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.

A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is [...]]]> This is the second of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part three, click here.

“If vibrancy is people, then the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them.” / Photo: PPS

A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them. Today, in the first of a two-part follow up, we will explore how Placemaking, by positioning public spaces at the heart of action-oriented community dialog, makes room both physically and philosophically by re-framing citizenship as an on-going, creative collaboration between neighbors. The result is not merely vibrancy, but equity.

In equitable places, individual citizens feel (first) that they are welcome, and (second) that it is within their power to change those places through their own actions. “The huge problem with citizenship today is that people don’t take it very seriously,” says Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College. “The two dominant frameworks for citizenship in political theory,” he explains, “are the liberal framework, where citizens are voters and consumers of goods, and the communitarian framework, where citizens are volunteers and members of communities. In other words, for most people, citizenship is doing good deeds, or it’s voting and getting things. We need to develop the idea of civic agency, where citizens are co-creators of democracy and the democratic way of life.”

It is bewildering, when you take a step back, to realize how far we’ve gotten away from that last statement. We have completely divorced governance from citizenship, and built thick silo walls around government by creating an opaque, discipline-driven approach to problem-solving. Busting those silo walls is imperative to creating more equitable communities. Rather than trying, haplessly, to solve transportation, housing, or health problems separately, as if they exist within a vacuum, government should be focused on building stronger place.

a new citizen-centered model has also begun to emerge, that we’ve come to call Place Governance.” / Photo: Andy Castro via Flickr

Revitalizing citizenship through Place Governance: Why we need a Copernican revolution

As the link between bustling public spaces and economic development has grown stronger, some government officials have started advocating for change in this arena. After so many decades of top-down thinking, the learning curve is steep, and many officials are trying to solve human problems with design solutions. But a new citizen-centered model has also begun to emerge, that we’ve come to call Place Governance.

In Place Governance, officials endeavor to draw more people into the civic decision-making process. When dealing with a dysfunctional street, for instance, answers aren’t only sought from transportation engineers—they’re sought from merchants who own businesses along the street, non-profit organizations working in the surrounding community, teachers and administrators at the school where buses queue, etc. The fundamental actors in a Place Governance structure are not official agencies that deal with specific slices of the pie, but the people who use the area in question and are most intimately acquainted with its challenges. Officials who strive to implement this type of governance structure do so because they understand that the best solutions don’t come from within narrow disciplines, but from the points where people of different backgrounds come together.

One of the key strengths of Place Governance is that it meets people where they are, and makes it easier for them to engage in shaping their communities. We have seen the willingness to collaborate more and more frequently in our work with local government agencies. Speaking about a recent workshop in Pasadena, CA, PPS President Fred Kent noted that “The Mayor and City Manager there fully realize and support the idea that if the people, lead they [the government] will follow. They recognize that they need leadership coming from their citizens to create the change that will sustain and build the special qualities that give Pasadena a sense of place.”

Finding ways to help citizens lead is critical to the future of community development and Placemaking, which is exactly why we have been working to form cross-disciplinary coalitions like Livability Solutions, Community Matters, and, most recently, the Placemaking Leadership Council. “Democracy is not a government, it’s a society,” argues Boyte. “We have to develop an idea that democracy is the work of the people. It’s citizen-centered democracy, not state- or government-centered democracy. That doesn’t mean government doesn’t play an important role, but if you think about government as the center of the universe, we need something like a Copernican revolution.”

“We have to develop an idea that democracy is the work of the people. It’s citizen-centered democracy, not state- or government-centered democracy.” / Photo: PPS

Attachment then engagement: Co-creating a culture of citizenship

The engagement of citizens from all walks of life is central to Place Governance, and while a great deal of Placemaking work comes from grassroots activity, we need more change agents working within existing frameworks to pull people in. As the Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community Study has shown for several years running, “soft” aspects like social offerings, openness, and aesthetics are key to creating the attachment to place that leads to economic development and community cohesion. But counter-intuitively, civic engagement and social capital are actually the two least important factors in creating a sense of attachment.

As it turns out, that’s actually not bad news. It’s all in how to read the data. When the SOTC results came out, Katherine Loflin, who served as the lead consultant for Knight on the study, recalls there being a great deal of consternation at the foundation around this surprising result. But SOTC does not measure the factors that are most important to place generally; it measures the factors that are most important in regard to peoples’ attachment to place. Working off of the specificity of that premise, Loflin dug deeper into the data to see if she could find an explanation for the curious lack of correlation between engagement and attachment.

“By the third year of Soul,” Loflin says, “we decided to start testing different variables to see whether civic engagement has to work with something else to inspire attachment. We found that one thing that does seem to matter is one’s feeling of self-efficacy. You need civic engagement plus the belief that you can make a difference in order for it to create greater attachment. We can’t just provide civic engagement opportunities, we also have to create a culture of success around engagement if we want it to translate to feelings of greater attachment to a place.”

Matt Leighninger, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (a Community Matters partner) echoes this need when talking about his own work in engaging communities. “The shortcoming of [a lot of community dialog] work,” he says, “is that it is too often set up to address a particular issue, and then once it’s over, it’s over. You would think that people having an experience like that would lead them to seek out opportunities to do it again on other issues, but that often doesn’t happen. Unless there’s a social circle or ecosystem that encourages them and honors their contributions, it’s not likely that they’re going to stay involved.”

