intellectual revolution is no longer necessary.” This struck me as odd, and it nagged at the back of my mind throughout what was otherwise a mostly enjoyable read. For, as Speck explains a mere paragraph after the line quoted above, “We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities—after forgetting for four—yet we’ve somehow not been able to pull it off.”

That “we’ve” is instructive; the book is seemingly intended for a mass audience, but I got the sense that I was part of a choir, being preached to with the church doors thrown open. While it is a very accessible book, Walkable City comes off feeling a bit more specific than it seems the author himself had hoped. There is a preoccupation with the physical cityscape that suggests the underlying assumption that the reader has some knowledge of and access to the proper channels to act on the information that’s being presented. But many (or even most, if the book is intended for a mass market) won’t.

Indeed, for a book about walkability, Walkable City seems much more concerned with cars and buildings than with people. “America will be finally ushered into ‘the urban century’ not by its few exceptions,” writes Speck, in wrapping up the prologue, “but by a collective movement among its everyday cities to do once again what cities do best, which is to bring people together—on foot.” Yet at the outset of the section titled The Useful Walk, he writes that “Cars are the lifeblood of the American city.” Are we to understand, then, that it is a collective movement among our cars that will create more walkable cities?

Of course not.  People are the lifeblood of cities, and if we’re going to pull off the feat of ushering America into the urban century, we have to show those people not only why walkability is important, but how their own actions and decisions can help to create more of it. [Of note, via PPS's transportation director Gary Toth: even AASHTO included the following line in the 1984 edition of the Green Book: “…it is extremely difficult to make adequate provisions for pedestrians.  Yet, this must be done, because pedestrians are the lifeblood of our urban areas…”]

“Specialists,” Speck writes in no uncertain terms, “are the enemy of the city, which is by definition a general enterprise.” Yet the urban designer seems not to heed his own advice. If he had, we may have seen a fifth category in the book’s General Theory of Walkability; alongside The Useful Walk, The Safe Walk, The Comfortable Walk, and The Interesting Walk, perhaps a section on The Considered Walk.

If we’re going to create more popular support for walkability in the US, we need people in auto-centric places to start thinking differently about the benefits of getting around on foot instead of by car: improved health, more time to spend with families, lower transportation costs, more unplanned social encounters, better sense of purpose and community. If you’ve lived your whole life in a landscape dominated by cars (as most Americans have), walkability may be far from the front of your mind. The idea that an intellectual revolution is no longer necessary assumes that everyone is already on the same page. They’re not.

For those of us who are already advocating for more walkable urban fabric, Walkable City offers a wealth of facts and figures with which we can load our cannons. But it also serves as a reminder that we have to keep working on how we present that information to broader constituencies. We’re getting there, but we’re still en route.

A colorful crosswalk scene / Photo: Alex E. Proimos via Flickr

For more, check out Brendan’s conversation on Walkable City with Next American City’s Brady Dale, part of the #NextCityBooks online book club series.

Detroiters crowd the Placemaking Hut to vote for their favorite ideas for improving downtown spaces / Photo: PPS

What do you want to see happening in your favorite public spaces? This is one of the questions at the core of the Placemaking process, and getting responses from as many different people as possible has always been central to what we do at the Project for Public Spaces. But now, as our work in Detroit evolves, we’re taking our own oft-given advice about thinking Lighter, Quicker, and Cheaper, and testing out some new ways of gathering input and getting more people excited about shaping their public spaces.

Over the next few weeks, PPS’s Steve Davies, Elena Madison, and Meg Walker will be conducting a series of “Pop-Up Placemaking” workshops with Detroiters at the Downtown Detroit Partnership’s D:hive, an innovative social gathering space along the city’s famed Woodward Avenue corridor. Packing the punch of a standard day-long Placemaking workshop into a few hours, these specially-designed sessions will offer participants a unique opportunity to be intimately involved with the continued transformation of downtown Detroit. Workshops will take place from 5-6:30pm on December 5, 11,12, & 18.

And based on the response that we’ve been seeing at events in the Motor City recently, we’re on the edge of our seats, excited to see what people come up with. Recently, Davies, Madison, and Walker set up a “Placemaking Hut” at the Christmas Wonderfest tree-lighting ceremony and holiday market in Campus Martius Park, where people were invited to share what kinds of amenities and uses they wanted to see more of in downtown public spaces.

