“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

Jane’s Walk Weekend is this May 4th and 5th!

The fact that Jane Jacobs’ name is so often attached to the idea of gentrification today seems a cruel irony. Jane’s writing was focused on how to create strong neighborhoods that fostered robust social networks; she was far from a “NIMBY”, and her interest in preservation was more about economics than aesthetics. Unfortunately, the complexity of her ideas is often vastly oversimplified or taken out of context today by people looking to generate a bit of controversy. Reports that ‘Jane was wrong’ are greatly exaggerated, often by people who wind up making many of the same arguments that Jane, herself, made.

So it is always wonderful to see people gathering in communities across the country for Jane’s Walk Weekend. Over the next two days (May 4th & 5th), thousands will meet their neighbors to explore, observe, and appreciate what makes their neighborhoods great. In honor of one of our very favorite Placemakers, we’ve rounded up several walks scheduled to take place this year that focus on the theme of resilience, a concern at the core of much of Jane’s work. She was a champion of complexity and flexibility in urban form because these qualities allow communities—and the people that inhabit them—to address challenges more nimbly and effectively. Or, in her own eloquent words:

“Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties … Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

And now, without further ado:

1.) Levee Disaster Bike Tour, New Orleans: The Crescent City’s comeback post-Katina, while far from frictionless, has been nothing short of miraculous. This bike tour will visit the sites of several levee breaches around the city, giving participants an opportunity to discuss what happened to their city, and how far they’ve come since.

2.) Not Your Typical Regent Park Walk, Toronto: This walk, in the city where Jane moved after her time in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, will “[shine] a light on the capacity of local residents and [reframe] Toronto’s negative ‘public housing’ narrative,” focusing on the importance of generating new economic opportunities from within local communities rather than attracting them from somewhere else.

3.) The Roots of Mack Avenue, Detroit: This tour will focus on an historic neighborhood commercial corridor in the Motor City, which recently played host to the Placemaking Leadership Council’s inaugural meeting. The tour will explore Mack Avenue’s economic decline, and look forward to the bright future outlined through the “Green Thoroughfare” revitalization plan.

4.) Hometown Security, The Bronx, NYC: Led by South Bronx-based advocate Majora Carter, this tour will examine the impact of the Spofford juvenile detention facility on the neighborhood. The tour will end with a performance by a group of people whose lives were affected by Spofford, and who have worked with the Theater of the Oppressed to tell their stories. Observations from the performances will inform how the 5-acre Spofford site will be re-developed in the future.

5.) Recycle Kingdom Walk, Calcutta: This year Jane’s Walk is making its way to several cities in India. This unique walk will meander through the East Calcutta Wetlands, providing an intimate look at the vital role that the site plays in the city’s ecological resilience. The wetlands “take in all the solid and liquid waste of the city and generates fish, rice and vegetables and sends it back.”

One last thing: if you’re in New York, the Municipal Art Society will be offering a host of free tours of neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy last fall. You can check out the full list of related events by clicking right here.

“Everywhere you look, there are kids canoodling. Think of all of the germs being spread around! It’s just gross.” / Photo: PPS

Citing data showing that kissing is up to dangerous levels in the city’s streets and public spaces, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has introduced a measure to attempt to limit the length of public displays of affection in the interest of public health. Bloomberg admitted that the rampant PDA may be an unintended consequence of the improvements in public spaces that have been central to his mayoralty.

Getting people out of their cars, the mayor admitted at a press conference this morning, may have encouraged people to get a bit too close. “Our sidewalks are getting stopped up,” the mayor lamented. “When we started this, we saw research that suggested we’d find lovers in the rear places. But they weren’t there. The most fervent embracing we’ve recorded recently has usually taken place in the most visible locations, with couples oblivious of the crowd. Everywhere you look, there are kids canoodling. Think of all of the germs being spread around! It’s just gross.”