“In equitable places, individual citizens feel (first) that they are welcome, and (second) that it is within their power to change those places through their own actions.” / Photo: Jennifer Conley via Flickr

How Placemaking helps citizens see what they can build together

Creating that support system is what Place Governance is all about. In addition to their capacity for creating a sense of attachment to place, great public destinations, through the interactive way in which they are developed and managed, challenge people to think more broadly about what it means to be a citizen. Place Governance relies on the Placemaking process to structure the discussion about how shared spaces should be used in a way that helps people to understand how their own specific knowledge can benefit their community more broadly. “We can set up the conversation, and help move things along,” Kent says, “but once the community’s got it, they’re golden. Just setting the process up for them to perform—that’s what Placemaking is.”

If the dominant framework for understanding citizenship today is passive, with citizens ‘receiving’ government services and being ‘given’ rights, then we need to develop affirmative cultures around citizen action. We should also recognize that elected representatives are citizens, just as surely as we are ourselves. We need officials to focus on creating great places with their communities rather than solving isolated problems for distant constituents. Equitable places are not given, they are made, collaboratively. Everyone has a part to play, from the top down, and from the bottom up. “The default of consumer culture,” Boyte says of this much-needed shift in thinking about citizenship, “is that people ask what they can get, rather than thinking about what they could build, in terms of common resources.”

Governance is social, and citizenship is creative. The only things standing between where we are and where we want to be are those big, thick silo walls.

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

Almost four decades ago, we created the Project for Public Spaces to expand the work of the great urbanologist and observer of public spaces, Holly Whyte. The way that public spaces were being conceived and designed then was disconnected from the reality of how people used them, yet there was surprisingly little [...]]]>

Click to view a larger version of our 2012 Holiday Card, featuring a stunning image of Detroit’s Campus Martius (courtsey of the Downtown Detroit Partnership)

Dear Placemakers;

Almost four decades ago, we created the Project for Public Spaces to expand the work of the great urbanologist and observer of public spaces, Holly Whyte. The way that public spaces were being conceived and designed then was disconnected from the reality of how people used them, yet there was surprisingly little resistance. Today, in contrast, we are witnessing a convergence of advocates, activists, fathers, mothers, citizens, neighbors, friends — those we call the “zealous nuts” — all coming together around the idea of place.

I have seen this happening in so many ways in 2012. In my conversations with attendees at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place and at the 8^th International Public Markets Conference, I heard advocates for local food, public health, and active transportation speak repeatedly of the desire to work with more broad-based, multi-faceted coalitions. They realized during their respective conferences that deeper, transformative change can be brought about across movements through a renewed focus on the idea of place.

This is not just a trend in the United States, but a global movement for our rapidly urbanizing world. We are honored to be joining with UN-Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation in Sweden to launch a series of international forums to plan how public spaces can be a core agenda for Habitat III in 2016. There is ever more evidence of a growing consciousness around the process of Placemaking. Grassroots advocates have been demanding a larger role in shaping their cities, with increasing success. This resulted in a number of exciting new developments in 2012:

• We’ve had the opportunity to work on the reclamation of iconic public spaces like the New Haven Green, the campus of Harvard University, the Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, and the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit.

• We partnered with the Orton Family Foundation, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Grassroots Grantmakers, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, New America Foundation, and Strong Towns to launch the CommunityMatters partnership.

• We’ve worked with major cultural and civic organizations to bring culture and art out into the streets, in places like the Houston Public Library’s central downtown plaza and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

• And speaking of art, we were selected to lead the National Endowment for the Arts’ Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design.

• Our focus on public markets has continued to expand through work on the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market, ByWard Market in Ottawa, and San Antonio’s Pearl Brewery district. Meanwhile, the NewBo City Market, a brand new indoor market we helped plan, opened in Cedar Rapids this October, helping to revitalize this Iowan city after a devastating flood.

• The PPS Transportation department has continued with its stewardship of the Context Sensitive Solutions program, and launched a series of wildly popular webinars in partnership with the Federal Highway Association.

While we used to fight for each small win, the importance of re-focusing our communities on place is being realized at higher and higher levels every day. It is at this critical point in the growth of the Placemaking movement that we are preparing for a shift into more proactive advocacy and network-building work. We know that our network of extraordinary people is our greatest asset, and we have spent the past several months preparing for the launch of a Placemaking Leadership Council.

This Council will accelerate the gathering of many voices and, through a series of convocations over the next several years, define a series of actions related to 1) re-centering transportation so that it helps to builds communities, 2) strengthening local economies through dynamic public markets, 3) building neighborhoods with centers that are true multi-use destinations, and 4) advocating for a new architecture of place. Our first meeting will take place in Detroit this coming April. The “transformative agendas” shaped by the Council will play a key role in the discussion that will take place at the forums we’re organizing with Ax:son Johnson and UN-Habitat.

Please email Lauren Masseria if you are interested in participating, or click here if you would like to make a year-end donation in support of this new stage in our evolution.

In the middle of the 20^th century, the power to shape our public spaces—a power that I consider a fundamental human right—was taken away from us. I have watched for years as people have fought to take it back. The Placemaking Leadership Council is a critical next step, filling the need for a central forum for debate and discussion of strategies and tactics for re-establishing a focus on creating better places at a global scale. On behalf of everyone at PPS, I thank you for all that you do to make the places and spaces in your community stronger. 2013 is going to be the year of the Zealous Nut! We’ll see you there!

Sincerely,