“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

Ian Thomas

If you’re working to make it easier for children to walk and bike to school in your community, Ian Thomas is a name that you should know! Ian is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Pedestrian and Pedaling Network of Columbia, Missouri (PedNet). As he prepares to step down from this position to run for the Fourth Ward seat in City Council in Columbia, MO, this April, we spoke with him recently about the lessons that he learned in setting up the organization’s Walking School Bus program, a nationally-recognized Safe Routes to School success story.

Ian shared his personal goals for making active transportation a citywide priority, and shed light on how drastically people’s perceptions can change from just one generation to the next—and what those changes mean for physical infrastructure.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Walking School Bus Program PedNet runs in Columbia, MO, and how it has become so successful?

PedNet’s Walking School Bus program, which started in 2003 , is a component of our Safe Routes to School (SRTS) initiative [Editor's Note: you can read more about Walking School Bus creator David Engwicht here]. This started prior to federal legislation about SRTS, and at a time when there wasn’t much funding, but SRTS was a concept that was starting to catch on in Missouri. PedNet was a young organization then, focused on street design standards, or what are known now as complete streets. We wanted some encouragement programs that would get people out walking and biking as we were trying to work with the city to put in sidewalks and bike lanes, and wanted to address a couple of oft-repeated concerns that parents have about their children walking to school–mainly traffic danger and stranger danger.

If you do an analysis of those two things, you’ll find that the number of kids walking to school was about 50% in the 1960s, but now it’s more like 15%. That’s a pretty dramatic change in behavior over just one generation. One of the main differences is that there’s a lot more traffic on the roads today, and these roads are not designed with the pedestrian in mind, let alone children.

If you design a program so parents have faith in it, it is well run, and volunteers are trained, responsible, and reliable, then parents are extremely happy that their kids are walking to school because they get out and get exercise in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s more like when the parents were in school. My generation was among that 50% walking to school so it’s sort of a throwback. We developed our program in Columbia by recruiting adults, many of them college students. We designed the routes, advertised the program, got parents to sign their kids up, and took the volunteers through the walking routes to survey them. It’s become very popular in Columbia. Last school year we had about 500 kids participate.

You mentioned that prior to SRTS there wasn’t federal legislation in place to support this concept, and funding was hard to come by. What was the process of getting that legislation in place?

There were advocates at the national level, and Deb Hubsmith was really a leading light working in Washington DC with Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, the chair of the House Transportation Committee who was primarily responsible for the federal SRTS Program. Deb worked very closely with other national advocacy groups and they made a very good case for the health benefits, academic benefits, safety, and congestion benefits of Safe Routes to School. As a result, more than $600 million was provided for the program in the 2005 Federal Transportation Bill.

Most school districts don’t provide busing for kids who live less than a mile from school. Before we started the program, we did a survey in of parents that live within a one-mile radius of a randomly selected group of schools and found that of all the kids living within that radius, only about 25% of them were walking to school. We realized if we put in place a robust Walking School Bus program, we would eliminate a tremendous amount of traffic around these schools. Congestion and air pollution would be reduced as well.

We were able to present these benefits to parents, and the people and advocacy groups mentioned before were able to present them to legislators. There was broad support for the idea of allocating federal funds to promote walking to school through programs like the Walking School Bus and through engineering investments like putting in sidewalks, slowing down traffic, and adding crosswalks in school areas. The idea was that this would hopefully move us back toward 50% of kids walking to school again.

500 children participated in Columbia’s Walking School Bus program last year / Photo: MoBikeFed via Flickr

Can you speak to the benefits, and in some cases the necessity of coordinating with various organizations to make these programs a success?

Certainly for SRTS, having a strong and diverse partnership of stakeholders and organizations from different sectors has been extremely important. As an independent, non-profit organization, PedNet had to reach out and partner with the school district. While we weren’t asking the school district to implement the program itself, but we wanted their support, and the support of the parents. The district has been a really important partner, and in some parts of the country school districts are heading local SRTS programs. We’re trying to achieve that in Columbia and transfer the program to the school so that they run it with our help.

Other important partners have been the Public Health Department and the University of Missouri. We’ve worked very closely with the health department for a dozen years, not just on walking to school, but on building more accessible communities, trails, and promoting bus use. The University of Missouri provides around 200 volunteers, most of which are students. We work closely with professors in the university to promote the program and they often offer students credit particularly in the health and education program.

We also work with other city departments, such as transportation and planning, to promote the targeting of infrastructure dollars toward streets around schools. Elected representatives play a big role in making those decisions as well as school board members. A diverse partnership has allowed us to promote the program widely within the community, as well as get some tangible help in the way of funding and volunteers.

How replicable are PedNet’s programs? How and where do you see them working in other cities around the US?

My colleague Robert Johnson is our Director of Consulting, and he has been promoting different kinds of workshops and trainings and technical assistance services to other communities, sharing what we’ve learned around the country. We have an all-day Walking School Bus workshop, which is designed for a single community with a group of around 15 or 20 leaders from that community. We gather teachers, parents, and city officials and take them through a six-hour training on how to establish a Walking School Bus program in their community, and give them the tools to get started. We also include the PowerPoint presentation that we use to train new volunteers. We try to give these communities a whole package so that they can get their own programs going pretty quickly.

So far, we’ve led about 70 or 80 these workshops in the last two years. I did one two weeks ago in Longmont, Colorado, and they had very good representation from across the community. I’m very confident that their program will really take off.

What are some of the new and exciting things that are going on with PedNet right now?

We’ve been running a pilot program for the last couple of years where parents that live further out (say five or ten miles from their children’s school), can still benefit from the Walking School Bus. We do this by setting up a staging post about half a mile to a mile from school where the parents and the school buses can drop kids off, and they walk under the supervision of our volunteers from that location to the school, and then back again in the afternoon. The schools have benefitted by having less traffic around, and they’ve been very supportive. The Columbia School Board is very actively looking at not just bringing the Walking School Bus under their own operation, but expanding the staging posts so that multiple schools can enjoy this benefit. This also helps to promote advocacy for physical improvements around the school so that more kids can walk.

We’ve done a lot of work with middle school kids teaching them the League of American Bicyclists Safety Program. It’s a lot more intense to run a bike to school program because there’s equipment involved, and safety concerns are greater. The kids really have to be well-trained in how to interact with traffic and the volunteers that lead the bike brigade have to be highly trained. In our program, they are all certified instructors who do a three-day training with the League of American Bicyclists. But it’s hard to grow that quickly.

Another component is teaching teenagers how to use the public transportation system, if they have access to one. We have a very underfunded bus system in Columbia, and that’s one of our policy campaigns: to increase public funding for the bus system so that it provides better options for everybody. But with teenagers, if they start learning and using the bus early, they will really enjoy the increased freedom in getting around town.

Is there one obstacle in particular that you often see causing trouble with programs that are getting started or trying to grow?