Increasing Kissing was first documented in the 1970s by William H. Whyte. / Photo: New York Magazine

The mayor pointed to a new report out of New York University that shows an alarming 34% increase in the average length of instances of PDAs around the city over the past five years. As such, the city is moving quickly to implement a ban on kisses lasting longer than 16 seconds in public spaces. The mayor indicated that a task force has been assembled with members from the city’s Departments of Health & Mental Hygiene and Parks & Recreation, along with several high-ranking officials from the NYPD.

“This isn’t just a few cute little pecks on the cheek,” explained Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, who was also present at this morning’s announcement. “We haven’t seen kissing up this high on New York’s streets since the 1970s!”

In response to critics saying that this is an extension of his “Nanny State,” Bloomberg said he is “facilitating people to control themselves” in NYC’s increasingly attractive public spaces.

Children play on the Museum of Art and History’s rooftop sculpture garden during a Placemaking workshop / Photo: Greg Larson

In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake changed the face of downtown Santa Cruz, damaging dozens of buildings and hobbling the local retail scene. The Cooper House, which had been a key public gathering space in this oceanfront city’s core, was ruined. When the site was re-developed, a larger building was placed along the street, and a smaller adjacent public space, Abbott Square, was tucked away in the middle of the block as a retail pass-through. The square never really became a real destination for downtown…but now, with the help of the adjacent Museum of Art and History, that may be about to change.

PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin and Priti Patel visited Santa Cruz recently to kick off a series of Placemaking workshops with the MAH, a cultural institution that has been re-inventing itself as a participatory community hub since bringing on Nina Simon (a past Citizen Placemaker interviewee) as director almost two years ago. The museum has outlined a new vision “to become a thriving, central gathering place where local residents and visitors have the opportunity to experience art, history, ideas, and culture.” To further that mission, the MAH is taking advantage of a 50-year lease on Abbott Square to bring the excitement within its walls out into the public realm, creating a great new destination for Santa Cruz.

Naturally, Nina and her staff brought the same innovative spirit that they’ve applied to exhibitions and events at the museum to the Placemaking Process. While hundreds of citizens and stakeholders participated in workshops and meetings over the course of several days, it was a children’s workshop organized in collaboration with one of the dads in the community, Greg Larson, that really showed off the museum’s capacity for thinking outside the box.

“The children’s workshop was exciting because it speaks to two things,” says Cynthia. “First, it showed that it’s not really far-fetched to think that kids can talk about public space and contribute really meaningfully to Placemaking. Kids have great imaginations, and they can look at an adult problem and think differently about what they want to do with it. Second, it highlighted the museum’s role as a community institution, as a creative and networked place, and so clearly spoke to that vision that the staff is working toward.”

“Kids have great imaginations, and they can look at an adult problem and think differently about what they want to do with it.” / Photo: Greg Larson

One of the most exciting things about this unique component of the process in Santa Cruz was that it grew organically out of the museum’s public engagement efforts leading up to the workshop. “One of the things we’ve heard over and over again from people is that there’s no place for families to come downtown with their kids,” Nina explains. “When I ran into Greg, a museum member and manager for an adjacent town, I invited him to the Abbott Square workshop and he asked if he could bring his daughter. He runs a dads group, and offered to put together a family component to the workshop.”

Greg worked with the MAH’s Director of Community Programs, Stacey Garcia, to plan activities to engage local kids into the Placemaking process. On the day of the event, Greg and 25 local kids (aged five to 10) joined the adults in the opening presentation on Placemaking in the workshop led by Cynthia and Priti, before breaking off for a series of adventures and brainstorming activities. The first stop was Abbott Plaza itself, where everyone was encouraged to think about ideas for the space. “We told them, ‘Imagine you could have anything you want in this square, and got them to start sharing ideas while they were in the physical space,” Greg recalls.

