Project for Public Spaces » Burgh Diaspora

Opportunity is Local (Or: You Can’t Buy a New Economy)

Brendan Crain — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:32:07 +0000

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.

Challenges and Warts: How Physical Places Define Local Economies

Brendan Crain — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:20:07 +0000

Is this Placemaking? Some would say yes… / Photo: Brendan Crain

“People develop, not places.”

So writes Jim Russell in a recent post over at Burgh Diaspora, in arguing that cities are wasting their money on Placemaking when they should be focusing more directly on talent development. In his view, widely held these days, Placemaking is about plunking down “cool urban amenities” and increasing token diversity to make a city seem edgy or superficially interesting. It’s a simple cut-and-paste process of taking some signifier of young, contemporary, urban hipness (a bike lane, public art, a funkily decorated coffee shop) and inserting it into a neighborhood in the hopes of re-framing that neighborhood as the Next Big Thing.

That’s not what Placemaking is. Or at least that’s not how many of us who use the word mean it. For every person who thinks that you can ‘placemake’ unilaterally by dropping in cool amenities, there is another who believes that Placemaking is as much about the discussion that participants have with each other as it is about whether a space contains public art or picnic tables when all is said and done. The physical attributes of the space in question are important, but they are the means, not the end. If you’re not building social capital in the community where you’re working, you’re not Placemaking; you’re just reorganizing the furniture.

Context (the size of a site, its location within the city, its present configuration) gives the people who choose to participate in a Placemaking process a universally agreed-upon starting point. But for that raw space to become a place, people have to identify priorities, make decisions, and take action. Involving the intended users of a public space in that process helps the resulting design to be responsive to the community’s needs—including the inherent need of all communities for people to connect with each other. Any organization can pave a plaza, but it’s not a place until people are using it. By bringing people together around a shared starting point to define and work toward shared goals, Placemaking can play a critical role in strengthening local economies.

For hard evidence of this, look to Tokyo. Writing for Next City‘s new Informal City Dialogs, urbanologists Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava explain how the Japanese government relied on the citizens of Tokyo to rebuild their (literally) bombed-out neighborhoods incrementally after WWII, while top-level funds were used to build state-of-the-art infrastructure to connect those neighborhoods and facilitate their growth, both physically and economically, over time. “After the war,” they write, “one of Tokyo’s few abundant resources was memory.” That the city rebuilt on the foundation of those memories—of local traditions, building techniques, shared needs—is now one of the world’s biggest economic juggernauts is no coincidence.

In his critique of Placemaking, Russell looks a bit closer to home, at Detroit. The city, he writes, is currently benefiting from a big fish, small pond talent migration, where talented young professionals are moving back because, as one such person asks in a quoted passage, “Where else in the country can you make an actual impact on a whole city when you are in your 20s?” Since Detroit is infamously lacking in amenities and diversity, Russell argues, people clearly don’t move there “to live out [their] Portland fantasy on the cheap. You certainly don’t leave Seattle in hopes of a place-making upgrade. You migrate for opportunity, despite the challenges and the warts.”

There’s a disconnect here that bothers me: in so much of the contemporary mainstream discussion of Placemaking, the signifier has become the signified. “Placemaking” is now often used as a stand-in for the finished product; if a parklet is built or a cafe popped-up, it doesn’t matter who asked for it, or whether anyone even asked in the first place. The people behind the project will tell you that it’s Placemaking, regardless. The implication in these instances is that a place can be imposed on a community, rather than created with it. That’s the exact same logic that was used to justify slum clearance and build tower-in-the-park complexes in the US during the years when Tokyo was going through its incremental resurgence.

In Detroit, an abundance of cheap space lowers the barrier to entry for participating in urban revitalization / Photo: Brendan Crain

That brings us back to Detroit: a city that is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Tokyo when it comes to the development of Place Capital over the past half-century. But what’s happening in Detroit right now is not the result of some inherent “opportunity” that can be pulled from the air. Like Tokyo after the war, Detroit’s “challenges and warts” are the opportunity; they create a physical context that people can make tangible changes to, even as upstarts in their 20s with modest resources. The abundance of cheap space lowers the barrier to entry for participating in urban revitalization, and while most cities don’t have Detroit’s elbow room, people can still take part in the shaping of their communities by working together to define their shared public spaces. As my colleague Ethan put it recently, “Human capital and creative talent increasingly goes where it likes; talent increasingly goes to great places; but talented people become most attached to places that they help create.”

Like Russell, many people today are beginning to voice the concern that Placemaking is “counterproductive” to economic development, because they’ve been led to believe that the process is simply about cutting and pasting things that worked somewhere else into struggling spaces. But great places and strong local economies are created in the same way: by getting people together to define local challenges and come up with appropriate solutions to address them. Placemaking makes tangible the opportunities inherent within a place so that they might be taken advantage of. People develop places; thereafter, places develop people.

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Note: You can read Jim Russell’s response to this blog post by clicking here, and Brendan’s follow up right here.