The way that rural communities and suburbs are built, often with everything very spread out, can make starting a Walking School Bus program very difficult. I don’t know that we’re ever going to see sidewalks on every rural highway, or lane, so there will always be some sectors that don’t convert to active or public transportation, where the car makes most sense, and that’s probably OK. I think that there needs to be a balance. I would like to look to Copenhagen, where approximately one-third of all journeys are taken by walking or biking, one-third by public transportation, and one-third by private car. I think that’s a really nice balance for a city to aspire to. In most American cities, it’s more like 80% private car, 10% public transportation, and 10% walking or biking.

Note: Ian will be stepping down as Executive Director of PedNet in January 2013, and the position will be filled by Annette Triplett, who has been working in Missouri for several years in promoting healthy food in schools.

Volunteers use bikes to transport donated goods to hard-hit areas like Red Hook and the Rockaways after Superstorm Sandy / Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh via Flickr

On Thursday following Superstorm Sandy, when much of New York City was still without power, the number of bike riders on the East River bridges rose more than 130 percent. The substantial increase in ridership, according to a study by NYU’s Rudin Center, showed that walking and biking commuters were, on average, the least frustrated commuters compared to those who drove, or used the bus or subway. While non-bikers experienced double or triple their pre-Sandy commute time depending on where they lived, walkers and bikers added only nine minutes to their commute time on average!

The volume of biking commuters was observed and counted by volunteers from Transportation Alternatives. They stationed themselves in four locations around the city to record the swelling number of cyclists and by their estimates, there were approximately 100,000 people commuting to work by bike between Wednesday, November 7^th, Friday, November 9^th, and the following Monday and Tuesday. Observers covered a lot of ground during morning, afternoon, and evening shifts from 2^nd Avenue, to Times Square, and up on 138^th Street in the Bronx.

Although strained (perhaps beyond capacity) by Sandy, New York’s bike infrastructure provided a much-needed transportation alternative when subways were down and the automobile network was stymied by traffic light shutdown. Even with approximately 300 miles of protected bicycle paths, exclusive bicycle lanes, and shared bicycle lanes available in all five boroughs, riders still experienced frustrations when traveling during the storm’s long aftermath. Brooklyn resident David Pimentelli, told The New York Times, “I’m scared to be going back to Brooklyn right now,” traveling the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. “People are running red lights, very agitated, they don’t care.”

Many PPSers are cyclists who bike to and from our HQ in Manhattan’s East Village. In the office, I’ve heard several colleagues comment on how difficult it was to pass slower moving cyclists, with traffic slowing and compressing at points. “I couldn’t believe the congestion,” said Transportation Associate David Nelson. “It was a Level-of-Service D equivalent. If [the East River Crossings] had been a highway, engineers would argue you’d have to add more capacity.”

PPS Associate Casey Wang, a resident of Brooklyn, did not travel into Manhattan during the week after the storm, but as a regular bike commuter, she knows and understands the world of cycling in NYC. Her experience that week was one of relief in owning a bicycle. Had she not, she says she would have felt “trapped.” Although cycling didn’t mean commuting during that week, she was thankful to be able to carry out her day-to-day activities in Brooklyn even though her trusted trains were down, including the L, which only resumed service the week of the 12^th.

Commuting aside, the bicycle’s role during Hurricane Sandy proved to be truly life saving. Many residents in the Rockaways and Red Hook suffered the loss of their homes, and had to rely on crowded, inadequate shelters and the generosity of friends and family—many without electricity or heat, themselves—and attending to basic needs quickly became an issue. Volunteers at Bicycle Habitat in Park Slope and Affinity Cycles in Williamsburg loaded their bicycles with panniers full of donations, including flashlights, diapers, blankets, and coats, and headed for the Rockaways. Using bicycle power allowed volunteers to bypass gridlocked traffic, nimbly move around donation centers and churches to make their drop-offs, and survey damage.

Occupy Sandy organizers demonstrated democracy in action by making use of bicycles as well. Rev. Michael Sniffen of St. Luke and St. Matthew on Clinton Avenue, an experienced Occupy Wall Street advocate, opened the church to Occupy Sandy, allowingmore than 2,500 volunteers to participate in relief efforts, including moving donated goods via bike and car. Rev. Sniffen told The Local: Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, “We’re neighbors helping neighbors, on a fleet of bicycles. It’s an image of community at its best.”

The number of NYC residents who cycle has risen considerably in the past few years. According to NYC DOT, bicycle commuting doubled between 2007 and 2011 from an average of 27,000 riders to 48,300 entering and leaving the Manhattan core each day and it aims to triple that number by 2017. Sandy has highlighted the resilience of NYC’s residents, the bicycling infrastructure’s ability to support that population, and the need to expand that infrastructure to accommodate the level of ridership seen during the storm on a permanent basis. Indicators recorded from Sandy present a strong case for the DOT to meet its 2017 goal.

To see photos of residents, commuters, and volunteers weathering the storm, visit Transportation Alternative’s Flickr page here.

For a New York City Cycling Map and information about NYC DOT’s cycling plans and initiatives click here.

At Cleveland’s Market Square Park, local residents, businesses, and leaders have invested heavily in Place Capital. / Photo: PPS

“We’ve been wrong for the last 67 years,” Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, announced in his closing address at last month’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place (PWPB) conference. “Ok. Time to admit it, and move on! We have completely screwed up transportation in this country. We can never expect to see the legislative or policy change until people understand the fundamental underlying problem. Asking for 20% more bike lanes is not enough.”

The following week, at the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, the same attitude was present. In her opening remarks to the gathering of market managers and advocates assembled at the Renaissance Hotel, USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan stated that “We’re all here because we recognize that markets can be far more than places just to buy food. We’re looking at markets as venues for revitalizing their communities.”

These statements capture a sentiment that permeated the discussion at both of the conferences that PPS organized this fall: that reform—of transportation, food systems, and so many aspects of the way we live—is no longer about adding bike lanes or buying veggies from a local farmer; the time has come to re-focus on large-scale culture change. Advocates from different movements are reaching across aisles to form broader coalitions. While we all fight for different causes that stir our individual passions, many change agents are recognizing that it is the common ground we share—both physically and philosophically—that brings us together, reinforces the basic truths of our human rights, and engenders the sense of belonging and community that leads to true solidarity.

Even when we disagree with our neighbors, we still share at least one thing with them: place.  Our public spaces—from our parks to our markets to our streets—are where we learn about each other, and take part in the interactions, exchanges, and rituals that together comprise local culture. Speaking at PWPB, Copenhagenize.com founder Mikael Colville-Andersen made this point more poetically when he said that “The Little Mermaid statue isn’t Copenhagen’s best monument. I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.”

“I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.” / Photo: Spacing Magazine via Flickr

Our public spaces reflect the community that we live in, and are thus the best places for us to begin modeling a new way of thinking and living. We can all play a more active role in the cultural change that is starting to occur by making sure that our actions match our values—specifically those actions that we take in public places. At PWPB, April Economides offered a simple suggestion for softening business owners’ resistance to bicycle-friendly business districts: tell the proprietors of businesses that you frequent that you arrived on a bike. At another PWPB session on social media, Alissa Walker advocated for users of popular geo-locative social media platforms like FourSquare to start “treating buses and sidewalks as destinations,” and ‘checking in’ to let friends know that they’re out traveling the city by foot, and on transit.