Next, it was up to the museum’s rooftop sculpture garden, where kids were encouraged to play on the art while considering what made the space fun, and thinking about what would make them want to come back. After that, they went back inside to do some more traditional group brainstorming, drawing their ideas on big sheets of butcher paper, and then sharing ideas with each other. Among the ideas generated were a theater space, Chinese lanterns, a giant slide, a maze, a chocolate fountain, a zipline, flowers, a climbing wall, a tunnel—even a replica of the Titanic!

Sharing ideas with the group / Photo: Greg Larson

The kids then voted on their favorites to select a few key “big ideas” to present to the grown-ups, and then spent some time coming up with three skits to act out during that presentation to illustrate their ideas for the climbing wall, maze, and tunnel. Once they were back with the adults, the skits proved to be a big hit. “The kids crawling around and over and under the tables in the room during their skits got the adults more engaged,” says Greg. “It was beyond theater in the round; the kids took the stage to the adults.”

True to form for an arts-friendly town like Santa Cruz, those adults were ready to play ball! Says Cynthia: “One of the dads worked with the city, and also teaches rope climbing, and it got him thinking, ‘You know, we could hook some guide wires between the buildings, and I could teach lessons in the plaza. It’s not that far-fetched.’ Kids wanted a zipline, and he was like, ‘You could do that, actually…’ These kids didn’t know to be cynical.”

In fact, the ideas were so well-received that, according to Nina, the kids’ contributions had a marked impact on the adults’ discussion. “You could tell that the adults really became the stewards of the kids’ ideas, in a sense. It re-oriented us to what it really means to create something that’s family-friendly.”

When you approach it the right way, Placemaking has the potential to bring out the kid in everyone. While priorities have to be determined and decisions have to be made, at the start, there is potential in every public space for an amazing new destination to emerge. Sharing freely and openly at the outset is key because, even if some of the more outlandish ideas won’t be feasible, they can help to set a tone and establish the kind of flexibility and open-mindedness that lead, ultimately, to stronger results.

“I think that the main takeaway was that it really is possible to engage kids in productive ways, parallel to adults, in a creative design process,” says Greg. “It’s important for it to be multi-modal, experiential, reflective, artistic, tactile. If there’s anything consistent to what the kids drew up, it was that the square and the art on the square needs to be engaging, or participatory as Nina would say, where they can touch it or interact with it, not simply observe it.”

We’ll be back in Santa Cruz next month. We’ll keep you posted as the new Abbott Square shapes up!

Click here to view a slideshow of the results of the kids’ workshop!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

A double rainbow shines over Lower Manhattan on the day after Hurricane Sandy / Photo: Kurt Deitrich via Instagram

Looking north from a darkened Lower Manhattan / Photo: NY Daily News

During and after a natural disaster, we truly see the value of community, up close and personal. Neighbors band together to help each other, providing shelter, supplies, and comfort to those who are less-prepared. The bravery shown by first responders drives the point home; seeing so many public servants risking their lives to help those in harm’s way is an inspiring reminder of the importance of cooperation and collaboration, as well as a reminder of how much impact each of us, as individuals, can have.

Hurricane Sandy has wreaked havoc from the Caribbean, up the Atlantic coastline of the US, and straight through heavily populated areas like the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia, and New York City, where PPS HQ is located. As those of us on the coast begin to assess the damage today, the superstorm is still dumping water on Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and is expected to barge into Canada some time tomorrow.

This morning, we received an email from Richard McCarthy, director of MarketUmbrella.org, with the title Solidarity from Sea Level. “There will be a month of very tired, mentally disoriented people,” our New Orleanian friend wrote. “Maybe longer with physical dislocation…From a public space standpoint, the markets and the parks and the pop-ups will be worth visiting to gauge mood, meaning, etc.”