Upon entering the Placemaking Hut, everyone was given eight dot stickers. They were then able to peruse images of 12 different amenities and 12 different uses, and place their dots next to the images of the things that they wanted most (four from each of the two categories). This visual voting system not only made the important data-collection phase of the Placemaking process fun and interactive, it also built off of the festive atmosphere at the Christmas Wonderfest event (which attracted tens of thousands of Detroit-area residents) and generated a steady dialog between people about how downtown should evolve, putting place at the center of the discussion that evening.

The Placemaking Hut proved to be so popular, in fact, that we ran out of dots just a few hours into the festival! Considering that there were 3,000 stickers on-hand, an estimated 150 people moved through the hut per hour, providing a wealth of feedback about desired uses. That information, along with results from the upcoming Pop-Up Placemaking workshops, will be used by PPS and D:hive to craft a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper plan for the activation of Downtown Detroit this coming summer.

Dog parks were a popular request / Photo: PPS

In case you’re thinking that 16 amenities and uses sounds a bit too prescriptive, fear not: plenty of crayons were available, and participants young and old were welcome to draw things that they wanted to see in their public spaces on a large flip chart if they couldn’t find a corresponding image on the hut’s walls. “We forgot to include a dog park image,” Davies recalled while recounting the story in the office this week. “Big mistake! So many people were using the crayons to ask for that; if you flipped through the chart, it was ‘dog park, dog park, dog park!’”

We’ll keep you posted on how things turn out at the pop-up sessions this coming month; if Detroit lives up to its burgeoning reputation as a hub of urban innovation, these Pop-Up Placemaking sessions could soon be making their way to a public space near you!

The Pearl Brewrey's Farmers' Market has helped to make the site a food destination / Photo: John W. Schulze via Flickr

Food – we need it, we love it, and we structure our lives and cultures around it. San Antonio, Texas, is a city that is starting to structure its neighborhoods around it, starting with an ambitious redevelopment project called the Pearl Brewery. Located on 22 acres along the banks of the San Antonio River north of downtown, today’s Pearl is a multi-use campus of buildings originally founded as the J. B. Behloradsky Brewery and City Brewery over 120 years ago. The current vision for the site is for a vibrant urban district to grow out from a culinary destination that brings people together around the celebration of local food and culture.

Since PPS first got involved with the master planning process for Pearl in 2005, we’ve watched this place change the way that San Antonians think of food and its role in their city. Senior Vice President Phil Myrick, who is working now on the next phase of expansion, describes Pearl as “the vision and bold scheme of a local entrepreneur of hot sauce and salsa.” This entrepreneur and visionary developer is Kit Goldsbury, who purchased the fallow Pearl campus in 2001 through his investment firm Silver Ventures. Developments currently underway at Pearl include a plaza and hotel and the addition of retail, restaurants, and residential units that now number over 200.

The main brewery building's landmark tower watches over the site / Photo: RedTail_Panther via Flickr

A key development milestone was Kit’s courtship of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) which led to the establishment of  a third campus at Pearl in 2010 (their other two residences are in Hyde Park, New York and Napa Valley, California). Says PPS’s Meg Walker: “CIA was an early anchor for Pearl, which was housed in a smaller building before moving to its current and larger home. The Farmers Market at the site also got going early on, along with food festivals in the parking lot.” The weekly market in particular was a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper way of weaving local, fresh, and seasonal foods into daily life of the site’s neighbors. Together, the CIA and Farmers Market have been key in re-framing Pearl as a major destination at the intersection of community life and healthy, local food.

Future plans for Pearl reflect a well-curated mix of creative uses in support of food endeavors of all types. The presence of the CIA will act as a major stimulus for other food and cooking events on the campus, tapping into the power of triangulation to enhance the vibrancy of the place. Ideas for the public plaza, for instance, include edible gardens and a chef’s table, while the Black Box aspires to be a pop-up space for young entrepreneurial restaurateurs.

Latin American food  is a common thread throughout these ventures, as are creativity and comfort. “This stems from an articulated vision and desire to give back to the San Antonio community in a nurturing way through food,” Meg explains. Part of the nurture is designing a space that provides comfort to its users in the most practical of ways. Elizabeth Fauerso, chief marketing officer at Pearl, says, “The need for shade and water provisions to make the campus feel welcoming and usable in a hot climate was one of the key considerations in designing the landscape.”