And of course, when trying to change your behavior, you often need to change your frame of mind. At the Markets Conference, Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman recalled the efforts that were required to change the way that vendors at the West Side Market thought about their role within the local community when the market decided to remain open for more days each week. While many vendors didn’t need to be open extra days, Cimperman helped to re-frame things: “[I asked people to consider:] Who are we here for? We’re not here for ourselves. We’re here for the citizens of Cleveland.”

Individual action is invaluable, but when working to spark large-scale culture change, it is even more critical to develop an overarching strategy. Putting forth a constructive vision, along with clearly-stated goals that people can relate to, provides the framework that helps to guide the individual decisions that people within a movement make as they work to change the culture on the ground. To put public space at the heart of public discourse where it belongs, we should focus on changing the way that folks talk about the issue that’s already on everyone’s mind: the economy. Bikenomics blogger Elly Blue was succinct in her explanation of why tying culture change to economics is a particularly fruitful path in today’s adversarial political climate: “We can shift the paradigm of how we build our cities; thinking about economics is a great way to do that because it cuts through the political divide.”

Great places foster human interaction & economic opportunity / Photo: Fred Kent

Across the political spectrum most of us, after years of economic hardship (and decades of wayward leadership), have learned to react to things like “growth” and “job creation” with an automatic thumbs-up. We too rarely ask questions like “What are we growing into?” and “What kind of jobs are we creating?” This brings us to the concept of Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts. Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible. Strong networks of streets and destinations are better at fostering human interaction, leading to social networks that connect people with opportunities, and cities where economies match the skills and interests of the people who live there. Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.

At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community. Today’s economy is largely driven by products: the stuff we make, the ideas we trademark, the things that we buy (whether we need them or not). It’s a system that supports the status quo by funneling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands. Leadership in this system is exclusively top-down; even small business owners today must respond to shifts in global markets that serve only to grow financial capital for investors, without any connection to the communities where their customers actually live. (For evidence of this, consider the fact that food in the average American home travels an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to table, turning local droughts and floods into worldwide price fluctuations).

Through our own Placemaking work, we’ve found that public space projects and the governance structures that produce them tend to fall into one of four types of development, along a spectrum. On one end there are spaces that come out of project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership is often behind these projects, which value on-time, under-budget delivery above all else. Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires. Next, there are spaces created through a design-led process. These spaces are of higher quality and value, and are more photogenic, but their reliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places. More and more, we’re seeing people taking the third kind of approach: that which is place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.

Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards. They make sure that the sidewalks are clean, the gardens tended, and their neighbors in good spirits. They are involved meaningfully throughout the process—the key word here being “they,” plural. Place-led processes turn proximity into purpose, using the planning and management of shared public spaces into a group activity that builds social capital and reinforces local societal and cultural values.

After participating in the discussions at PWPB and the Markets Conference this fall, we believe that the concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general. If we re-build our communities around places that put us face-to-face with our neighbors more often, we are more likely to know each other, and to want to help each other to thrive.

“It’s because our public spaces got so bad that we have led the world in developing ways to make them great,” argued Eastern Market director Dan Carmody at the Markets Conference, explaining the surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades. We have momentum on our side; if we focus on creating Place Capital, we can continue to build on that forward motion, and bring together many different voices into a chorus.

Like capital attracts capital, people attract people. As Placemakers, we all need to be out in our communities modeling the kind of values that we want to re-build local culture around. Our actions in public space—everything from saying hello to our neighbors on the street to organizing large groups to advocate for major social changes—are investments in Place Capital. Great places and strong economies can only exist when people choose to participate in creating them; they are human-powered monuments. So let’s get to work.

Meet Hatuey and Elizabeth! / Photo: Patrick Wall

Elizabeth Hamby and Hatuey Ramos Fermín are people connectors. As artists, activists, and Bronxites, their creative collaborations are all about gathering information from neighbors and presenting it in ways that allow communities to better understand themselves and the urban spaces they create. The two have worked in all kinds of public spaces, from major thoroughfares and street corners to laundromats, grocery stores, and vacant waterfronts.

Recently, they organized Boogie Down Rides: Bicycling is Art. The artists used the social act of biking as a springboard for talking with people about the creation of healthy, active urban environments. Throughout the month of May 2012, they set up many different formats for engaging the public: a temporary bike shop that simultaneously served as an education hub, group rides across the Bronx, and visioning workshops about biking and greenway initiatives in the city.

The project was organized as part of the public art exhibition, This Side of Paradise, by No Longer Empty at the Andrew Freedman Home. I recently sat down with Hatuey and Elizabeth to talk about Boogie Down Rides and the other urban projects they have in the works.

What was it about your community that inspired Boogie Down Rides? Was there a particular need that you were responding to or wanted to address?

Hatuey: Boogie Down Rides grew out of another project of mine, Transmit-Transit. It explored the idea of taxi drivers as a mode of transport in the the Bronx, and the need for cabs to move around. Public transit in the north-south direction works well but east-west not so much. No Longer Empty first approached me about that transportation project, which became a video installation at the Andrew Freedman Home that connected the gallery space to the outside world. Then we began thinking about how to physically and conceptually expand transportation within the community. Transportation was a major theme extending back to Mr. Freedman’s time, with Mr. Freedman being a major backer of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), New York City’s original underground subway. The IRT addressed the linking of open space from Central Park to Van Cortlandt Park. Extending the idea of Transmit-Transit beyond cabs, we wanted to look at bikes as another viable option to address mobility in the Bronx.

One of the great things about Boogie Down Rides is how it brings together many activities that people may not normally associate but which all contribute to healthy places. Your tagline, for example, is Bicycling is Art. Can you explain how biking, public art, and urban spaces are linked in your project?

Elizabeth: Instead of representing reality as a painting, we live it on a bike. The bike embodied action for this issue of transportation in the Bronx, where biking is a social act and a political act. Instead of designing a solution to a problem, we tried to figure out the questions that exist in real life through the experience of biking. We both live in the Bronx. It’s part of our day-to-day reality, and because we’re artists, we have a compulsion to make what we see public.

The project also involved community visioning sessions for the Bronx’s longer-term development. What came out of these sessions?

Elizabeth: The visioning sessions were really spearheaded by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which was just launching an interactive toolkit to gather data and address threats to active transportation and public space. They were key in leading some of the concrete visioning work happening around the Sheridan Expressway, where dangerous connections make it unsafe to bike between the parks. Rather than focusing on cause and effect, the visioning sessions were about figuring out opportunities for improvement. Safety—specifically, feeling safe in public—was an ongoing theme in the conversations we had with our neighbors.

Bronxites show some love for their bikes at a Boogie Down Rides event / Photo: Boogie Down Rides

Throughout your various interactions with the public, did you come across questions or reactions that particularly surprised you?

Elizabeth: One of the most surprising things that we learned from Boogie Down Rides was the number of adults—particularly women—who had never learned how to ride a bike, and who were very excited to find out about opportunities for biking in the Bronx. In the instance of another project, Mind the Gap/La Brecha, we talked a lot with folks in our neighborhood about their ideas for the waterfront. One of the critical components to the waterfront that came up over and over again was the basic need for clean public restrooms!