The strength of our communities will be on display in the coming days and weeks. Much of this will play out in our streets, and our public spaces. As horrific as the damage is in many places, and as staggering as the news reports of damage will undoubtedly be, there will be many inspiring stories to share as people work together to rebuild the places that they love. Stories like this are already showing up, and we’ve seen many of you coordinating on Facebook and Twitter to help as your cities and towns begin their recovery efforts.

If you live or are staying in a community affected by Sandy, and you experience an example of community resilience first-hand, please share it here. These stories must not be lost in the din.

During one- to two-day workshops, Livability Solutions coalition members will work with selected communities to help them address a variety of challenges. Whether you are working to overcome a significant hurdle within a longer-term process, or  just starting to develop a plan for achieving a particular livability or sustainability goal, coalition members can help you to identify the tool or palette of tools that will best help your community to move forward. A short report will be prepared for each community following the technical assistance, and communities receiving technical assistance will be asked to follow up one month and nine months after receiving technical assistance to report on their progress toward objectives set during the assistance.

If you’re interested in learning more, or have questions about the program, click here to register for a webinar on October 10th that will provide an overview of the application process.

We’re looking forward to working with you and other members of the Livability Solutions coalition to help your community implement changes that will move them along the road towards smart growth and sustainability. To get started on your application, visit the Livability Solutions website today!

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Please note that there are also two other organizations currently offering free technical assistance through the Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program:

• Through a 3-day intensive visit and consultation, the technical experts on the Global Green team will evaluate how the sustainability of a specific neighborhood can be enhanced through an upcoming catalytic project by applying metrics from the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system and developing actionable recommendations for our grant recipients.
  
• Each year, Smart Growth America offers free assistance to local communities interested in building stronger local economies and creating great neighborhoods. These workshops will be awarded to a limited number of qualifying communities. Communities interested in receiving free technical assistance from SGA are invited to join our informational webinar on Thursday, September 27th at 2:00 pm EST.

Aphrodite interviews a New Yorker on Love TV in front of the city's iconic Flatiron Building / Photo: Love TV

Love was recently high in the air at PPS, as we were regaled with tales of a heartfelt summertime voyage around New York City’s five boroughs, where deeply-held secrets, innermost dreams, and impassioned desires were divulged by locals in the bright glare of broad daylight across public parks, plazas, streets and ferry terminals. Inside a giant pink television…to a golden-haired vixen called Aphrodite…with an Australian accent…

Nope, we’re not losing our grip on reality here in the office. In fact, we had the good fortune to be visited by artist Rebecca Macintosh and creative producer Victoria Johnstone, two Australians who had been touring their urban installation, “Love TV,” around New York City as a part of the DOT’s Summer Streets and Weekend Walks Urban Arts Program.

Describing Love TV as a “bold, fun and innovative public art adventure,” Rebecca and Victoria had been busy sharing the love across nine sites with 19 performances in some of NYC’s most diverse and far-flung neighborhoods. Through an outreach process organized jointly by Love TV and local community partners, people went online to either nominate themselves or their neighbors for an interview with Rebecca—aka the illustrious Goddess of Love, Aphrodite—in her public studio, a cheerfully fuchsia mobile theater shaped like a giant TV set. As local personalities revealed all, the interviews were aired on a screen before an inflatable lounge, allowing for prime public viewing with all of the fluffy comforts of home. Interviews were rapidly uploaded onto the Love TV website and posted to social networks, growing “a lively online Love TV community” across the world.

As happy a spectacle as Love TV is, its aim is far from superficial. As Rebecca explained, the project endeavors to activate public spaces and strengthen community spirit by creating a place for “their stories, by their people, [so that communities can share their] personal love affair with their respective neighborhood or city.” Indeed, Love TV’s five-borough journey collated interviews from a passionate public, from boy wonder drummer Marakai at the Jamaican Music and Arts Festival in Queens, who dreams of “a big pool in the park,” to soon-to-be MTV Superstar singer Ray 6 at the TAMA Summerfest in Brooklyn, who was brimming with pride in Bed-Stuy’s music-filled streets: “Tompkins is it! Brooklyn is the place to be.”

