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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing ideas with the group / Photo: Greg Larson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locals mill about Silanga Field, which will soon become the Silanga Community Centre / Photo: PPS

In Nairobi, Kenya, the contrast between rich and poor neighborhoods is beyond stark.  And even though half of the city’s population lives on a mere 1.5% of the total land area, in Nairobi, public space is scarce. Since the creation, by Colonial powers in 1948, of the master plan that led to the formation of the city we now know today, little to no provision has been made for well structured common spaces for much-needed programming, activity, and services. In that same period, the city’s population has ballooned from 120,000 to more than 3.1 million people–and that’s just the official number! Nairobi is home to many informal settlements, where it’s very difficult to take an exact head count.

One of the most well-known of these settlements is Kibera, a massive slum comprised of 13 separate villages where most residents get by on less than a dollar a day. It is here where PPS has joined forces with UN-Habitat, the City Council of Nairobi, and local partners including the Kilimanjaro Initiative, KENSUP (the National Housing branch of the Kenyan Government), Chief of SOWETO (South West Township) in Kibera, and the Undugu Foundation, for one of two pilot projects in the city’s effort to create 60 great public spaces over the next several years.

Earlier this year in Kibera’s Silanga village neighborhood, PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin and Board Member Vanessa September met with community members to conduct a Placemaking workshop to generate ideas and support for the next phase of improvements to a soccer field that serves as an important recreation facility for this long-underserved community. Today residents continue to work toward the transformation of Silanga Field (which contains school facilities, a meeting room, a pottery studio, and other important resources) into what they have agreed, collectively, to re-name the Silanga Community Centre. “I have taken great delight in the confidence that is being displayed by the team in how they have taken ownership of the projects,” wrote PPS board member Vanessa September (who continues to work on the ground with partners) in a recent email. “If they have 58 more spaces to do, then the sooner they take ownership, the better!”

We have written previously on the Placemaking Blog about how dangerous social conditions produce alienating public spaces in developing world cities, especially for women. In Kibera, the desire for a safe and welcoming space for the community very clearly influences recommendations for everything from comfort to accessibility. A variety of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper improvements are included in an as-yet-unpublished report detailing recommendations generated through the Placemaking process, with many of them focused specifically on creating a safe space for people to gather. From using fences to define the perimeter of the site (and designate entrance and exit points), to programming the space, very intentionally, with local security meetings and social programs focused on youth and good parenting, the focus on safety plays a critical role.

“The best way to make a public space safe,” the report suggests, “is by creating positive activities in and enhancing wider citizen ownership of the space.”

We often say that public spaces reflect the communities that surround them; this can be both a good thing, and a bad thing. In Nairobi, the lack of adequate public spaces reflects the stark social divisions across the city and, worse yet, reinforces them. Since Nairobians rarely come into contact with people from different socioeconomic groups, there is little upward mobility for people in places like Kibera—diminishing one of the chief benefits of urban agglomeration. The lack of space communicates to these people that their presence is undesirable. This contributes directly to the sense of isolation and desperation that makes for more dangerous neighborhoods.

In wealthy areas, meanwhile, fear of the violence created by this tension leads to more fortress-like compounds and walled golf courses when what the city really needs are great public spaces, and shared destinations where people from different neighborhoods and backgrounds can take part in the formation of a shared civic identity. Spaces like the Silanga Community Centre are steps toward a stronger Nairobi.

Presently, the UN-Habitat is working with local partners to accurately survey the site, and prepare for the RFP process in order to push forward on Silanga Field’s reconstruction. The newly appointed City Planning Director, Mrs. Rose Muema, recently presented on progress at the site both at the World Urban Forum in Naples Italy and more recently to major donors from Norway, Sweden, and Spain, “[stressing] the importance of participatory approaches to development.”

In Nairobi's Kibera slum, life is lived out on the street. Public space is the lifeblood of the neighborhood. / Photo: neajjean via Flickr

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you care about your community. You’re involved with the daily life of the neighborhood to some degree, and if you want to get more involved, you know that there are plenty of options and resources to help you figure out where your talents would be most useful and the work enjoyable. But what if your neighborhood was made out of cardboard and corrugated sheet metal? Where would you start then?