Collaboration seems integral to your work. What other community partners were vested in Boogie Down Rides?

Hatuey: Conversations and collaborations were important from the start; we worked with Transportation Alternatives, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bronx River Alliance, Bike the Bronx, Bronx Health REACH, Partnership for Parks, Velo City…

Elizabeth: We also had a meeting with City Planning and the Mayor’s Office where we were able to show our recommendations. It was perhaps an unusual case in that the Mayor’s Office and City Planning came to us. Our collaborations really grew organically, and our project was timely in terms of how they related to conversations already happening in New York about biking, complete streets, and the South Bronx Greenway Plan.

And did people express any misconceptions that you were able to address through these collaborations?

Elizabeth: I think that artists working in public the way that we do are often confused with non-profit or other community-based organizations. We often talk to people about the role that artists play as citizens and neighbors in our communities—and the ways that we hope that our work can help make our neighborhoods more safe, lively, and liveable.

Any advice you would give to communities who are trying to build healthier places?

Elizabeth: You have to remember the factor of critical mass. If you notice a problem, someone else probably has too, so it becomes about working together in a long-term way.

Hatuey: It’s realizing there are already resources within the community, and that becomes the main point of departure. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You want to create space to bring stakeholders together.

Elizabeth: Also humility and willingness to listen and genuinely collaborate—those are really important, in regard to attitude. There’s a lot of work that goes into working together.

Hatuey: Listening is the biggest thing, listening with a big ear.

Kit Keller

Kit Keller, Executive Director of the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (APBP) chatted with us recently about her organization’s presence at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, the vital role that women have played (and continue to play) in the bicycle movement, and how walking and bicycling advocates can make the most of the new federal transportation bill. Whether you’re attending the conference or following it online, Kit shares what’s special about this year’s conference and the exciting things to expect from the National Women’s Bike Summit immediately following it.

Do you think this Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place will be different than past conferences?

This is an exciting year for the conference. By adding in Placemaking, it emphasizes the importance of walking and biking to livability and good community planning. All too often, we see very over-engineered dead space facilities where there’s no sense of place and no people because there’s no destination. To integrate Placemaking into the conversation about biking and walking is brilliant.

Locating the conference in Long Beach is also interesting, because they really work on being innovative in this area. To have the leadership in the city be so visibly supportive before, during, and presumably after the conference is wholesome and hopefully will inspire more cities to become engaged in walking and biking issues. Long Beach’s mission to be the most bicycle friendly city in America is pretty exciting and is a great example. Go Long Beach! By envisioning our goals, we can make stuff happen. Hopefully we’re entering into a period of the Olympics of walking and biking for city governments.

What will the APBP be doing at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place?

The APBP views the conference as akin to our own conference, in that we make it a point to hold our annual meetings at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. We provide the opportunity for members to get together at booths and we hold our in-person board meetings there. We will also be presenting the APBP Lifetime Achievements Awards, the Professional of the Year Private and Public Sector Awards, and Young Professional of the Year Award. In addition, we will present our board candidates, as we will be having our board member election following the conference. We have eight candidates running for four board positions—and five of those candidates are women. I think this reflects the growing interest of women in our field.

Why is women’s bicycling such a hot topic?

It’s a hot topic everywhere, it seems. At conferences like the National Bike Summit, people want to talk about getting the number of women riders up. Women currently are about 24% of the ridership compared to men. The conversation got started a couple of years ago with a survey APBP did on women’s cycling that grew out of the International Scan on Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety and Mobility. We saw so many more women cycling in the cities that we visited outside of North America than in the States, so we set out to figure out why that was. We imagined our survey would only be answered by a few hundred women but it went viral and we got 13,000 responses.

Women are changing the landscape of bicycling advocacy / Photo: Sustainable Flatbush via Flickr

What we learned is that women are very worried about safety issues on the roadway, and that many of the facilities that are suitable for a more recreational or more assertive and experienced rider aren’t inviting to new riders or riders carrying children with them who are just looking to have a pleasant ride to work or other destinations. So the conversation is one you see not only in professional and advocacy circles, but you see it in the industry as well. Older male cyclists are becoming a diminishing part of the market. The bike industry needs to be seeking new markets, and women’s cycling is quite natural.

At Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, we’re excited about a visioning session on doubling the number of women who ride bikes. The session will be small group discussions exploring how to break down the barriers that cause women to not ride, or not ride as much as their male counterparts. We will utilize real world scenarios in order to look at some of those issues. The aim is to offer new perspectives to people so they can take action in their own communities in an effort to double the number of women riding. The National Women’s Bike Summit will directly follow Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place on Thursday, September 13^th, and we’re thrilled that it will be presented by APBP and the League of American Bicyclists. Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is very supportive and has offered space for that discussion to happen.

The keynote speaker for the summit on Thursday is Leah Missbach Day, co-founder of World Bicycle Relief, an organization that has captured the imagination of a lot of people to empower women and girls in developing countries. The WBR works at getting these women bicycles to help them get to school to get an education, and to work toward improving their lives.

We’re going to do six break-out sessions with a variety of facilitators and speakers on health, recreation, racing, women who have children who cycle, and women who are running programs to encourage more women to cycle.

Can you talk about the impact that women have had on the active transportation movement over the long term? 

Women are very concerned about the health of their families, and children, and their broader communities so it seems natural to me that more women would be coming into the planning and engineering field seeking to build a career around making communities more walkable and bicycle-friendly. I think just from the sheer amount of women who have received APBP awards in recent years, it really indicates the growing importance of the role of women in our field.

What can planners and engineers do to make the most of MAP-21?

It seems to be a point of collaboration across people working in public health, safety, sustainability, Placemaking, and all types of professions that resonate with complete streets. APBP has been working closely with the National Complete Streets Coalition. We’re taking MAP-21 and utilizing all possible avenues for funding bicycling and walking, not just through the transportation alternatives aspect, but also through all of the other transportation funding. Obviously, congress was not thinking about Placemaking when they created the opportunity for states to opt out of spending federal money on bicycle and pedestrian projects. The most important thing that professionals in our field can do right now is to work with their states’ Departments of Transportation to make sure that they don’t opt out.  Since available funding is going to drop under MAP-21, our job is to make sure every penny that is available gets utilized effectively.

What can planners and engineers do to improve the next transportation bill?

We need to start ourselves, and take our policy makers on bike rides or walks through our communities to show them what was funded, and what else needs to be funded. We have to show them how people are walking and biking to school, work, the library, and the grocery, and to socialize. People are utilizing the facilities that have been put in place, whether they’re trails, cycle tracks, or protected bike lanes, and policy makers need to see that. Get them out to see that people who are too young or old to drive, if they can get around a community and if the community is safe for them, then it’s likely to be safe for people of all ages. The young and the old (their children and their parents) count on being able to walk and bike for transportation and for health.

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For those of you interested in learning more about how to foster great streets and communities, register today for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place, North America’s premier walking and bicycling conference, taking place September 10-13th, 2012 in Long Beach, CA. Join more than 1,000 planners, engineers, elected officials, health professionals, and advocates to gain the insights of national experts in the field, learn about practical solutions to getting bike and pedestrian infrastructure built, and meet peers from across the country.