Plenty of shade makes Pearl enjoyable even in San Antonio's hot summer months / Photo: The Brit_2 via Flickr

Pearl also hosts a variety of activities and programs, including cultural events (films, parties, conferences, and live performances) and engaging services and retail like the independent Twig Book Shop and Bike World bike rentals. Well-connected by an expanded Riverwalk and a bike share station , Pearl uses the Power of 10 to create a magnetic destination for the surrounding community. “Pearl is helping set an exciting drumbeat for San Antonio,” says Phil. “In several of the local workshops that PPS has conducted recently in the city, when asked to map San Antonio’s best places, participants have mentioned Pearl despite it being brand new to the scene. There is a feeling of serendipity that people associate with it.”

The momentum behind Pearl’s transformation is remarkable, but at the same time planning remains responsive and flexible. Meg emphasizes, “Pearl is not springing full-grown out of the developer’s head. While some developers want everything at once, build-out at Pearl has been evolving incrementally over the past six years, gradually bringing restaurants in and creating places people want to visit as a destination. And it’s working. People love it.”

In the larger context of the city, Pearl is the leading edge of River North’s rebirth as a vibrant arts district that promotes an urban lifestyle and creative living opportunities. In fact, the combination of dense urban housing and the infrastructure to embolden its growth is a key tenet of the plan for a vibrant central city. In February 2012, HR&A published a report, Center City Strategic Framework Plan, Implementation, commissioned by Centro Partnership of San Antonio and the City that illustrates how Pearl helps fulfill the city’s goal to encourage more people to live downtown. “Residential growth is the key to unlocking the benefits sought by the city,” the report explains, “including downtown amenities, redevelopment of existing building stock, and the presence of more vibrant neighborhood life on the street and in the public realm.” Anchored by the amenities and vibrancy of Pearl’s food and cultural attractions, the River North district  is enjoying a population boom that would have been unimaginable just five years ago when it was mostly vacant industrial land by the highway.

Going back to Kit’s original vision, Elizabeth says, “Pearl is his love letter to San Antonio.” In helping create the heart and soul of the neighborhood, Pearl’s potential as a public multi-use destination is kickstarting the economic development of a more livable, nourishing downtown.

Abandoned public baths along the Dún Laoghaire waterfront / Photo: Gary Toth

Places, like many things, go through cycles—and even the grandest of public spaces can wind up looking a bit worn and forlorn. Last month, PPS’s Fred Kent, Gary Toth, and Kathy Madden traveled to the wonderfully bucolic community of Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, to conduct one of our How to Turn a Place Around training workshops. The area between Dún Laoghaire’s waterfront and high street is picture-perfect at first glance, but the 30 workshop participants quickly identified many underlying flaws. Led by the PPS team, these locals recognized assets that together represented a “gold mine” of Placemaking potential, and developed some wonderfully creative ideas for knitting together the area’s public spaces to create a truly extraordinary destination.

Dún Laoghaire, a suburban seaside town about 7.5 miles south of Dublin along Dublin Bay, has long been nourished by its access to the sea—first as a sea base for Ireland to carry out raids on Britain and Gaul, and later as a commercial shipping center. In 1821, Ireland decided to build a harbor here due to increasing difficulty for ships to navigate, berth and transfer cargo along the River Liffey in Dublin (at one point, shipwrecks rose to literally hundreds per year off the coast). As a result, a new town center developed uphill along a former military road, and came to be called George’s Street. Ireland’s first railway started in Dublin and terminated in Dún Laoghaire (then called Kingstown), establishing Dún Laoghaire as a preferred suburb of the capital. Ever since, the fortunes of the town’s waterfront and its high street have been tied together.

George's Street, briefly pedestrianized, was re-opened to auto traffic in 2008 / Photo: Gary Toth

Dún Laoghaire was one of the Irish centers that began to experience decline when Ireland accelerated its construction of big freeways like the M11 and the M50 in the 1990s (just a few decades after the same strategy destroyed Main Streets across the US). George’s Street now suffers from over 30 vacancies along its length. The street was briefly pedestrianized at the start of the new millennium. Due to shop owners’ complaints and a lack of a sufficient revitalization of the street, one way traffic was restored in 2008. The waterfront has, similarly, lost a lot of its luster. Elements like the public baths, which flourished until 1997, are no longer functioning; some are falling into disrepair.

How to Turn a Place Around (HTTAPA), which is designed to enhance the impact of designers, planners, and other professionals by illustrating how their efforts to revitalize public spaces can strengthen existing communities, got a few tweaks for its first Irish audience. The course included a session on Streets as Places and a Street Audit. The focus was on George’s Street and a parallel strip of the harbor between the East Pier and City Hall, an area that provides a solid foundation for a great waterfront district, but that faces a lot of challenges. HTTAPA focuses on the idea that, because people are holistic thinkers and see their world in an integrated way, engaging the people who live and work in a space is the best way to turn everything upside down, and take places from inadequate to extraordinary.