As it turns out, if you ask the experts on informal settlements at UN-Habitat, they’ll give you an answer that sounds a lot like what an org like PPS might tell you back home: start with the public spaces. While perhaps counter-intuitive at first, considering that many developing-world slums lack basic necessities like clean water, electricity, and health care, it turns out that great public spaces are even more important to places like Nairobi’s Kibera and Mumbai’s Dharavi, because they allow many issues to be addressed at once. “You have to get people to understand that, when they are planning a city, they have to think multi-sectorial,” says Thomas Melin, a Head of Habitat’s Office of External Relations. “If you go into a slum area and you try to sort out only one thing–the power, the water, etc–it will not help! It might even make things worse. You have to sort out several basic things in order to get neighborhoods to work.”

Public spaces bring many different people, activities, and government functions together where everyone can see them; this makes them ideal places to show, by example, how multi-sectoral (aka interdisciplinary) planning processes like Placemaking can start the process of transformation that turns informal settlements into thriving urban neighborhoods. In recent years, we have found ourselves working ever farther afield; it made perfect sense, then, to partner with the UN-Habitat in 2011. “When you have these kinds of partnerships,” Melin explains, “you exchange, and you help, and you assist, and both parties learn–there are enormous needs in the world, and there’s a need for a network like the one PPS has in the US, but for the whole world.”

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities and with the gap between poor and affluent areas widening, the need to adapt and adjust Placemaking for new audiences in informal communities is particularly acute. Poverty is rampant in these settlements, making Western notions of “private space” for commercial and social activity seem quaint. “People in Kibera use public spaces very differently from how they might in, say, New York City,” notes PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin, who led a series of Placemaking workshops in one of Africa’s largest slums this past spring through our partnership with UN-Habitat. “In New York, ‘public space’ translates to a park, or a plaza. In Kibera, the streets are truly the public spaces, and people are out all day, every day: selling, begging, trading. People make their living–they live their lives–right out in the streets. Having safe and adequate places for that activity is as vital in these areas as water or electricity.”

Even in downtown Nairobi, the Jevangee Garden is filled with homeless residents. / Photo: Vanessa September

So why haven’t international NGOs and UN-Habitat been focusing on public spaces for ages, already? According to Juma Assiago, the Human Settlements Officer leading the Global Network on Safer Cities (GNSC) with UN-Habitat’s Safer Cities Programme, the organization’s partnership with PPS and its broader shifts in focus are the culmination of a decades-long shift in thinking. “We’ve moved from the conception of local government alone to local governance that claims responsibility for all city stakeholders in the planning, management and governance of urban centers,” Assiago says.

In the Stockholm Conference in 1972, the UN-Habitat was formed by member governments of the United Nations. This was followed soon after by the Habitat I gathering in Vancouver, where the discussion was largely focused on creating an agenda for providing more safe and adequate housing for all. True to the times, there was little concern with the spaces between the buildings themselves. Following much of the same logic that led to slum clearance and urban renewal in US cities during the decades before it was formed, Habitat’s mandate led to the organization’s early focus on bricks-and-mortar solutions. At the Habitat II summit in Istanbul twenty years later, member states and partners came to agree that human settlements development was not a housing-only challenge, but included the built environment and the living environment encompassed by the built environment. The UN-Habitat mandate widened in response.

“This was the major outcome in 1996,” notes Assiago. “To be able to achieve sustainable human settlements, member states acknowledged the need to develop partnership arrangements that allow various stakeholders, including the private sector, NGOs, youth groups, women’s groups, and academia to participate as equal partners with governments in shaping cleaner, safer and more equitable cities, towns and villages. By 2007, for the first time in human history, the majority of the population was urban as compared to rural. A fundamental shift is taking place from a sustainable human settlements agenda to a sustainable urban development agenda.”