Bicyclists fill a street during a Critical Mass ride in Vancouver / Photo: David Pritchard via Flickr

In 1980, the very first Pro Bike conference was convened in Asheville, North Carolina. At the time, the movement to carve out more space for bicycling on North American streets was young, and the first conference was attended by around 100 people. Thirty-two years later, the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is expected to draw a thousand active transportation advocates to Long Beach, California. The expanded conference title reflects the dramatic transformation of bicycling advocacy into today’s active transportation movement, as more and more people have begun to realize the importance of thinking of streets as places that tie communities together.

Recently, PPS’s Gary Toth and Brendan Crain had the opportunity to chat, informally, with Dan Burden, Andy Clarke, and Charlie Gandy, three friends and advocates who have played very active roles in this transformation. The following is a transcript of that conversation, looking back over the past three decades and reflect on lessons learned thus far.

Brendan: Can you each start out by talking about how you got involved in advocating for active transportation?

Dan: I started with advocacy around 1962, by promoting some biking events. Then very quickly folks like Charlie Gandy and I started working through the American Youth Hostels to put on even bigger events. Charlie, I don’t know what time you entered the scene, probably the mid or late 1960s?

Andy: Are you kidding? He wasn’t even born in 1960! [Laughter]

Charlie: Geez you old coot, what are you talking about? I showed up, and you and I met, in about ’85 or ’86, through Youth Hostels.

Dan: Back then, it really was the AYH playing a huge role. It was a concurrent evolution. The League of American Bicyclists had started up just about that time in the early 1960s, although the real advocacy started with recreation. The active transportation side, the health side, and the bike commuter side probably didn’t get a good launch until the early 1970s.

At the first Pro Walk/Pro Bike—actually, back then it was just Pro Bike—we honored Bob Cleckner. Bob was the first full-time paid professional in America to go around and really try to drum up interest in this stuff, starting with bike lanes; he was my inspiration. He was getting paid to go around the country and get adults to stop thinking of bicycling as something that was just for children. He worked for what was then called the Bicycle Manufacturers Association. We shared offices with them back in those early years when we started the Bicycle Federation of America [which later became the National Center for Bicycling and Walking].

Andy: As Dan said, the League was re-formed back in the mid-60s. They’d been absent for about ten years, and it was because of the support of Schwinn and the bike industry that the League got back on its feet. By the early 1970s, we started to work more on advocacy issues. The oil crisis in 1973 was a defining moment. One is always bitten in the ass by history because you think you’re doing something for the first time and it never turns out that you are. But I would be so bold as to say that the renaissance we’ve seen in the last 4-5 years in bicycling is probably the biggest boost we’ve seen since that oil crisis and the explosion of interest in cycling . Communities realized again that perhaps we shouldn’t have completely thrown cycling away.

When I moved here from the UK in 1985, the state of bike advocacy was such that we were able to convince the Immigration and Nationalization Service that letting me in here to be the League’s government relations director would not be taking a job from anyone else who was an American in the country. In 1988 there literally wasn’t anyone doing that. I think the Rails to Trails Conservancy was probably three years old? There was no America Bikes, no Bikes Belong. A lot of the groups that we work with now weren’t around yet. In the intervening 25 years we’ve seen things come a long way.

It’s very interesting—you can chart the progress of where the inspiration for advocacy was coming from and where groups were formed, particularly at the state and local level, by just looking at their names. In the 1970s the League was the only show in town, and we were doing a lot of advocacy on getting the legal status of cyclists straight. Groups that were formed in the wake of that are groups like the League of Illinois Bicyclists. Then in the 80s the Bicycle Federation took over and groups that formed became Federations. Charlie Gandy led the way in the 90s and started the Coalition movement with the Texas Bicycle Coalition (TBC). In the 2000s, groups started using declarative titles like Georgia Bikes! or Bike Delaware. Now folks are forming Alliances, and many are formally adding walking to their names as well. It’s uncanny how that catches on, and you can tell when a group was established by the title they give themselves.

Charlie: Going to Copenhagen back in ’76 and riding a bike really opened my eyes to the notion of a bicycle being a respected and valuable tool in an urban place. That stayed latent for me until about 1990, when I formed the TBC with a bunch of other interested cyclists that were looking for political respect and power. That put me in contact with Dan Burden, who was one of the first bike professionals within a state agency, at the DOT in Florida. He came to Austin, and I put him up as an expert in this field in front of our state DOT leadership. Our tactic was to get bike coordinators at the state and local level within the DOT—this was ahead of ISTEA mandating it—and Dan convinced them that it would be smarter to fold their hand and just do that, rather than take us on. It was really a powerful lesson for me as a political organizer to see Dan’s ability, as the guy from out of town, to be effective at moving an agency to do something very tangible.

That started my learning about how we could turn the crank at the state and local levels and improve conditions for cyclists, organizing to give them a cohesive voice. I started attending Pro Bike in the early 90s as the Executive Director of the TBC. Then in ’94 I went to work for Bill Wilkinson at the Bicycle Federation, with Andy and Dan. Andy and I were protégés of Dan’s, and Wilkinson was pulling the strings. I remember going to my first Pro Bike and thinking what an incredible learning institution and networking opportunity this thing was.

Gary: I think we should get Charlie talking about how he did the first Walk Audits for FHWA in the mid-90s.

Charlie: In about ’96, Wilkinson comes out with his hand up in the air barely holding onto this piece of a proposal and he says “I’ve got something here related to walking, does somebody want to take this?” At that time, both Burden and Clarke turned their heads and walked away. [Laughter] Nobody wanted to do walking stuff. But I was working on my first million frequent flyer miles, and I jumped at the opportunity to go around to Grand Rapids, and the Bronx, and Snowmass, and a bunch of other places. “Pedestrian Roadshows,” is what they called them.

Dan: Actually, walk audits really started in the 80s. When I came back from Australia after doing some work on bicycling there, I realized that the real answer to reactivating and re-energizing cities was in the walkability side. So starting around 1981, at the Florida DOT, we changed my job title instantly. And that was the origin of the first ped-bike coordinator! I was having trouble with my engineers, when they would design intersections; they were getting them completely wrong. So I said we need to go out and walk around them and understand. It was later, when Bill saw what I was doing, that he realized that there was funding that could be secured for this, and later developed the Pedestrian Roadshows.

Charlie: That was back when they were referring to the sidewalks as “auto recovery zones,” right?

Gary: So the pedestrians were impact attenuators?  [Laughter]

Dan Burden leads a walk audit in Linden, Michigan / Photo: Michigan Municipal League via Flickr

Dan: But looking even further back, there are a few people that I’d be remiss in not bringing up, who were critical to the formation of the bikeped movement as we know it now. These people did things that nobody was doing. The first is Dr. Paul Dudley White, who was the heart surgeon for Eisenhower that really launched biking as an adult activity. He got the attention of the press, and he did it by pushing the idea that people needed exercise. Way before the modern health movement got going, he realized that benefit. He was probably doing his work starting around 1959, but he really was starting to command serious press until 61. This was around when I was starting to realize this is what I wanted to do with my life, so Dr. White was a hero of mine.

