Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think [...]]]> This is the third of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part two, click here.

With some temporary materials, a roadway can become a bocce ball court, and a street can become a great place / Photo: PPS

Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think about the colors, sights, smells, and sounds; imagine the sidewalk ballet in full swing, with children playing, activity spilling out of storefronts and workspaces, vendors selling food, neighborhood cultural events and festivals taking place out in the open air. Take a minute, right now. Close your eyes, and really picture it.

Now, here’s the million dollar question: in that vision, what are you doing to add to that bustle?

If vibrancy is people, and citizenship is creative, it follows that the more that citizens feel they are able to contribute to their public spaces, the more vibrant their communities will be. The core function of place, as a shared asset, is to facilitate participation in public life by as many individuals as possible. Ultimately the true sense of a place comes from how it makes the people who use it feel about themselves, and about their ability to engage with each other in the ways that they feel most comfortable.

“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table,” says Katherine Loflin, who led Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. “It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place; it’s not something that you construct, physically, it’s something that you feel. And it is us as humans that convey that feeling to each other—or not!”

“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table…It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place.” / Photo: PPS

Getting Started: How You Can Make a Place Great Right Away

As Sustainable South Bronx founder and advocate Majora Carter famously put it, “You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one.” Each of us can participate, right now, in creating the city that we want to live in. If you think of enlivening a place as a monumental task, remember that great places are not the result of any one person’s actions, but the actions of many individuals layered on top of one another. It may take years to turn a grassy lot into a great square, but you can start today by simply mowing the lawn and inviting your neighbors out for a picnic.

In an essay for The Atlantic back in 1966, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey touched on this when he wrote about his father’s public spirit, and his active participation in the life of the small town of Doland, South Dakota, where the family lived. Hubert Sr. was a pharmacist, and he strove to make his pharmacy into a community hub, a place where neighbors came to meet and discuss the issues of the day. “Undoubtedly, he was a romantic,” writes Hubert Jr. of his father, “and when friends would josh him about his talk about world politics, the good society, and learning, he would say, ‘Before the fact is the dream.’

When you think about making your neighborhood a better place, think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC). In public space design, the LQC strategy is framed as a way for communities to experiment with a place and learn how people want to use it before making more permanent changes. That experimental attitude can be adopted by anyone. Just ask yourself: what’s one thing I already enjoy doing that I could bring out into the public realm?

Make it Public: Bringing Existing Activity Out Into the Streets

For some of us, there may be opportunities to take the work that we do in our professional lives and turn it into a way to engage with our neighbors. Perhaps there’s a certain activity we perform that could be moved to a nearby park, or a skill that we could teach at a local library. One graphic design firm in Cape Town, South Africa, has taken the idea of public work to a delightful extreme through their Holding Public Office initiative, where they move their office out into a different public space for one day each month and interact with curious passersby. “It keeps us on our toes,” says Lourina Botha, one of the firm’s co-directors. “It forces us to be aware of our role as designers and is a fairly stark reminder that what we design has a real effect on the world.”

In other words, this project illustrates how taking a LQC approach to work enriches not just the public space where the intervention takes place, but the work that the firm does, as well. This kind of activity blurs the line between private and public, and re-frames work as a mechanism for building social capital. According to Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, “We need professionals to think about themselves not narrowly disciplinary professionals, whose work is to simply solve a narrow disciplinary problem, but as citizen professionals working to contribute to the civic health and well-being of the community.”

“Holding Public Office” brings co-workers out into the streets, re-framing work as a mechanism for building social capital / Photo: Lisa Burnell, Graphic Studio Shelf

Many people may not have any particular job function that can become more public, for whatever reason, but there are still plenty of activities that mostly take place in private that can be used to enliven public space. Active citizenship needn’t be all work and no play, after all. “Any kind of community [that is supportive of engagement] is not just going to be about the problems that residents want to solve,” explains Matt Leighninger, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. “It also has to be about celebrating what they’ve done, through socializing, music, food.”

Building off of that last point, the organizers of Restaurant Day have turned cooking into an excuse for a carnival, giving residents of Helsinki, Finland, a chance to showcase their creativity in the kitchen and turning the city’s streets into a delectable buffet in the process. Their idea to organize a one-day festival where anyone could open a restaurant anywhere (from living rooms to public plazas), started when Antti Tuomola was struggling through navigating the onerous process of starting up a brick and mortar restaurant in the city. Recalls Kirsti Tuominen, one of the friends who works with Tuomola on organizing the event, “We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do something that would be fun, easy, and social at the same time. Something positive. We didn’t want to go the protest route. That’s the not-so-efficient way of trying to make a difference; it’s often better to show a good example and then it’s harder for the opposition.”