In addition to the nominated guests, Love TV also built up its own merry team of followers, from George the Greek, an Astorian poet who serenaded Love TV at multiple locations, to a group of Italian tourists who simply fell in love with the installation and reoriented their NYC itinerary to follow Aphrodite around the boroughs. So why is Love TV so loveable? What’s the secret to its success?

A crowd gathers to watch a performance at Fordham Plaza in the Bronx / Photo: Love TV

As veterans of pop-up public space activation (Love TV has been touring the world’s public places for more than five years), Rebecca and Victoria dropped by PPS HQ to share tips and tricks over a brown bag lunch with Placemaking staff. They described how, when new to a neighborhood, city, or country and working on a tight schedule, on-the-ground partnerships and a spirit of collaboration are the absolute starting point for any pop-up event. Community partners are essential for ensuring that work fits within the local context—especially when needing to tap into neighborhood knowledge to select an appropriate site, since poor site location can make or break a performance.

Yet Love TV’s charm swells from something other than good site location and thorough research. This installation creates a public meeting space (often in very limited supply, especially in poorer neighborhoods) charged with a spirit of optimism, and uses a commonly-held human value that spans cultural, social and economic differences—love—to inspire positive community conversations and visions for the future. Every participant was asked what they would do if made mayor for a day and, Rebecca told us, this became a significant moment in each interview. With community organizing so often focused on what people don’t want, it’s rare for communities to have the opportunity to come together to define common values by sharing their hopes and desires in their own local public spaces.

So Love TV’s beauty, on one hand, lies in this curation of shared community experience in public space; but that beauty also, perhaps more strategically, comes from the way the project finds avenues for these aspirations to linger. Rebecca noted that Facebook seems to have become that place where, well beyond Love TV’s departure, participants and communities continue to dwell online to share their urban dreams for the future. Victoria and Rebecca hope that the few hours of rosy fun they bring to neighborhoods will do more than simply bridge off- and online community conversations, but also seeding longer-lasting effects–perhaps as an online archive of community strengths and needs which municipal officials, planners and advocates could use.

Love TV is back home now, resting up with Rebecca and Victoria on Queensland’s Gold Coast. But if the project sparked a little something for you, or if you think your community could use a healthy dose of Australian warmth, community imagination, and/or a whole heap of fun, get in touch with these Placemaking romancers, and see what can come when you “turn on” an intimately good time in your neighborhood.

Audience participation! Dancing in the NYC DOT's Flatiron Plaza / Photo: Love TV

"Whenever you see a corner, think of it as a square, because that puts that corner into the public realm, rather than into the traffic realm." / Photo: Cher Amio via Flickr

PPS President Fred Kent is featured as the guest on today’s episode of the cdmCyclist, a podcast hosted by Frank Peters in southern California, where we’re looking forward to hosting the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference this September 10-13. Fred not only talks about the important role that walking and bicycling play in successful places, he gives a bit of background on how he came to be involved in the Placemaking biz, and how active transportation advocates and Placemakers can strengthen each others’ efforts by working together. A short preview of Fred’s interview:

“It’s all woven together. It’s so naturally intuitive. We all share the same [desired] outcomes. Whether you’re an avid bicyclist, an avid walker, or just an avid playground user, we all want the same thing. So that’s why this conference that we’re all doing together in Long Beach in September is such a big shift away from isolating the biking and walking people, to integrating them into the broader community life and happiness that we all know happens when we create environments that are good places…

We see streets as public spaces; when they’re public spaces they’re meant to be for everyone. That starts to put into perspective the role that the automobile plays in a space because it’s only one of the users…Whenever you see a corner, think of it as a square, because that puts that corner into the public realm, rather than into the traffic realm. You can downsize or right-size or modify the role that the vehicle plays and enhance enormously the pedestrian and bicycle [uses]. Corners are where you start! That’s the hardest part, because that’s where the traffic engineer controls the outcomes more than any other place.”