Another name that should not be lost to history is Dr. Clifford Graves, a surgeon in San Diego who started the International Bicycle Touring Society and got big-name adults to go on bicycle tours in Europe and the US. He also started bicycle clubs for teenagers in the California area, and all of those preceded anything going on with the League. Fred DeLong was an engineer that worked for one of the big battery manufacturers out of Philadelphia, and his work preceded John Forester‘s Effective Cycling program, by about four years. DeLong helped raise awareness about the technical side of adult bicycling—how to brake, how to turn, how to set up your bike—he really put the science into it.

Brendan: The idea that just getting adults to ride bikes was seen as broadening the constituency is so radically different from how we think of bicycling now. Bikeped advocates have been very good, historically, at drawing new people and new groups in, and that’s clearly been important in terms of this going from something that was very informal, driven by zealous nuts, to creating a contemporary movement that’s very broad and formal, with so many people dedicating their careers to bicycling and pedestrian issues. Just thirty years ago, there were only two or three people doing this work full-time!

Andy: It’s been really interesting to see how the bike movement has provided the passion and fuel for the Safe Routes to Schools movement, which has taken us into uncharted territory in terms of constituencies that now care about Safe Routes and the issues around that. The same is true of Complete Streets. The walking movement is such a more prominent issue for the broader public today; it’s more marketable, immediate, and unimpeachable. But without bicyclists at the start of that, there wouldn’t be the walking movement or the active transportation movement or the Complete Streets or the Safe Routes movements that we have now. It’s important that we’ve been able to, in certain cases, sort of let go and let these branches grow off.

Charlie: I’d like to build on that because, as the bicycle movement has become more mainstream, it has made sense for us to broaden the perspective and to partner up and to see the value in the coalition with pedestrians and a realization that what we’ve been talking about is Placemaking—and I remember learning early on from Dan about how instilling that vision of the place puts bicycling in context. We self- identify as bicyclists and we’ve organized a political voice around that, and we’ve found through coalition that we have more of a mainstream voice. Today, it’s the health people and women bicyclists that are really emerging, at least in the US, as fresh voices within the movement.

Gary: It seems like a lot of this type of advocacy starts with biking first and then branches out to walking and related activities; why do you think that is? And why did the bicycling movement emerge so many decades ahead of the walking movement in the first place?

Dan: A bit of historic perspective on that: the pedestrian movement was actually occurring as bicycling was emerging, but cycling came out more strongly, I think, because it had technological side to it that adults could get into—where a lot of people, even to this day, think of walking as, well… pedestrian! That it’s something you try to get away from as an adult.

I think we should keep in mind that there was a pedestrian movement that was growing up simultaneously, and it wasn’t as though the bicyclists branched out and created the pedestrian movement, although many are reaching across the aisle now. There used to be a small annual pedestrian conference in Boulder, Colorado back in the 80s and 90s; it was the only place where people were really talking about these issues for a long time. Those went on for 12 -13 years before the city council finally stopped funding them. Even a few years before that, Donald Appleyard organized one of the first meetings to talk about traffic calming, in Seattle. Looking at these early strings, we can see where they finally stitched one another together.

Once they become good advocates for bicycling, an issue they care so much about, they begin to realize they’re not the only ones that are being overlooked. So they get into the pedestrian side, and eventually they start to realize, well, we need destinations and places to go for this stuff to work, and then it broadens out from there.

Andy: This is absolutely true of Complete Streets. For the longest time, we banged on about what was then called “Routine Accommodation,” and how we wanted bicyclists and pedestrians to be routinely accommodated in all projects. We almost got that principal written into the transportation bills in ’91 and ’98, but it just wasn’t resonating. Finally, in the early 2000s, Martha Roskowski of America Bikes convened a phone conference with bunch of smart marketing people, and that was where the phrase “Complete Streets” was coined, I think by David Goldberg, from Smart Growth America. Almost overnight, Complete Streets started to carry a tune. This was something we’d written about with different names for years! [Editor's Note: The term "complete streets" has been attributed to several people in different accounts, including Martha Roskowski.]

A Complete Street is a street where everyone feels comfortable, whether they're in a car, on a bike, or on their own two feet / Photo: Complete Streets Coalition via Flickr

Brendan: Looking back over the past few decades of advocacy, what are your thoughts on how the movement has evolved, broadly? Did you expect to be this far along, or think you would be even farther? And what impact would you say PWPB has had since the first conference in 1980?

Dan: I discovered recently, while having lunch with Richard Killingsworth, that it was a presentation at a PWPB conference that totally turned around his attitude toward his work at the CDC. He went back and said ‘Folks, it’s not about curing diseases anymore, it’s about preventing them.’ But no one would listen to him. And he worked for a year and finally got folks like Richard Jackson, Andy Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin to take a different approach. Not long after, he got funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2001 to leave the CDC and start Active Living by Design, and over time Frumkin and Dannenberg moved out to Washington, and Richard Jackson went to UCLA where he’s still advocating for Healthy Places. So if we stop to think about it now, there are billions of dollars now being focused on health through active living, and that started at a Pro Bike conference. There wouldn’t have been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation putting money into this if it wasn’t for Richard Killingsworth realizing that there had to be a new approach for the CDC.

Andy: Looking at the movement, in terms of the numbers—specifically the number of people involved, the number of staff in advocacy groups and government—the movement has come an enormous way. It’s like night and day. It’s been extraordinary to see that and be a small part of it. But on the other hand, 30 years is a helluva long time. In terms of outcomes, it’s hard to be too optimistic about the impact that we’ve had because we’ve still seen 30 years of really awful community development in the majority of communities across the country. It’s a really big ship to turn. We really have to step up our game to make a much bigger change in outcomes—not in the next 30 years, but the next three years if we’re going to have a legacy we can all be proud of. We can’t wait 30 years to have another incremental step up in the number of people walking and biking.

Dan: There’s an enthusiasm that you don’t see in other professions and other trades that is a hallmark of what the walkability and the bicycling movements. If I were to project forward about what’s coming, we have to get the vast majority of people who come into the movement to realize that it’s the Placemaking—the creation of places for social exchange—that’s the missing piece. We’ve got to get away from just thinking of it as active transportation and think of it as rescuing our cities, redesigning our cities for people, and building the economy around the scale of the human foot. Until we do that walking can’t work, and bicycling can’t work.

I agree with Andy: we can’t wait 30 years; three years may be all that we’ve got. We’re talking about a totally wrecked economy, one where we keep trying to go back to building things that cannot be sustainable, cannot even be maintained; if we keep doing things the way they were done in the past, the US is at risk of becoming a third-world nation. There’s more at stake here than just giving ourselves a nice place to ride a bike or to walk.

Charlie: One of the identifying characteristics of this group is its collaborative spirit. I’ve noticed in my travels that that’s a fairly unique thing. Throughout the past few decades, there’s been a whole lot of innovation and invention going on, and guys like Dan, Andy, Pete Lagerway, and so many others have been freely sharing these ideas. I think that’s true at PWPB as well as one on one, and I think that’s a unique element of our success.