The first Restaurant Day took place back in 2011; today, it has been celebrated in cities all over the world. The festival is a brilliant example of how a completely normal daily activity can totally transform a city’s public spaces when approached in a creative way. “The street experience itself was a joy to behold,” wrote City of Sound blogger Dan Hill after participating on one of the festivals. “It truly felt like a new kind of Helsinki. International, cosmopolitan, diverse yet uniquely Finnish…It felt like a city discovering they could use their own streets as they liked; that the streets might be their responsibility.”

Tuominen echoes this in her own reflection on the event, explaining that “[Finland] is so full of regulations that people tend to see regulations even where they don’t exist! That’s been hindering things for a long time, but Restaurant Day has encouraged people to use their public spaces in a new way. Sometimes people just need someone to show them, or give them a gentle kick in the butt, and things will start happening.”

Understanding this is key for citizens who want to take a LQC attitude toward activating their neighborhoods: public spaces have a way of amplifying individual actions. One thing from the above comments that is not uniquely Finnish is the tendency of people (particularly in the developed world) to see regulations where they don’t exist. After decades of society turning its back on public life in favor of the private realm of home, office, and car, a lot of people now feel that they need permission to use public spaces the way they’d like to. We can give that permission to each other.

In a wonderful example of triangulation, jazz musicians perform for the assembled crowds near a Restaurant Day pop-up eatery in Helsinki / Photo: Karri Linnoinen via Flickr

Leading From the Bottom-Up: Work Fast, Work Together

If you are a change-oriented person, we need you to lead. Whether you want to move your office outside, organize a citywide cooking festival, or start small by making a concerted effort to engage directly with your neighbors every day, know that your own actions are an essential component of your neighborhood’s sense of place, by virtue of the fact that you live there. Explains Loflin: “If you don’t spend at least some time thinking about the state of mind of Placemaking—every decision, behavior, everything that we do as residents in our place every day—on top of the infrastructure that’s provided by the place itself, then you miss a really important part of the conversation, where everybody gets to have some of the responsibility.”

Whatever you decide to do, know that there will be bumps in the road. One of our 11 core Placemaking principles is that they’ll always say it can’t be done. But keep pushing. Meet your neighbors, and find your allies. Creating great places is all about getting to know the people who you share those places with. Thinking LQC doesn’t just mean experimenting with what you do, but with how you do it. Look for unconventional partners, and always be willing to consider doing things a bit differently.

In an interview for the Placemaking Blog late last year, Team Better Block co-founder Andrew Howard explained how his own LQC street transformations in cities around the US have caused his understanding of how people engage with places to evolve. “As a planner,” he explained, “I always thought that, if I made the best plan, that would attract the right people to come from somewhere else and make that plan happen. What I’ve realized through Better Block is that every community already has everybody they need. They just need to activate the talented people who are already there, and shove them into one place at one time, and that place can become better really quickly.”

Great places are not created in one fell swoop, but through many creative acts of citizenship: individuals taking it upon themselves to add their own ideas and talents to the life of their neighborhood’s public spaces. The best news is that we seem to be living at a very special time, when people are once again realizing the importance of public life. It’s something we’ve seen first-hand in communities where we have worked around the world, and something we’ve heard from many others. “I think that these are the early first steps,” says Tuominen, “but I think we’re heading to something that is very good, and interesting. I love this time. You can feel it, it’s almost tangible: that things are happening and moving forward.”

Before the fact is the dream. Just a few minutes ago, at the beginning of this very article, you conjured up a vision of a better neighborhood. Go make it real.

–

This coming week, the Placemaking Leadership Council will meet for the first time in Detroit, Michigan, to begin developing a campaign to put Placemaking on the global agenda. In the lead-up to the big meeting, we’d love to hear from you about what you’re doing to activate the public spaces in your community. Tell us what you’re up to on Twitter with the hashtag #thinkLQC, and we’ll share some of the awesome work citizens are taking on with other Citizen Placemakers around the world!

This is the third of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part two, click here.

Candice Davenport is a nurse who works on improving public [...]]]>

Meet Candice!