With that has also come a shift of focus of how cities are being built, and in how people perceive development: urbanization is increasingly now seen as the source of development, and not the outcome of development. “This has led policymakers and practitioners alike to critically question: are we having people for the structures or building structures for the people?” Assiago says. “This shift in thinking is placing more emphasis on cities for people which moves us from the aerial skyline view of cities to the level of the walking persons eye level view of cities.”

Melin echoes this sentiment when speaking about Habitat’s work in Nairobi: “We use public space as a symbol when we train different municipalities around the world to take a more multi-sectorial approach and specifically think much more about individuals. Cities are about people, it’s not really houses. Take the houses away and the city will still survive; if you take the people away, there is no city.”

This, in turn, echoes the sentiment at the heart of the work that PPS does. Placemaking is, first and foremost, an inclusive process that brings people together to take part in shaping the public spaces that will serve as platforms for the daily life of their communities. Creating great places and creating great human networks are, in fact, one in the same. Elijah Agevi, the CEO of Research Triangle Africa, put it beautifully when he wrote of the workshop that Cynthia led at Kibera’s Silanga field, “It was certainly one of the key milestones during the Placemaking process. It was humbling to see different stakeholders working so constructively together towards a common goal!”

Where the Kibera slum ends, a golf course and condos begin. / Photo: Chrissy Olson via Flickr

In cities like Narobi, slums nestle up next to the freeways, garbage dumps, golf courses, and other awkwardly-inserted implements of Western culture that have gouged their way into the rapidly-changing cityscape.While the formal and informal cities often sit within spitting distance of each other, they operate as two different worlds, with very different civic lives. In the formal city, Melin explains, the system is set up to service a wealthy and powerful minority. Engagement is mostly non-existent for many residents, and often there is not even a legal right to participation. In informal settlements, however, services are provided more often by NGOs than by local governments, which has created a very different climate.

“These organizations utilize participatory decision-making as a means to ensure that they do something that the community needs, understands, and will continuously maintain,” he says. “You need to get the buy-in. There’s no use in building a clinic if everyone wants a school. This means that people in the slums have rarely seen a project which is not very participatory! If we come together with partners and want to create a public space, we have to invite participation; there’s no other way. This is the norm.”

"We not only have the opportunity to learn new things, but to learn them in new ways." Photo: The Advocacy Project via Flickr

The process of creating strong public spaces for vibrant but tenuous neighborhoods offers residents of developing-world cities a unique opportunity to not only build stronger and more permanent physical settlements, but to build more robust civic social networks as well. Placemaking can serve as a bridge linking the resources of the formal city and the open culture of the informal city, enriching life on both sides. Most likely, this will in turn inform the way that Placemaking processes are led in cities in the developing world as well, as Western society shifts toward a more publicly-oriented, less ownership-driven model out of necessity. “That’s why we’re excited about this partnership,” Nikitin says. “We not only have the opportunity to learn new things, but to learn them in new ways, and to see Placemaking from an entirely different perspective.”

“The globe is becoming increasingly urban, and on the other side, urbanization is becoming global,” Assiago says. “Sometimes, when we are approaching Placemaking and public spaces, the common mistake is to apply techniques as if one size fits all; but this is not true! Through learning from practice, we begin to understand how cities are human creations that configure themselves to development in totally different ways based on the social context…the social capital of the city. We need to be able to understand those flows in order to connect with the richness of value and quality that public spaces can provide.”

Click to learn more about #WUF6

In the words of Cecelia Martinez, director of Habitat’s NYC office, “Whatever you do for human kind, you do it in cities.” To that end, we are already working with our friends at UN-Habitat and Nairobi’s City Council on an initiative, announced by the Kenyan capital’s mayor this past March, “to make Nairobi a social city” by creating 60 new public spaces around the city over the next five years. In addition, Cynthia will be attending the World Urban Forum 6 in Naples next week to lead a workshop on How to Turn a Place Around on Tuesday, September 4th. We’ve included a schedule of events where Cynthia will be participating during the week-long gathering below. If you’d like to connect with her, you can email her, or follow her on Twitter.