Andy: I would absolutely echo that; that’s a really important thing to identify. You see, from one consulting firm to another, people just want to help each other get the right answer, and just want to get a good outcome. That is pretty remarkable, I think.

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You’ve read about the past thirty years of bikeped advocacy–if you want to become part of the next crucial three, join us in Long Beach this September 10-13 for Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. Remember–standard registration ends at midnight on August 10th, at which point registration rates will rise, so click here to register for the conference today!

"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!

For the itinerant bicyclist: Are you always looking for somewhere new to go on your bike? Do you prefer to roll even when traveling just a couple of blocks, for the sheer joy of it? The folks behind WalkScore have just released BikeScore, a set of maps that show how “bikable” 10 major US cities are based on bike infrastructure, topography, and the density of attractions and amenities in various neighborhoods. Now, you can figure out exactly which parts of town are best for living life in the foam saddle.

For the thrifty bicyclist: This Wednesday, May 16th, marks the end of the earlybird registration period for September’s Pro Walk / Pro Bike conference in Long Beach, which will focus on the theme “Pro Place.” Over the course of the week, conference-goers will be able to learn about how to strengthen their cities by and network with other bicyclists (and pedestrians!) from around the country. You can save big on registration for one more day, so don’t dawdle!

For the activist bicyclist: Also on Wednesday, you can show solidarity with fallen bicyclists by taking part in the 10th Annual Ride of Silence. The Ride’s mission is to “HONOR those who have been injured or killed, RAISE AWARENESS that we are here, and ask that we all SHARE THE ROAD.” As far as bicycling has come in the past few years, it’s important to remember that hundreds of people are killed while riding in the US every year, and there is still important work to do to create safer streets for everyone.

For the workaday bicyclist: The League of American Bicyclists is promoting May 14-18 as “National Bike to Work Week,” with a big push toward Friday’s nationwide Bike to Work Day. So throw the dress shoes in a backpack, put on your sneakers, and grab a comb to counteract any instances of helmet hair: this is the week to bike to work! You can also find a full listing of events happening during May as part of the LAB’s Bike Month on their website.

People chatting at a demo bike share station in New York City / Photo: Planetgordon.com via Flickr

With yesterday’s big announcement from the NYC DOT, bike shares are in the news again. Here in New York, we’re getting excited about the possibilities on the horizon as hundreds of bike share stations start popping up all over town. These stations don’t just improve mobility and transportation options–they’re also wonderful tools for activating public spaces. In fact, bike share stations are ideal for engendering what we call Triangulation, which Holly Whyte explained as “the process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other.”

Here are three reasons that bike share stations are ideal triangulators:

1. They’re natural conversation-starters: You can’t participate in bike share without visiting a bike share station. Stations bring people together around a common interest, giving them an opportunity and a reason to communicate with people they might not otherwise meet. Being that they serve as nodes in a transportation system, these stations also have a moderate sense of urgency to them: everyone there is trying to get somewhere else. This lowers the barrier-to-entry for casual social interaction for people on the shyer end of the spectrum, since it’s easy to smile and say “Nice helmet!” or “It’s a great day for a ride!” to someone as you both hop on bikes. Since instances of social interaction lead to a desire for greater contact, bike share stations make for happier, more social public spaces overall.
2. They attract a stream of diverse users at all times of day & night: A truly great place facilitates a mix of uses over time; if there’s nothing to keep a space active at night, it can create uncomfortable or even unsafe conditions for passersby, and detract from the entire community. Bike share stations ensure a steady flow of people through a space even after dark, keeping “eyes on the street” and making other constructive after-hours uses more likely. This extends the usefulness of a place as a social hub for the surrounding community.
3. They act as casual landmarks that concentrate activity: Bike share stations, with their colorful bikes and signage, help to make a place more comfortable and navigable for people who might not be familiar with a neighborhood. Think of the relief you felt the last time you were walking around, lost, and stumbled onto a subway or bus station; transit nodes help to re-orient us when we get turned around, chipping away at the sense of alienation that sometimes accompanies visiting a new place. The visual impact of these stations is also great for surrounding businesses and attractions, as the identifying signage and maps often highlight nearby points of interest.

Wanna go for a walk? / Photo: JaneJacobsWalk.org

The annual Jane’s Walk Weekend is just around the corner! On Saturday, May 5th, and Sunday, May 6th, hundreds of free walking tours will take place in cities around the world. We were going to try to round up the best walks for people interested in Placemaking but, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Jane was the doyenne of human-scaled urbanism, it’s pretty much impossible to find a tour that isn’t great in that regard. Instead, we sifted through all of the listings to find some of the most original and offbeat tours on the roster.

We highly encourage you to visit the two main websites with listings of walks around the world, JaneJacobsWalk.org and JanesWalk.net, to see what’s going on in your city or town, whether it involves unicycles and ugly houses, or a good old fashioned exploration of the history, people, and architecture of a unique place.

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City of Labyrinths Project (Toronto, Ontario)
Toronto, where Jane lived during the latter half of her life, will be the setting for more walks than any other city during the weekend; still, several stand out. This walk ont he 5th, organized by a group that aims “to place a semi-permanent labyrinth within walking distance of every Torontonian,” celebrates the city’s existing sidewalk mazes, and explores the history of labyrinth design.

Cityscape/Soundscape (Toronto, Ontario)
Most walking tours tend to rely more on what we see than what we hear, but Toronto will play host to a “soundwalk” on the 5th. This tour will “show how Toronto’s diverse downtown spaces can be distinguished by their own characteristic soundscapes.” Sounds cool enough already, but take a look at the photo–it seems this walk will even include blindfolds to heighten your hearing!

Food Foraging (Flesherton, Ontario)
For a thoroughly rural ramble (say that five times fast), head to Flesherton on the 6th to learn all about what can and can’t be eaten during a walk in the woods. Organizer David Turner “will also point out plants, roots, barks and leaves that can be used for tinctures, salves and teas.”

IRUBNY Celebrates Gramercy Park (New York, New York)
Artist Carol Caputo will lead participants in New York on a walk around Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood on the 5th, armed with paper and crayons to create rubbings of the architectural details that define this historic district.

Levee Disaster Bike Tour (New Orleans, Louisiana)
Led by an organization lobbying for safer levees to protect New Orleans (sad that we even need sustained advocacy for that), this bike tour on the 6th will visit the sites of two levee breaches that flooded the Crescent City shortly after Hurricane Katrina blew through town.

Not a Cakewalk (Toronto, Ontario)
There are a number of food-related tours scheduled during the weekend, but only one will focus specifically on the design of bakeries, and “illuminates the relationship between emotions and desire with architecture.” The walk will take place in Toronto’s West End neighborhood on the 5th.

Seersucker Ride (Sacramento, California)
If you’re the kind of person who regrets not being born during the Victorian Era, you’re in luck! On the 6th, the group Sacramento Tweed will lead an olde-fashioned bike tour of the historic city core “that encourages period dress and a more relaxed style of riding.”