In our Citizen Placemaker series, we chat with amazing and inspiring people from outside the architecture, planning, and government worlds (the more traditional haunts of Placemakers) whose work exemplifies how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

Candice Davenport is a nurse who works on improving public health in the Township of Maplewood, New Jersey, and who understands deeply the importance of place in creating healthy communities. One of her recent initiatives, the Gratitude Graffiti Project, turned dozens of storefronts along several of the town’s commercial streets into a place where neighbors could share things that they were grateful for by writing them directly on store windows. Simultaneously they collaborated with their local library system to create a library themed gratitude graffiti wall to also collect thoughts of gratitude.  The project started shortly before Hurricane Sandy last fall; after the storm, it proved to be an important part of the community’s recovery process, as it gave everyone a way to work through the storm’s aftermath together while maintaining a positive, forward-thinking outlook in a very tough time. We spoke with Candice recently about how she bridges health and place in her work.

Why it is that you are interested in Placemaking, as a public health nurse and health educator?

My background is in nursing. My mom was a nurse, and I read about Florence Nightingale and how a person’s environment affects their recovery, and how a healthy environment creates a healthy person and vice versa. The importance of where we live, work, play—that’s a big mantra of public health, and a huge mantra for nursing if you look at the person from a holistic perspective.

I have a bachelors degree in nursing from UPenn, and a masters degree in public health and community health education from NYU. I’m a first generation American; talk about place! My parents both immigrated to the US from the Philippines, became citizens, and raised me and my siblings here, so there was a very clear definition early on: this is your place. How are you going to define your place and make your mark? Those were things we grew up understanding.

And now you’re making that mark through the Gratitude Graffiti Project. What was the inspiration for that project?

I work as a nurse for the health department in my town, Maplewood. I wanted to focus on wellness at our adult health clinics, and approach it in a positive way. I met up with another mom from my kids’ school, Lucila McElroy, a wellness coach and a dharma practitioner, to brainstorm. We hadn’t met before, but we hit it off brilliantly. Right as she was about to leave, she said “You know, I’ve always wanted to do something about gratitude. We all talk about happiness, but we don’t know how to get there, and gratitude is the first step, and an easy step, to get to a place of happiness. No matter what happens around you can still always be grateful and therefore always be happy with your circumstance.”

A quick sidebar: I’m originally from Flushing, Queens, and I grew up with a lot of graffiti around me. A lot of people look at it negatively, as just tagging. From a child’s eye, I always looked at it as art. Now, as an adult, I lead a children’s group at my church, and I lead a stained glass window tour for kids, and I tell them ‘look at how the windows affect us, and how light shines through it.’ These windows are not just works of art, they were originally created as instructional pieces back when most people couldn’t read biblical text. So the use of natural light and color and graphics on windows to express something has always been inspiring to me.

So when Lucila was talking about doing something to encourage more gratitude, and doing it in a way that would reach a lot of people, I threw out using windows. I said, “We could do graffiti!” As an artist, when you have a thought that you have to get out, you have to face that inspiration and get it out of your system and physically move it. I figured, if people have these thoughts of gratitude trapped inside of them or they just have never manifested it before, why don’t we give them a way to express that, in a way that allows them to be really present, physically, in the community?

I’ve lived in Maplewood for about twelve years now, and she’s lived here for six, so it was easy for us to go into the stores that we frequent most often, talk to a store owner that we knew, and say look, you’ve got these great windows, and we’ve got this great idea, and it’s only going to be up for 40 days. Any of your patrons can write down one thing that makes them happy that they can be grateful for.

“We love Maplewood because this is the kind of community we have, where people do stuff like this.” / Photo: Gratitude Graffiti Project

Did you have to do any convincing, or were the store owners pretty receptive to your idea?

Many people were receptive. We said just let us use your window; we’ll even provide the marker. Just put up a little sign explaining that this is the Gratitude Graffiti Project, which we printed out on our printer. It was so bare-bones. We had no supplies. Everything we did, we paid for out of pocket. We didn’t mind doing it because we thought how many stores could this be, four, five? It turned out 25 stores participated. Not only did it increase foot traffic into the participating stores, it increased foot traffic around the town; most importantly, it increased the feeling of community connectedness among the stores, our libraries, and the residents. People who have watched the video have come up to us and said “We love Maplewood because this is the kind of community we have, where people do stuff like this.”