Click here to visit Frank’s website and listen the full podcast of Fred’s interview.

Click here to learn more about Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, and register for the event.

We’ll see you in Long Beach!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper activities can help determine how a space can be best used in the future / Photo: 1hr photo via Flickr

In a post yesterday at Design Observer, Alexandra Lange voiced concern over the growing phenomenon of “Kickstarter urbanism.” Lange contrasts a recent Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource the construction of a prototype skylight, to be used in the proposed “Low Line” underground park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with a campaign to bring a ping pong table to nearby Gulick Park. The Low Line team raised $155,186–103% of its target–from 3,300 individual backers; the Gulick Park ping pong table only pulled in $2,145 from 19 people, meaning that it went completely unfunded since Kickstarter campaigns must hit their target in order for any money to change hands.

That means the Low Line’s campaign was so successful that the extra funds alone could have financed ping pong table outright, with plenty of extra cash left over (which the Friends of Gulick Park promised on their campaign site would “go to maintenance of the table and a supply of extra paddles and balls.”) As Lange points out:

If you are part of the physical community, you would be able to see the fruits of your donation [for the ping pong table] within months. [A donation to the Low Line campaign] is seed money for seed money. If the designers build a better skylight, then they might be able to attract more backers, then they might be able to make a deal with the city, and then they might be able to create whatever it is…The timeline for urban projects, the real-life approvals and the massive construction costs, are ill-suited for the Kickstarter approach.

But the success of major, long-term public space projects and immediate, short-term improvements doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, using Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies to enliven a public space in the short term can be an extraordinarily effective way to build community support for bigger projects. LQC improvements are a great way to test out different uses for a space and get people to see the potential for change. There’s a huge difference between saying “We’re going to build a park on that lot over there,” versus setting out some potted trees, folding chairs and tables, and organizing a few street games for local kids. It’s showing versus telling–and it’s much easier to build a movement by doing the former.

One of the eye-catching renderings that propelled the Low Line's Kickstarter campaign to success / Photo: Delancey Underground

In the case of the Low Line, doing LQC interventions on the site (an abandoned trolley terminal under Delancey Street) would be difficult, if not impossible. Dazzling renderings helped get the prototype funded by the design-savvy Kickstarter crowd, but once that work is complete and it comes time to build on-the-ground community support, locals will start asking serious questions about how they’ll actually be able to use the park. At that point, beautiful images fall back into the role of telling; to show members of the community how the park might improve their lives, the project’s organizers would do well to take a more hands-on approach.

Low Line co-founder Dan Barasch has been quoted as saying that “Some of the best design is to create a beautiful space and then allow the uses to come after it’s built.” While we are big proponents of creating flexible public spaces, we also believe that thinking about how a space will be used before the design process begins is essential to creating a great Place. In addition to getting people excited about a project by inviting them to participate, LQC interventions have the added benefit of allowing designers to see how the local community uses its public spaces in a low-impact way that requires little capital. If something doesn’t work, it’s infinitely easier to revise a design on paper than to go in and try to undo a defunct idea that’s already been cast in concrete.

The proposed site of the Low Line is to the left in blue; Gulick Park is to the right, in pink. The two sites are less than a quarter-mile apart. / Photo: Google Maps

This brings us to the power of the ping pong table. Gulick Park is one of the closest existing public spaces to the Low Line’s proposed site, making it an ideal “staging area” to test out various potential uses to see what residents want to be able to do. While the Friends of Gulick Park’s original Kickstarter campaign was for a permanent table, why not partner with the Low Line team to bring in a few inexpensive, impermanent tables? Test out the use, and see if it gets people excited.