Silent Midnight Walk (Regina, Saskatchewan)
If the Cityscape/Soundscape walk in Toronto sounded fun but a bit too easterly, you can experience another soundwalk in Regina on the evening of the 5th. During this one-hour traipse, “participants may choose to practice walking meditation or to simply allow their senses to take over.” Tranquil or spooky, depending on your perspective, it certainly sounds like an interesting experience!

Ugly Houses (Karlskrona, Sweden)
There’s not much information available about this walk on the website, but the title suggests that, if you happen to be in Karlskrona on the 6th, this walk has potential to be very entertaining!

Unicycling for Change (Bozeman, Montana)
While Jane’s Walk Weekend will feature several biking tours, we only found one that will be conducted via unicycle! If you’re a fan of transportation of the one-wheeled variety, head out to Montana on the 5th to help promote the cause! (Don’t worry, the route includes several breaks for weary legs).

All Photos: JaneJacobsWalk.org

Meet Matt!

In our new Citizen Placemaker series, we’ll be chatting with some of the folks we meet in our travels and through our online interactions to learn about the amazing and inspiring work that they do, and to see how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

This brings us to Matt Lechel (@mlechs), a community change agent in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Matt is one of the founding board members of the IDEA Association, a non-profit that works to create structures that improve community health. On the clock, he works as the executive director of Kalamazoo Collective Housing (an affordable housing cooperative that works to develop neighborhood leaders and engaged citizens) and as an event manager for Volunteer Kalamazoo, where he organizes community days of service, specifically focusing on neighborhood safety initiatives. We met Matt on Twitter, and were impressed by his deep level of community involvement. So now, without further ado…

What is it about your place (city/neighborhood/block/etc) that inspires you to do the work that you do?
Kalamazoo is filled with incredible art, bright music, a growing and somewhat progressive downtown, and for the most part, people who seem to genuinely care about making the place they live better. Kalamazoo is also filled with some fascinating juxtapositions. The city is home to award-winning innovators in the field of anti-racism training and yet some neighborhoods are still so racially segregated that, at times, I wonder how much progress we’ve really made since the Civil Rights Movement. Kalamazoo is a community of truly amazing philanthropy and community investment, yet a huge chunk of that wealth was made through extremely negligent pollution of the Kalamazoo River. My motivation and curiosity stems from a desire to understand why these conflicting truths exist, and what we can do differently or better to fix them.

Probably wherever I called home, I would still have an insatiable desire to work in whatever small ways I can. But I do think Kalamazoo offered some special inspiration to me, particularly in terms of its cultural and political community.  As I began my journey to understand and know Kalamazoo (which is ongoing and mostly a learning experience), the real inspiration came from the people I met. I found people at the end of nearly every discovery or realization I made waiting for me with open arms, saying, “Glad you’re up to speed Matt, we could use your help, dig in.” In a town like Kalamazoo, it feels like every door is open; it just depends on if you want to step through it or not.

It sounds like your route to community involvement was very organic. Can you say a bit about what kinds of things you saw happening around Kalamazoo that led to the creation of the IDEA Association?
There was a coffee shop in Kalamazoo called the Strutt that likened itself to a public cafeteria—and it wasn’t that far off. People flocked to The Strutt: artists, bohemians, poets, weirdos, hipsters, square dancers; it was such a vibrant cultural hub. As someone who works in the nonprofit/social entrepreneurship field, I started to think about the impact this place was having. This bar was a haven for artistic expression, group planning meetings, drawings and poetry—it was probably one of the most important places that existed for some locals. That’s an important and empowering realization: that “Places” don’t have to be formal, long-standing institutions; in fact, sometimes the best places are ones that sprout up out of nothing and lack traditional forms of structure or policy.

IDEA Association was created in an attempt to help fill the gap between art, culture, and social progress—and support the creation of organizations that improved Kalamazoo while operating outside of those traditional structures. We started organizing these weird, unique events all over Kalamazoo where we would have live music, participatory community art projects, and we would survey attendees, asking all sorts of questions about what the most important relevant social issues were to them, and what solutions they knew of or imagined.

The Open Roads Bike Program was created by neighbors who saw a problem on their street and wanted to make a difference. / Photo: IDEA Association

You describe what IDEA does as “participatory project design.” What exactly is that, and how has it worked in past projects?
Strengthening connections between cultural experiences and social problem-solving was only one part of the work we wanted to do. We wanted to accomplish something tangible. For the first few years, we batted around lots of ideas about  how participatory project design would manifest itself. Eventually, through our work with the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and O.N.E. Place, we realized that there are many people seeking to do amazing work in our community who lack 501(c)3 status, and are thus ineligible to receive even small grants. On top of that, many nascent groups struggle with communication and organizational development issues—some of the very same issues IDEA had worked through. As a result, we began to serve as a fiscal sponsor to emerging grassroots projects in town.

An early success project is the Open Roads Bike Program. Open Roads was started 36 months ago by Ethan Alexander and a couple of neighbors who saw a problem on their street in Kalamazoo’s Edison neighborhood and wanted to make a difference. They started hosting weekly “Fixapaloozas” in Ethan’s garage. Pretty soon, kids and parents alike were coming to check it out, neighbors started to donate bikes, and by the end of the summer every single kid on the street had their own bike—and the skills to fix it themselves. Open Roads considered becoming their own 501(c)3 nonprofit, but decided they’d rather focus on doing what they love: working with kids, fixing bikes. This past summer, through fiscal sponsorship with IDEA, Open Roads got a significant grant from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation that took their program citywide.

We’ve found that there are so many people just like the Open Roads crew, who are outrageously talented and simply want to make an impact. They just need some of the community’s resources pointed in their direction. We help them identify and go after those resources.

"Kalamazoo feels like a small enough place that you can literally get to know every single person in it if you try hard enough." / Photo: Paladin27 via Flickr

One of our key Placemaking Principles is that “you can’t do it alone.” How important is collaboration in your efforts to improve Kalamazoo?
For me, collaboration is just a way of life. When someone brings me a new idea, the first thing I want to do is connect them to everyone in town who cares about similar issues. And Kalamazoo feels like a small enough place that you can literally get to know every single person in it if you try hard enough.

While collaboration can feel forced these days as it becomes a mantra for foundations and funders, when it happens organically and cooperatively, it’s so obvious and simple. IDEA’s fiscal sponsorship work is collaborative by its very nature. There are these really fantastic Zen-like moments when we’re meeting with various partner organizations. We’ll have 10 people in a room, all of whom have these grand visions, but only $1,000 in seed funding. People start to realize the immense amount of resources it will take to achieve the impacts that match their visions, and finally someone will speak up and say something like, “Hey, all of our resources are so limited…shouldn’t we be asking ourselves what investments we can make together that serve all of our collective needs?” And then they create these masterful program collaborations that incorporate several emerging grassroots projects instead of just one.

If you could give one piece of advice to people who are interested in tackling challenges in their communities but aren’t sure where to start, what would it be?
Start today. Just show up. Start showing up and don’t stop showing up at community events, neighborhood watch meetings, nonprofit board meetings, city commission meetings, art shows, local concerts, political rallies. Volunteer at events related to the things that you are passionate about; sometimes you’ll be invited to participate, sometimes you’ll have to invite yourself. Just remember that there is no one more qualified to impact your community than you.