People really like the interactivity of it; you are both the artist and the spectator. Not only did everyone feel cool that someone’s reading what they wrote…everyone loves to tweet, so this is sort of like an old-school way of doing that, right? And you get to be in the present moment and write down something that you are truly grateful for, that you might not otherwise have acknowledged about your day. You walk away happier with your life. Likewise, writing on a public window allows for other people to be changed by what another person wrote. One of our store owners told me a story of a woman, whom she didn’t even know, who called her store one day. The woman was riding a bus that stopped in front of her hair salon and read what people wrote on the store windows. She called just to tell her that reading the notes of gratitude from so many people changed her perspective for the rest of the day. It’s the biggest gift that we could give to anybody, and that they can give to other people.

There was a difference between what was written before and after Hurricane Sandy. People started off writing things like I’m thankful for my kids, for my coffee, whatever. Then afterward it became I’m thankful that my house didn’t fall down, grateful for electricity, thankful for a neighbor, or I’m thankful that I can call my mom. It really put things in perspective for people. Many of us had no power for nine days, and yet we were still able to be grateful.

You’re also working on getting a walking school bus started in your town with Camilla Zelevansky (who’s been working with us at PPS on our image database).

Maplewood is a very walkable community. Tuscan Elementary School, where my kids go, was built to be a walkable school, but we’re finding that a lot of kids are driven—mine included, but we stop and walk from a couple of blocks away. I think it’s just a mindset in our culture now, to think that kids need to be dropped off right in front of school, because it’s not safe to walk. So in addition to kids having so many issues relating to obesity and lack of exercise, we’re also getting kids who are not confident in their environment. They don’t know basic place markers, they don’t know directions, they don’t know basic street crossing safety guidelines and they don’t know who their neighbors are. That’s something we need to change, because the only way you get to know your environment is by being in it, and when you’re in a car you’re not really engaging with your environment or with your own body.

When you walk, you create the opportunity for these moments where a child can dream, and learn, and notice and think about that blossoming flower that yesterday didn’t have a bloom and now does. It’s an opportunity to create wonder. I’m inspired by opportunities to create places of wonder, because every day is a gift, and every day is wonderful, but only if we engage in it. Only if we allow for the beauty of the community to come out and for us as individuals to soak it in.

Storefront windows in Maplewood village were transformed into opportunities for neighbors to share their gratitude with each other / Photo: Gratitude Graffiti Project

As a public health nurse, do you think there’s an actual effect on peoples’ health when they get involved in their communities?

We’re human beings who are, by nature, social creatures. We’ll always be that way. No matter what technology bridges communities within the online spectrum, we’ll still need to engage in sunlight, with eye contact, and touch, and smell, and with our senses. How a person looks at and thinks about their environment, subconsciously is a reflection on how an individual thinks about themselves and their health condition. A healthy community is a thriving community and people are drawn to environments where they can be productive citizens and grow; to be able to make change and to be changed for the better. This, I think, is what we as human beings all seek in a community to live in and call home.

What advice would you give to people who aren’t happy with the current state of things in their community, and are trying to change it?

One thing that both the Gratitude Graffiti Project and the walking school bus have taught me is that you can’t do it alone. You need a group of people who also believe in what you’re doing, and believe that this is true and possible. You need that momentum behind you, and that’s where the power of people comes in.

Another thing is that you actually do have to have a vision. You have to have the self worth to know that you and others like you deserve a clean and healthy environment to thrive, and deserve to be inspired by that environment. In my experience, even in the least desirable of conditions, we can still be moved by inspiration if we always have a sense of appreciation and wonder about the world around us, if we imagine the creative possibilities and if we commit to being mindful of our place. But we must be engaged and present in our relationship with our environment and surroundings if we want to be moved and take action on its behalf.

Because in the end, I believe that the relationship between a person and their environment is a symbiotic one. If the environment is a positive, healthy one, the person will grow to have the healthy belief that they have the power to change or protect their environment and be stewards of positive change in how they live their life. I suppose that is the lesson I would like to pass down to my children; so hopefully, I’m doing my part.

Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached [...]]]> This is the first of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part two, click here. To read part three, click here.

You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. / Photo: PPS

Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved and build shared wealth in their communities. “Placemaking, applied correctly, can show us new ways to help cultures emerge where openness is not so scary,” notes Dr. Katherine Loflin, the lead project consultant for the Knight Foundation’s groundbreaking Soul of the Community study, which showed a significant correlation between community attachment and economic growth. “We could find with consistency over time that it was the softer side of place—social offerings, openness, and aesthetics—that really seem to drive peoples’ attachment to their place. It wasn’t necessarily basic services: how well potholes got paved over. It wasn’t even necessarily for peoples’ personal economic circumstances.”