How to Turn a Place Around
Tuesday, September 4th, 9:00am-12:00pm
Pavilion 4, Room 20 Mostra D’altremare exhibition Center

Sustainable Urban Development Network (SUD-Net) Meeting
Wednesday am the 5th, 9:30-11:30am
Sala Sardinia Room

Launch of the Global Network for Safer Cities
Wednesday, September 5th, 5:30pm

SEDESOL Networking Event
Monday, September 3rd, 2:30pm

And, last but certainly not least, we have just released a working draft of a new publication, Placemaking and the Future of Cities. This new pamphlet, designed to serve as a guide for mayors who are interested in using the Placemaking process to directly engage citizens in the revitalization of their cities, can be downloaded by clicking here. This is a draft-in-progress, and your suggestions, corrections, updates, and other input are both welcome and valued!

The Perth Cultural Centre is seen here in full bloom during CHOGM 2011 / Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

As much as we prize creativity in cities today, the cultural centers that we’ve built to celebrate it rarely hit the mark. Culture is born out of human interaction; it therefore cannot exist without people around to enjoy, evaluate, remix, and participate in it. So why do our cultural centers so often turn inward, away from the street, onto an internal space that is only nominally for gathering, and is mainly used for passing through? Why do these cultural centers physically remove culture from the public realm and plop it on a curated, often “visionary” pedestal instead of providing a venue for promoting more interaction among the people who create it? “Big Cultural Centers–think of Lincoln Center in Manhattan–they need to turn themselves inside-out and become about culture for all instead of culture for a few,” says PPS President Fred Kent. “Elitism is a big part of what’s going on in some of these places. They exude a subtle sense of who ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be there.’”

Perth’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority had a different vision. Their vision was to connect the 23 institutions within the Perth Cultural Centre (PCC) to each other by improving the public spaces that surrounded and connected them, and to extend the precinct past its formal edges, with cultural activity reaching out into the surrounding area like an octopus.  The PCC  is a cluster of institutions located at the hinge point between the city’s central business district and one of its burgeoning nightlife districts, Northbridge. The centre features a mix of historic buildings from the 1800s and Brutalist structures built in the 1960s and 70s, and includes art museums, theaters, a history museum, a major library, and a compact college campus.

The MRA got involved in 2008 by buying and renovating a number of storefronts along William Street, a major shopping corridor on the edge of the PCC precinct, and then carefully managing the selection of tenants. When PPS’s Kathy Madden, Alessandra Galletti, and Josh Kent were brought in back in 2009, the MRA’s understanding of the importance of careful management and cohesive vision proved to be key to developing a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC) plan that’s completely changed the public’s perception of the space in a very short period of time. “Compare something like Lincoln Center with the center of culture and diversity they have created in Perth,” says Fred, and you’ll find that the latter is “all about engagement, people, social interaction, a hundred different things to do–maybe nobody wins a design award for it, but that diversification of uses is a really big deal for the people who use that Place, and for their local culture.”

“One of the big things for us was to take the focus off the buildings and put it on the things that happen in the spaces between them,” MRA Executive Director of Place Management Veronica Jeffery explains. “That’s why what we call the ‘quick wins’ strategy was so important: it basically went from planning straight to implementation, and was really powerful. It didn’t leave time for contemplation, which meant that people could see their ideas transform into action.”

Volunteers work on the PCC's amazing "urban orchard" built atop a parking deck / Photo: CPSU/CSA via Flickr

The LQC plan included a working orchard on top of a parking deck, a wetland and play space focused on nature-based discovery, a large screen for projecting movies and digital art, seating, food vendors, etc. Major events like the Perth International Arts Festival and Fringe World Festival relocated to the center’s grounds, which also had the honor of hosting CHOGM 2011.