A panoramic view of the harbor from the Grand Marine Hotel / Photo: Gary Toth

On the first afternoon, the attendees evaluated six distinct sites in the downtown area of the waterfront via a process we call the Place Game, which helps attendees to better understand these sites and the connections between them from their own perspective. The sites included: Carlisle Pier and its entrance area; entry areas in front of the East and Ferry Terminal Piers; the Pavilion, a newer public space created when the airspace over the train line to and from Dublin was covered over and landscaped; and a plaza alongside the new library, currently under construction.

Kent, Madden, and Toth guided participants through the Placemaking process, helping them to identify challenges and brainstorm a range of solutions, from short-term, inexpensive fixes that could start to change the way that other residents of Dún Laoghaire thought about the waterfront and start building local momentum immediately, all the way up to creating a long-term vision for the area.

On the following day, participants conducted a Street Audit at five sites—three along Marine Road and two on George’s Street. Guided by the Streets as Places concept and observation of these sites, the team came to understand the important role that streets could play in knitting together the various destinations within the vibrant downtown district that they’d imagined. The broad corridor of Marine Drive was identified as a critical lynchpin in their vision, as it represents the greatest opportunity for linking George’s Street to the waterfront.

Harsh streetscaping on Marine Drive, between the water and George's Street / Photo: Gary Toth

Below, we’ve mapped the ideas that were generated for central Dún Laoghaire during the HTTAPA training. If you are working on a public space project in your own city, take a look—and if you’re interested in learning more about the Placemaking process and the various strategies and concepts behind creating a great place, you’re in luck! We’ll be offering another HTTAPA training here in New York City in just two weeks (April 19-20). If you’re interested, email Casey Wang: cwang@pps.org.

View How to Turn Dún Laoghaire Around in a larger map

MAP KEY
DARK BLUE AREAS: Sites analyzed on during the waterfront Place Game evaluation
LIGHT BLUE AREAS: Sites analyzed on the second day of HTTAPA through PPS’s Street Audit process
PINK LINES: Existing streets and paths that need to be re-engineered to restore balance & re-thought via the Placmaking process
YELLOW LINES: New paths that could be engineered to improve connectivity throughout the downtown

One of the key principles to remember when trying to create a great public square is that the inner square and outer square must work together. Active edges (sidewalk cafes, museums, shops) feed into the center; in turn, a lively scene at the heart of a square creates a buzz that draws more people to the area, generating more activity for edge uses. It’s symbiotic!

The video above illustrates this principle using imagery from our study of Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, Texas. Home to one of the most iconic buildings in America, the plaza itself is more of a place to stand for a photo op than a place where people linger and enjoy. As you can see, creating a sense of connection and flow between the inner and outer square is key to success.

San Antonio's iconic Alamo Plaza / Photo: Blondie5000 via Flickr

Downtown San Antonio is probably best-known for its public spaces: the RiverWalk, the Alamo, and Main Plaza chief among them. But the local perception has long been that the city’s core is for tourists, not residents. Luckily, there is a considerable amount of energy being devoted to changing this perception, and remaking downtown as a place for people. Just this past weekend, the city hosted its second Síclovía, which saw two miles of the central Broadway corridor closed to automobile traffic. The event, which also included San Antonio’s first Better Block project, drew more than 40,000 people out into the streets for a day-long celebration of public space–a response that surprised even the event’s organizers.

“We’re just so excited, because other cities who have a stronger reputation for this kind of thing came, and they were blown out of their shoes,” said the city’s Health Program Manager, Maggie Thompson, who organized the city’s first Síclovía last October, and built upon the success of that event with assistance from the federal Communities Putting Prevention to Work grant program. “After the first one, there was such overwhelmingly positive support from the public. The mayor came out as a fan of this initiative, the city manager came out and spoke. It now has big public support.”

Síclovía 2012 Route Map

Downtown’s sidewalks and plazas will remain very much in the public eye this coming week: the city will mark the 176th anniversary of the massacre at the Alamo with public ceremonies this Tuesday and Wednesday, while the annual Luminaria festival will flood the area with color over the weekend. And while major events can help to enliven spaces in the short term, there are real and concerted ongoing efforts to make liveliness the default for downtown. PPS has been working with several city agencies, non-profit organizations, and companies on a variety of projects, and from where we sit, downtown San Antonio looks like it’s really building some serious momentum.