The study’s other key finding was that there is an empirical relationship between higher levels of attachment and cities’ GDP growth. This is important because, in Loflin’s words, “We have not recognized, as a society, the importance of [place]. Studies like Soul of the Community are helping to give us all permission to spend some time working on this stuff—and not in a kumbaya way, but an economic way.”

Placemaking, in other words, is a vital part of economic development. And yet, there has long been criticism that calls into question whether or not this process is actually helping communities to develop their local economies, or merely accelerating the process of gentrification in formerly-maligned urban core neighborhoods. We believe that this is largely due to confusion over what Placemaking is, and who “gets” to be involved. If Placemaking is project-led, development-led, design-led or artist-led, then it does likely lead to gentrification and a more limited set of community outcomes.

Who is the community, and what is their role?

The key question right now seems to be about ownership and belonging, in regard to who  has a right to participate when a Placemaking process is underway. In an article for Next City last fall, Neeraj Mehta started a great deal of chatter after raising this very issue when he asked:

“Which people do we want to gather, visit and live in vibrant places? Is it just some people? Is it already well-off people? It is traditionally excluded people? Is it poor people? New people? People of color?”

This builds on a common frustration among people who work in community development and related fields: oversimplification of what we mean when we talk about “the community.” Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community, but the intersection and overlapping of multiple or many diverse groups. “The community” often includes people who never speak to each other, or may not even notice each other, depending on the quality and availability of welcoming public spaces in which to connect.

Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community / Photo: PPS

This is the very problem that Placemaking aims to address. The most important tenet is that the process must be open and welcoming to all who want to participate. This is not to say that everyone will get what they want out of Placemaking. The point is that there will be an opportunity for people not just to share what they want, but also to listen to their neighbors’ ideas, and to be part of the process of shaping the public spaces that they share with those neighbors. The end result should be a space that’s flexible enough to make room for many different communities, and encourage connections between them.

What role do artists play?

Perhaps one of the most significant changes that has taken place in the public dialog around Placemaking, over the past several years, has been the rise of the “creative” modifier. Creative Placemaking’s proponents (including the Knight Foundation-supported ArtPlace) have contributed substantially to the public awareness of the importance of public space, and the role of public art in creating great places, by positioning artists at the center of the Placemaking process. Unfortunately, this privileging of one type of activity over others also seems to be the source of many of the recent questions around who benefits, and who is allowed at the table.

Whether we like it or not, “creativity” has come to mean something quite specific over the past decade or so. Dr. Richard Florida’s movement-sparking book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was boiled down into sound bites so frequently and consistently after its publication, that the idea of “creativity” became the purview of a specific group of people. Suddenly everyone was talking about “creative types,” and scheming to build more coffee shops and bike trails in order to lure young people with liberal arts degrees to their city to create design blogs and tech start-ups. The idea, perversely, and in contradiction of what Florida was actually arguing, became that a certain kind of person with a certain kind of creativity was most valuable to local economic development, and cities should try to be more like the places that were already attracting that kind of person in order to steal them away—rather than fostering the creativity of people who were already living in a given place.

The sidewalk cafes so often cited as indicators of gentrification can be a great way to enliven some public spaces–but only in response to an existing need within the neighborhood / Photo: PPS

Roberto Bedoya hits the nail on the head in a provocative post originally published shortly before Mehta’s:

“What I’ve witnessed in the discussions and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment, e.g., artists live-work spaces, cultural districts, spatial landscapes. And this meaning, which operates inside the policy frame of urban planning and economic development, is ok but that is not the complete picture. Its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong. Before there is the vibrant street one needs an understanding of the social dynamics on that street – the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.”

In other words, while the intentions of Creative Placemaking’s proponents are undoubtedly good, and their work very frequently wonderful, the fact that a lot of people just don’t consider themselves to be “creative types” limits the potential outcomes. No doubt, part of the drive is to expand creativity and the arts to impact community development and open the arts up to more people, but to start off by limiting the Placemaking process to a certain set of outcomes from the get-go is not the way to go about it.

Every place can be vibrant. Vibrancy is people.