The culture of risk-taking and experimentation encouraged by the LQC plan has allowed for the MRA team to try some things that failed, learn from them, and move on. This has been greatly aided by the fact that, as part of the Placemaking process, the many once-isolated institutions located within the PCC have come to see their participation in the way that the site is managed as an opportunity to collaborate and enhance their own missions and events. As Alec Coles, Chief Executive Officer of the Western Australian Museum, explains it:

“The recent redevelopment of the Perth Cultural Centre as a ‘people space’ has helped us create the permeability around the Museum that we have long desired. The softening of the edges, not least with the popular sound garden, is making our historic ‘edifice’ a much more welcoming proposition…Too often, cultural centres become cultural ghettos; we are determined that by working with MRA and our many partners that this will not be the case in Perth.”

The good news, today, is that shifting attitudes are chipping away at the austere walls of yesterday’s “culture ghettos,” with people demanding more inspiring, interactive gathering places. Creativity is becoming one of the most coveted social assets for post-industrial cities with increasingly knowledge-based economies–and this is good news for culture vultures and average Joes, alike. “This idea of the ‘Creative Class,’” says PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin, an expert on cultural centers, “is about culturally-based industries, and creatively-engaged people. They could be making clothing, they could be in web or media design. The public’s definition of creativity is really changing to be about celebrating the creativity in all of us, and creating a public environment that supports and encourages that.”

According to Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class, pressure is mounting on traditional Cultural Centers–what he calls SOBs for ‘symphony, opera and ballet’–forcing more and more of them to adapt to meet the needs of an ever-broadening audience that is looking for ways to engage creatively with each other, and actually participate in culture instead of merely consuming it. “The real challenge for the ‘Big C’ centers,” he explains, “is how to reposition for this shift…these institutions are in trouble. Many teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.  They have to get with it, like universities and all the old school organizations. They have to become more fluid, more open, more accepting.  Less imposing. Think of it sort of like the difference between haute cuisine and great food trucks.”

The MRA's focus on becoming a place for people has created a destination where people can connect and learn from each other / Photo: Fred Kent

Put another way, great, engaging centers of culture are the product of great Placemaking. In Perth, various activities and institutions had co-located, but they hadn’t come out of their respective buildings to interact and make use of their shared space. The Placemaking process allowed the various stakeholders to come together and develop a collaborative vision for their shared site. “We think it’s important to debunk the myth around Culture with a Capital C and make the place inclusive and welcoming to different kinds of people,” Jeffery explains.

That inclusiveness–of organizations, of individuals, of businesses–is the lynchpin in the process of creating great places. Florida notes that Gallup & Knight’s Soul of the Community survey found that the quality of a place’s social offerings was the #1 factor that people said creates emotional attachment to their community. Openness to all sorts of people was #2. “I say the two go together,” he argues. “Our public spaces are perhaps the last vestige of democratic space in our cities.”

Today, we need those kinds of comfortable social environments more than ever. Encouraging creative exploration and experimentation is a great way to develop local talent. As studies (popularized by the writing of Ken Robinson) have shown, while the vast majority of children will answer enthusiastically in the affirmative when asked if they are creative, by the time most people reach high school just as great a majority will say that they are not. For our cities to thrive, we must develop participatory public spaces to re-spark latent creative spirits.

The PCC's openness and flexibility make the precinct ideal for everything from meeting a friend for coffee to meeting a few thousand friends for a concert. / Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

“When a cultural institution does programming out in public space,” says Nina Simon, an expert who consulted at museums around the world before taking the helm of the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz last year, “there’s a really powerful shift in the context.” Still, she cautions, it’s important that institutions remember that the shift is as important for them as it is for neighbors who attend an event or activity. “If you’re going to be out in public space, you have to have the attitude that this is about connecting to the community that you’re in, rather than just trying to figure out how to plug what you do inside the museum in somewhere else. When TV was invented, people didn’t just say ‘let’s put radio on the television.’ They had to re-think the way programming that was made in order to be successful.”

Over the years, PPS has seen how pulling cultural programming out into streets and squares has transformed not just those public spaces, but the cultural institutions that participated in their renewal as well: from Wade Oval in Cleveland, to Tucson’s Congress Street, to the Bronx River Arts Center in New York. And, of course, there’s the Perth Cultural Centre, where the MRA’s pioneering approach to transforming its precinct lights a new way forward for the formal, inward-focused capital-C Cultural Centers of yore.