Since last summer, PPS’s Phil Myrick has been working closely with the Center City Development Office under Assistant City Manager Pat DiGiovanni, leading a series of workshops and trainings to teach city staff about the placemaking process. PPS also recently began helping the city revitalize and reconceptualize Alamo Plaza and Plaza de Valero. These places have played an important role in the city’s history; this has led to their popularity with tourists, but has had the unintended side-effect of driving many locals away. One of the main goals in re-thinking these spaces has been to focus on changes that will open downtown up to a wider variety of uses. Speaking specifically about Alamo Plaza (for which there will be a Placemaking Community Meeting this Wednesday evening), Phil explains: “We’re trying to think of it primarily in terms of its huge potential to be a great city square that becomes an anchor for activity in downtown, and makes people want to come back to the city center to work, live have fun, bring their children, and generally have a wonderful experience.”

Beyond downtown’s historic plazas, the city is also gearing up for major overhaul of HemisFair Park and its surrounding streets. Officials have kick-started an effort to craft a new Downtown Transportation Plan for the area around HemisFair, and will host the second public meeting on this initiative tomorrow night.

The energy around placemaking in San Antonio is starting to spread out into the city’s neighborhoods, as well. Last summer, PPS launched Power of 10, a website where San Antonians could share their ideas for how downtown could be improved. Power of 10 generated roughly 300 ideas from the public, and we’re now working with Texas Public Radio to launch a citywide version of the site in May, which will lead to the implementation of citizen-sourced Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper projects later in the year. We’re also working with Rackspace Corporate Headquarters to create a new public park for the northeast side neighborhood surrounding the former shopping mall that the company is redeveloping as its base.

San Antonio, in short, is a city that ‘gets it.’ Back to Phil: “I think that people are going to look back on this moment as a real turning point. We’ve been happy to be involved in guiding [city officials'] thinking, but they’ve lined up an incredible slate of projects.”  If you’re interested in learning more, make sure to check out one of this week’s public meetings on the Downtown Trasportation Plan (Tuesday) or the Alamo Plaza re-design (Wednesday), and keep an eye out for May’s citywide Power of 10 launch. We’ll be keeping you posted!

Photo: Blondie5000 via Flickr

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

Click here to view the archived webinar.

PPS is proud to be one of four recipients of grants from the United States Environmental Protection Agency under their Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program. The Building Blocks program funds quick, targeted assistance to communities that face common development problems. Three other nonprofit organizations have received competitively awarded grants under this program this year to help communities get the kinds of development they want – Forterra (formerly Cascade Land Conservancy), Global Green USA, and Smart Growth America.

This grant will enable us and our partners at Livability Solutions to offer FREE technical assistance to communities that have set goals for achieving improved livability, smart growth, or sustainability, but have run into barriers in achieving these goals. You can read more about the opportunity and see the application here.

The deadline for applications is coming up. Candidates must complete and submit the application by Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8pm EST. Late applications will not be accepted.

PPS’s Fred Kent joined Brian Lehrer and New York World reporter Yolanne Almanzar for the segment, which you can listen to in its entirety below.

The scene at Zuccotti Park back in October. Photo: Sarah Goodyear

Here’s some of what Fred had to say about the Occupy Wall Street presence in Zuccotti: “We need those places to express ourselves without any hesitation…. We’re moving through an era right now of massive change in a wonderful way. And the feelings that they have are manifested all over the world. It’s a great time. What do we get out of it in the end is what we’re trying to figure out.”

Fred suggested that if the park’s occupation is creating a need for more public space in the area, perhaps nearby streets should be closed to create that.

The founding inspiration behind PPS is the work of William “Holly” Whyte, whose 1980 book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces revolutionized the way people saw the parks and plazas around them. Here’s what Whyte wrote about the public’s right to use those spaces — words that have often been quoted since the Zuccotti occupation began:

The public’s right in urban plazas would seem clear. Not only are plazas used as public spaces, in most cases the owner has been specifically, and richly rewarded for providing them. He has not been given the right to allow only those public activities he happens to approve of. He may assume he has, and some owners have been operating on this basis with impunity. But that is because nobody has challenged them. A stiff, clarifying test is in order.

One disturbing finding that has emerged as the result of the reporting done by WNYC and the New York World: it is very difficult to get information about exactly what benefits developers have gotten in return for the public spaces — some of which are not very accessible or pleasant to use. It is as true now as it was more than 30 years ago, when Whyte wrote those words, that “a stiff, clarifying test is in order.”

You can read an in-depth account of what the New York World found in the course of their reporting here. They’re going to keep digging, and we’ll keep you in the loop.