Also problematic is the fact that so much debate has centered on a flawed definition of “vibrancy” that further limits the Placemaking process’ capacity for transforming communities. Ann Markusen, who co-authored the original paper on Creative Placemaking for the NEA, highlights this problem in an essay that she wrote for arts management hub Create Equity, questioning the movement’s early evolution. Markusen asks:

“Just what does vibrancy mean? Let’s try to unpack the term. ArtPlace’s definition: ‘we define vibrancy as places with an unusual scale and intensity of specific kinds of human interaction.’ Pretty vague and…vibrancy are places?  Unusual scale? Scale meaning extensive, intensive? Of specific kinds? What kinds?”

This definition is not just vague, it’s unnecessarily limiting. If vibrancy is defined explicitly as an “unusual” condition, it furthers the idea that Placemaking is geared toward the production of specific kinds of spaces and amenities, rather than toward the enabling of citizens to use their public spaces to highlight their neighborhood’s unique strengths, and effectively address distinct challenges. We may have come to think of vibrancy as a finite quality after seeing our cities stripped of their dense social networks through decades of freeway-building and suburbanization, but that is a misconception.

Vibrancy does not need to be limited to a few ‘unusual’ areas; vibrancy is people / Photo: PPS

Every neighborhood—every plaza, square, park, waterfront, market, and street—can be vibrant, but if people don’t feel like they can contribute to shaping their places, vibrancy can’t exist. Period. Gentrification, which is often blamed on honest attempts to create more vibrant, livable places, is what happens when we forget that vibrancy is people; that it cannot be built or installed, but must be inspired and cultivated. Says DC-based community organizer Sylvia Robinson: “I consider gentrification an attitude. It’s the idea that you are coming in as a planner, developer, or city agency and looking at a neighborhood as if it’s a blank slate. You impose development and different economic models and say that in order for this neighborhood to thrive you need to build this much housing, this much retail.”

Cities’ “soft” sides matter—and so does how we talk about them.

When Placemaking is perceived to be geared toward a specific set of outcomes, it undermines the work that everyone in the field is doing, and leads to the kind of criticism that we saw from Thomas Frank, whose blistering takedown of Placemaking in The Baffler should make even the most seasoned Placemaking advocate wince. Frank writes:

“Let us propose a working hypothesis of what makes up the vibrant. Putting aside such outliers as the foundation that thinks vibrancy equals poverty-remediation and the car rental company that believes it means having lots of parks, it’s easy to figure out what the foundations believe the vibrant to be. Vibrant is a quality you find in cities or neighborhoods where there is an arts or music ‘scene,’ lots of restaurants and food markets of a certain highbrow type, trophy architecture to memorialize the scene’s otherwise transient life, and an audience of prosperous people who are interested in all these things.”

And then, toward the end of the article, the clincher:

“Let’s say that the foundations successfully persuade Akron to enter into a vibrancy arms race with Indianapolis. Let’s say both cities blow millions on building cool neighborhoods and encouraging private art galleries. But let’s say Akron wins…What then? Is the nation better served now that those businesses are located in Akron rather than in Indianapolis? Or would it have been more productive to spend those millions on bridges, railroads, highways—hell, on lobbyists to demand better oversight for banks?”

This is a straw man argument that many of us are tired of hearing: that focusing on the ‘soft’ side of cities, the very things the Soul of the Community study found most important, is a waste of money when cities should be focusing on hard infrastructure. But if we allow Placemaking to be framed (or even worse, practiced) in a way that leaves people feeling unwelcome or excluded, we’re setting ourselves up for exactly that sort of criticism.

Better communication between the people who share rapidly-changing neighborhoods is vital to the future success of our cities—and, considering the fact that 70% of the world’s population will be urban by 2050, to the future of global society. That is what we advocate for when we advocate for Placemaking. We do not work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and eat gelato; we do it so that they will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors. Whether or not that conversation is about art (or politics, or food, or education, or sports…) is beside the point.

You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. When people feel encouraged to participate in shaping the life of a space, it creates the kind of open atmosphere that attracts more and more people. In their inclusiveness, our greatest places mirror the dynamics of a truly democratic society. As we put it in our introduction to the Guide to Neighborhood Placemaking in Chicago (written for the Metropolitan Planning Council), “Placemaking allows communities to see how their insight and knowledge fits into the broader process of making change. It allows them to become proactive vs. reactive, and positive vs. negative. Simply put, Placemaking allows regular people to make extraordinary improvements, big or small, in their communities.”

Over the next few weeks, as we prepare for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council in Detroit on April 11th and 12th, we will be exploring the relationship between individuals and the Placemaking process in further detail. More to come soon.

We work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors / Photo: PPS

This is the first of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part two, click here. To read part three, click here.