“It’s been a challenging process, but the results have exceeded all of our expectations,” Jeffery says. “Ultimately, the centre is a public space, and we want everybody to feel comfortable here. They should be able to come in and feel like it’s theirs. If they happen to have a cultural experience in the process, that’s even better!”

Nikitin’s essay not only outlines problems in public-art policy; it also offers solutions. “By tapping into a community’s intrinsic creativity and establishing a design process that elicits public input early on,” she writes, “public artists are successfully creating artworks and establishing an arts presence that have meaning to the public for whom they are intended.” It is through this approach that she believes art can be made with – and not just for – the public.

Click here to read the article excerpt

She will also speak on the recent translation of How to Turn a Place Around into Korean!

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on July 16, 2004.

REDWOOD CITY — El Camino Real, which means “the King’s Highway” in Spanish, has become more like a royal eyesore in San Mateo County.

It was, in 1823, a 500-mile walking path connecting mission settlements from San Diego to Sonoma.

Over the years, indiscriminate land use has resulted in an unremarkable roadway lined with car dealerships and take-out restaurants, parking lots and strip malls right down the middle of the county.

Dusty storefronts look out on a congested, six-lane roadway without much in the way of landscaping or charm. Pedestrians rarely stroll along its sun-baked sidewalks.

It’s just, well, unsightly.

But that may change, according to an optimistic group of transportation, city and economic planners that has set its sights on a new future for the county’s tarnished centerpiece.

“Right now El Camino Real is really the third freeway in the county. It’s not really part of the community. It’s more of a thoroughfare,” said Deberah Bringelson, president of the San Mateo County Economic and Development Association. “We want to make it part of the community.”

The concept has come to be known as the “Grand Boulevard.” It envisions transforming El Camino Real from a highway into a street — a slower-paced, pedestrian-oriented boulevard packed with affordable housing, small parks and mixed-use retail frontages, and connecting to vibrant transportation hubs in each city.

It’s a utopian vision, and one that will require both plenty of funding and cooperation among cities. Still, local planners say the possibilities are real.

“I think there is incredible potential to have an impact,” said Ian McAvoy, chief development officer with SamTrans, Caltrain and the Transportation Authority. “It will take a long time. This is not a one-year plan. This is a plan that will be ongoing.”

Daly City and Colma have already applied for roughly $4 million in construction funds from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. San Carlos has begun inviting developers to peruse six-and-a-half acres of vacant land near its Caltrain station to see what sort of housing or commercial property can be built there.

The first part of the plan calls for new housing, plazas and shops around transit stations on El Camino Real in Daly City, Colma, Belmont, San Carlos and Redwood City.

Eventually, the improvements will expand to other cities as the idea catches hold, according to Cynthia Nikitin, project manager with Project for Public Spaces, a New York nonprofit working on the Grand Boulevard project.

“Hopefully, this will set up a framework to guide the evolution of El Camino Real over the next 25 to 30 years,” Nikitin said.

Planners say the first improvements should be finished by around 2006.

Who pays for the improvements, which are expected to run well into the tens-of-millions of dollars, is still unclear. At this point, it’s simply a concept that has city planners thinking hard about the future.

Officials are looking at “what sorts of things we might put near the San Carlos station to make it a place people want to get to, to make it a destination,” said Brian Moura, San Carlos’ assistant city manager.

It’s also about cooperation. Until now, cities have generally isolated their planning efforts to their own cities, and left changes to El Camino Real to Caltrans, which owns it.

However, the Grand Boulevard concept has cities working hand-in-hand to improve the road that connects them. State Assemblyman Gene Mullin, D-So. San Francisco, has sponsored legislation that would allow cities to pool their redevelopment money to build common projects like the Grand Boulevard.

Currently, cities may only spend redevelopment funds in specific, blighted areas within their own city limits.

“I think we really have the potential to connect communities together,” McAvoy said.