Neighborhood residents had no shortage of suggestions for ways to make this a better place.

PPS knew that engaging the neighborhood in Placemaking would take more than just a workshop. So, with the support of the Kresge Foundation and working with the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation (CDC), we decided to do a fun harvest festival that would demonstrate the neighborhood’s potential. It would also be a way to get more Placemaking ideas from people who would be unlikely to show up a community meeting.

And it worked. On October 29, PPS was thrilled to be part of a very successful harvest festival outside the wonderful neighborhood produce market Peaches & Greens, which is celebrating its third anniversary. Although flanked by vacant lots, Peaches & Greens proved to be the right spot for the festival — and the event showed how this could evolve into an even better place for the neighborhood to come together.

(Check out this great CBS News report about Peaches & Greens’ truck delivery service, which brings produce to the doorsteps of Detroiters who otherwise would have no access to fresh food.)

The rain held off and it turned out to be a great day, filled with games, horse-drawn hay rides, marshmallow roasting, and lots of Placemaking suggestions offered in PPS’s “Placemaking in Detroit” tent.

This is a neighborhood with a lot of basic needs. Many residents are out of work. Many don’t own cars, and the public transit system is utterly inadequate. Safety and security are a major concern — the city can’t even keep up with repairing broken streetlights. A lot of houses are abandoned and occupied by squatters.

The term “food desert” has become well known, but this part of Detroit might also be called a “place desert.” As the city’s population has shrunk, neighborhoods like Central Detroit have lost not just people and homes, but places to come together. Still, a lot of assets remain, including some beautiful housing stock and strong community organizations such as CDC. Importantly, the city has designated this as one of the communities where resources are going to be focused in the future.

The tough conditions faced by local people made the response to the festival even more heartening. People were ready to jump right in and become part of something more meaningful. They provided a lot of practical ideas for activities could be taking place around Peaches & Greens on a more regular basis. One thing we heard from a lot of local residents was that they are eager to see more community-building events in the neighborhood. Lots of people stuck around after the festival was over to help clean up.

One of the day’s high points came when we announced the winner of a bicycle we were able to raffle off. The woman who won it told us that she wasn’t going to keep it herself — she was going to give it to her grandson, who just turned 18, so that he could look for a job.

This is just a pilot for what we hope will be many more events in the neighborhood, along with some “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” improvements that will make people’s lives better in the short term.

Big thanks to our partners at CDC and Kresge for making it possible.

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.

The surprise winner: The Circle in Normal, Ill. Photo: HOERR SCHAUDT landscape architects

Chances are you didn’t flash on The Circle in Uptown Normal, Ill., which came out on top in the crowd-sourced poll the folks at Planetizen conducted with our help. As Tim Halbur wrote at Planetizen, “Passion was the rule of the day for our Top 100 Public Spaces survey project,” and the people of Normal turned out to be surprisingly passionate. (For the record, Central Park placed at #32, Rittenhouse Square at #17, and Stanley Park at #59.)

Let’s take a closer look at the not-so-obvious #1, which obviously inspires quite a lot of local passion. Normal’s Circle isn’t just any old roundabout. It’s a multifunctional shared space that provides entertainment and activities for the community and visitors alike all year long. The Circle also has sustainability cred: It recycles stormwater, recirculating it into the public drinking fountains and irrigation system. It’s a pleasant place to sit and relax, and it’s home to  a farmers market as well.

Here are the rest of the Top 10:

2. Temple Plaza, New Haven, Conn.
3. Campus Martius Park, Detroit, Mich.
4. Cal Anderson Park, Seattle, Wash.
5. CityArt Walking Sculpture Tour, Mankato, Minn.
6. Bryant Park, New York, N.Y.
7. Pittsburgh Market Square, Pittsburgh, Pa.
8. Arts District at Bay Street, Bellingham, Wash.
9. Balboa Park, San Diego, Ca.
10. Church Street Marketplace District, Burlington, Vt.

Many of the spaces in the top 10 are projects that have been redeveloped in recent years in order to create a balance of form and functionality that serves the community, giving residents a sense of pride in and excitement for their neighborhoods. They are also places that serve as destinations, attracting visitors from outside the community. They will likely continue to thrive and evolve over time.

Some of the places on the list have been integral parts of the community for over 100 years, but it was only after they were redeveloped with an eye toward Placemaking that they found new life — Pittsburgh’s Market Square (#7) is one such example. After many redevelopment attempts over the years, the latest refurbishment of Market Square has finally landed on a successful combination — embracing historical elements of the original square, while at the same time redesigning aspects that were less successful. It is now a safe place for children to play, an appealing spot for workers from surrounding buildings to take a break, a venue for community-wide events, and much more.