Extending that idea, a series of LQC experiments–a farmer’s market, a pop-up cafe, a tai chi class, an over-sized chess set–would provide the FoGP with a much larger base of potential donors for future crowdsourcing campaigns to fund permanent improvements. Beyond that, these experiments could inform the design of the nearby Low Line and build a broad, engaged base of community support that will be invaluable when it comes time to start navigating the city bureaucracy to turn a trolley terminal into a public space. The end result would be a network of high-quality public spaces for the neighborhood.

“Kickstarter urbanism” is something that can effect change at multiple levels, but it’s important to take the long view, even on smaller projects. This week’s episode of the 99% Invisible radio show looks at how “bigness,” in architecture and urban design, only “pays off when it it uplifts people, gives them a sense of grandeur and purpose.” People want to be a part of big projects that inspire them, and crowdfunding can help them feel like they have ownership in major initiatives in their city. But let’s not forget: sometimes the best way to go big is to start small.

For more examples of crowdfunding sites for urbanists, check out Nate Berg’s response to Lange’s article at The Atlantic Cities blog.

The Village of Cheshire's master plan was developed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

I had the unique opportunity to participate in a “Smart Growth” bus tour of communities in North Carolina, organized last year by the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute and the Local Government Commission. We visited a variety of neighborhoods, from low-density to high, pre-car to newly developed, to learn how livable and sustainable principles can help a wide range of communities to adapt to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century.

Important lessons can be learned from each of the communities we visited. None were perfect, but as Joel Garreau pointed out in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, now-revered places like Venice and London were pieced together over centuries; flaws were frequently pointed out by critics, and fixed over time. Flaws in these places will be addressed over time as well. What is critical about each location is that they are testing out new ideas of what a sustainable future could look like. The neighborhoods that had the best sense of place were those that were created over a hundred years, and they serve as great models for how to take Traditional Neighborhood Development, Form Based Codes and other contemporary planning strategies to the next level.

My observations from the experience are below. You can click here to download my full report on the trip, which includes more detailed information on each of the communities that we visited across the state: Charlotte, Belmont, Kannapolis, Cornelius, Davidson, Black Mountain, and Asheville.

1.) Urbanism can be scaled to fit all types of development, from big city to rural: One of the major misconceptions holding back the acceptance of livability and sustainability policies across a broad spectrum of American communities is that urbanism is anti-suburb, and holds no answers for rural areas. The variety of communities seen on the North Carolina Smart Growth Tour proves otherwise. Urbanism has improved livability in communities ranging from small towns like Black Mountain; to once-rural villages like Cornelius, Belmont, and Kannapolis that are struggling to avoid losing their identity as they are being absorbed by modern auto-oriented development; all the way up to larger cities like Asheville and Charlotte that are looking to repair damage inflicted by post-WWII retrofits implemented to make way for cars.

Residential development at the Bland Street Station in Charlotte’s South End / Photo: Gary Toth

True, urbanism reaches is fullest value at higher densities. But the social benefits of having a small center where one can walk to eat breakfast, grab a quart of milk, or hang out and chat with others around a cup of coffee can be achieved even in application of urbanism principles in small – and new – rural villages. While residents of places like Black Mountain and Cornelius will probably not be able to ditch their cars entirely, these places have the potential to reduce the daily auto trip load from the average of 12-14 daily trips per household. While this may not seem significant, reducing daily trips from 14 to 12 represents a 14% decrease – a significant contraction.

The clustering around a center offered by Cornelius and Black Mountain also dramatically increases the feasibility of a transit provider offering service. Typical suburban communities are too spread out to make transit stops efficient. Even a town as small as Black Mountain creates a focal point for passengers waiting for transit service to hang out, grab a cup of coffee, and perhaps even do some business.

More importantly, creation of urbanist developments in these traditional rural areas creates a sense of place, a sense of community, and better livability.

2.) Placemaking, New Urbanism, and Smart Growth can help protect rural communities from losing their identity to suburbanism. Communities such as Davidson, Cornelius, Belmont and Kannapolis have recognized that the biggest threat to their rural landscapes is NOT livability and New Urbanism; it is business-as-usual suburban sprawl. The latter, by leading to formula-driven housing, commercial and office developments that look the same whether in New Mexico, New Jersey, or North Carolina, erodes the sense of community that preceded its arrival. Beginning in 1996, Belmont, Davidson and Cornelius adopted form based codes to help stem the tide of suburbanism emanating out from Charlotte as its metropolitan area boomed.

3.) The production line efficiency of stamping out off-the-rack buildings limits the value of New Urbanism. The Town of Belmont’s clustering of new development into small pods with connected, properly-sized streets and alleys is an important step in the right direction. However, when compared to the Antiquity at Cornelius development, where a series of building styles varies from building to building, Belmont pales. While Cornelius does not exhibit an infinite variety of architectural styles from house to house, even a mild variety in housing types here makes a dramatic difference in the sense of place. It chips away at the “Disney-esque” feeling that New Urbanism is sometimes accused of creating.

4.) Pods of New Urbanist residential development need to be within walking distance of activity centers. Not to pick on Belmont, but their dozen or so New Urbanist pods are isolated and are a mile or two from commercial activity. Belmont does have a quaint, mixed-use Main Street, but shopping options are limited and in tough competition with auto-oriented strip development located along State Route 74, with a particular concentration at the interchange with Interstate 85. Compare this to Antiquity at Cornelius, where a small town center is being built right in the midst of new residential neighborhoods; or Davidson, which has recognized the importance of its historic downtown, surrounded by hundreds of residential units adjacent to and within easy walking distance of downtown. Antiquity, Davidson and even Black Mountain offer the potential to eliminate at least one round trip a day by car. Isolated pods do not.

5.) Livable street design is equally important in all residential places, regardless of population density. Complete streets create the engineering foundation for a great street; Placemaking completes the job. On destination streets, multi-modal activity is fostered by triangulating multiple destinations within easy walking distance. Buildings are located to create the “walls” of an outdoor living room, and ground floor uses engage people on the street. This is as true in the two-story buildings in downtown Belmont as it is with the multi-story buildings on Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte. The street cross sections tame traffic and provide comfortable settings for activity; the speed of cars does not intimidate. A street does not need to have been created 100 years ago to establish the destination street feel, as the developers of Biltmore Park Town Square have proven.

6.) Malls don’t have to be totally auto-dependent, surrounded by seas of parking. Biltmore Park Town Square in Asheville proves that mall can move back towards a more sustainable form, centered on a Main Street and with office and residential mixed in.

7.) New development may need to age gracefully like a fine wine; Placemaking layered on top of modern planning can accelerate the creation of attractive patinas. New Urbanist principles such as Smart Codes, Form Based Codes, Complete Streets, and Mixed-Use Destinations create the bones for sustainable communities. However, while newly-created developments like Antiquity and Biltmore Square, there is some of that “Disney-esque” feel mentioned above. Older downtowns in Asheville and Davidson, by contrast, felt more natural and comfortable, the result of gradual informal Placemaking over the years.

Antiquity at Cornelius / Photo: Gary Toth

Click here to download the full report.

The Destination Creation organizers recorded all of the presentations given during the two-day event, which brought together leaders from the Placemaking and Place Branding movements to discuss how, as ULI’s Edward T. McMahon so succinctly put it in a recent article, “Place is more than just a location on a map.”

Fred’s talk provides an overview on Placemaking, with a specific focus on the importance of the Power of 10 philosophy and the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategy for improving a place. Gary spoke about the importance of planning for Streets as Places in creating great destinations.

We write about these ideas frequently here on the Placemaking Blog, but there’s something especially compelling about listening to someone speak about a topic that they’re passionate about, so this seemed worth sharing! You can click here to visit the conference site to hear both talks, complete with accompanying visual presentations.

Photo: Clickr.com