The Planetizen survey points to the success of revitalization projects that are bringing neighborhoods all over the world back to life. Perhaps it’s a sign of yet more positive things to come.

For the full list and more in-depth information, head over to Planetizen.

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.

Charisma usually requires a sense of humor: A Long Beach bike rack. Photo: waltarrrr via Flickr.

And he talks about how Long Beach has added to its own natural assets of good weather and relaxed Southern California attitude by investing in high-quality bicycle infrastructure and encouraging bike-related businesses.

It’s a strategy that, as we told you yesterday, makes it the perfect place for the 2012 Pro Walk/Pro Bike Conference, organized by the National Center for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW).

Watch Gandy’s talk and ask yourself, how could your city add to its charisma?

Photo: waltarrrr via Flickr.

What a difference a lane makes: Downtown Long Beach, before and after. Photo: jericho1ne via Flickr.

Pro Walk/Pro Bike is a biennial event convened by the National Center for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW), which is a resident program of PPS. And next year, it’s going to be held in a Southern California city that has been steadily improving its bike infrastructure — and is seeing that effort pay off in increasing number of cyclists.

Here’s what NCBW’s Mark Plotz, conference director, had to say about the selection of Long Beach: “For 2012, we will bring our conference to Long Beach because great things are already happening in the city, and because the city’s investments in walkable and bicycle friendly streets and neighborhoods will position Long Beach to be economically viable into the future, while continuing to provide a high quality of life for all residents. In other words: we see that Long Beach is headed where many cities need to go; lots of people are eager to learn from its example.”

The news about the Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference has gotten favorable coverage in the local press, including the Long Beach Post-Telegram, which interviewed Charlie Gandy, mobility advisor for the city of Long Beach and chair of Long Beach’s host committee for the conference:

[Gandy] said surveys show the city’s bike-only lanes in Belmont Shore and along Third Street and Broadway have more than doubled bike traffic since they were constructed several months ago.

“In Belmont Shore, we were averaging about 400 cyclists per day” along Second Street, “and that’s jumped to more than 1,000 daily now, and it’s growing,” Gandy said.

The city has also installed about 1,000 bike racks outside businesses and in public spaces, with another 1,000 scheduled to be installed at a rate of 50 per month.

“These efforts are encouraging people to leave their car at home and make those short trips to the coffee shop or to a favorite restaurant on their bike or by walking,” Gandy said. “And it’s also one way we can address the obesity and health epidemic facing our community along with the rest of the nation.”

To find out more about what’s in store at the 2012 conference, check out NCBW’s website here. We’ll be updating you with much more information in the future.

And check out the sweet video below from Vimeo user jericho1ne, showing the opening of a protected lane in the heart of the city. Makes you want to head out there and ride Long Beach yourself, no?

Long Beach Protected Lane Grand Opening from jericho1ne on Vimeo.

Photo: jericho1ne via Flickr.

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

On Main Street in Burlington, VT, the town where Front Porch Forum launched. Flickr photo via origamidon.

By Wayne Senville, Editor of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal

Historians have documented the central role that taverns and coffee houses have long played as places for people to exchange news and information. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg has also highlighted the valuable service that these and other “third places,” as he calls them, have performed in knitting together communities and integrating newcomers and immigrants into their new place of residence. Here’s some of what Oldenburg had to say in an article he wrote for the Planning Commissioners Journal:

“Americans long enjoyed third places in the form of the inns and ordinaries of colonial society, then as the saloons and general stores springing up with westward expansion. Later came the candy stores, soda fountains, coffee shops, diners, etc. which, along with the local post office, were conveniently located and provided the social anchors of community life.

… Third places also serve as “ports of entry” for visitors and newcomers to the neighborhood where directions and other information can easily be obtained. For new residents, they provide a means of getting acquainted quickly and learning where things are and how the neighborhood works.”

In many neighborhoods, you’ll still find these kind of gathering stops, sometimes taverns, sometimes grocery or convenience stores, sometimes a donut shop, and sometimes even the laundromat.

Toward a New Community Message Board

For years, a common sight outside many of these places was the message board, where neighbors left word about a missing dog, a yard sale, an apartment to rent, a community meeting … and where candidates for city council, alderman, school board, or mayor placed their campaign posters.  But fast forward to 2011. Email and Facebook is where we often “talk.” Many bemoan this, feeling it has weakened civic life and resulted in a loss of connection within our neighborhoods. And, yes, count me among those who’ve made such claims.

Yet something quite remarkable has emerged in Burlington and other Vermont towns. A locally-developed email-based message service, called Front Porch Forum, has established itself as the key way many residents now keep in touch with neighborhood concerns: by posting announcements, notices, offers of help, requests for help … and also debating a variety of local issues.

Michael Wood-Lewis

Valerie and Michael Wood-Lewis started up the precursor to today’s Front Porch Forum (FPF) in their own small “Five Sisters” neighborhood six years ago. Their mission was and remains: “to help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood.” In 2007, the Orton Foundation recognized the Front Porch Forum with its 2007 Innovator in Place Award.

Launched in Burlington in 2006, FPF has exploded in popularity. Remarkably, more than 50 percent of Burlington (pop. 40,000) households subscribe to FPF! This means that there’s a critical mass of users. Front Porch has become the “place” people think of first when looking to find out what’s happening in their neighborhood, or to post an announcement.

Front Porch Forum is successful in part because it’s so simple to use. Just type your message and either email it to FPF or post it on their web site. They reformat and distribute it as part of a grouping of messages (one or more times each week, depending on the level of activity in the particular neighborhood).

It’s important to realize that there are many Front Porch Forums, since each neighborhood has its own FPF email list. However, city departments and local officials can post messages in multiple neighborhoods when an issue is of citywide (or ward-wide) interest.

This past month, local farmers (such as Dave Zuckerman seen here) have used Front Porch Forum to alert Burlington residents to the availability of locally grown produce.

While you can learn more by visiting the Front Porch Forum web site, here is an excerpt from some correspondence I had with Michael Wood-Lewis two years ago:

Wayne Senville: What sort of questions get asked on the Front Porch forums? Has the networking that Front Porch Forum enables led to any local actions that might be of particular interest to planners or planning commissioners?

Michael Wood-Lewis: Front Porch Forum is used frequently by residents to announce, discuss and organize for or against development projects … Williston landfill, Southern Connector, Circ highway, Moran plant, Appletree Point senior housing, on and on.  FPF gets dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people tuned into planning-related issues. It should be noted, that after Town Meeting, the postings reverted back toward FPF’s bread and butter … lost cat, seeking apartment, car break-in report, etc. FPF members talk about feeling an increased sense of community ownership. A survey found that 45% of respondents reported “speaking up or getting involved on any public or policy issue
as a result of subscribing to Front Porch Forum.”

Wayne Senville: How much of a financial commitment does it take to make Front Porch Forum work? Are there any other factors important to its success?

Michael Wood-Lewis: Front Porch Forum’s success to date is due to many factors, including its inclusion of a moderator. Doing this kind of thing well requires resources. FPF operates as a small business covering a growing number of cities and towns in Vermont. It generates revenue from advertising, municipal subscriptions, and other sources to cover its costs. This business model is promising at this early stage, but has not yet fully developed.

Another ingredient to Front Porch Forum’s early success is that it is not beholden to any single interest.  All FPF’s decisions are made in an effort to fulfill its mission of helping neighbors connect and foster community at the neighborhood level.

Using Front Porch Forum to Increase Public Involvement

Another interesting observation Wood-Lewis made is that Front Porch Forum can actually increase citizen interest in local government meetings and public involvement. For example, he received this comment from a steering committee member on one of Burlington’s neighborhood organizations: “We had a great turn out at the Neighborhood Planning Assembly meeting this past week — 80 plus people and almost all of them are on the Front Porch Forum. We have had three great meetings with numbers above 50 this fall thanks to the free advertising on Front Porch Forum.”

In Burlington, Front Porch Forum is used by "neighborhood planning associations" (NPAs) to highlight upcoming meetings. Here, members of an NPA are doing a walk through of the nearby University of Vermont campus. Front Porch Forum has helped boost attendance at neighborhood meetings and events.

Another Burlington resident noted that: “having been active in our local neighborhood (and on the community association board for a year), I’ve certainly seen the value. People will say ‘Oh, yeah, I saw that on the forum.’ I’ve had neighbors, some of whom I didn’t know, contact me specifically because of notes I’ve posted. Sometimes by email, sometimes by phone and also in person. It has connected our local community together more – and it’s been an interesting experiment to watch.”

Front Porch Forum demonstrates that “modern” forms of communication don’t have to weaken community bonds — when used thoughtfully, they can actually help bring a community or neighborhood together.

Have you used Front Porch Forum? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.