Photo: Vincent Desjardins via Flickr

1.) Towards an Architecture of Place: Moving Beyond Iconic to Extraordinary

“In the last decade, some of the new buildings that have won the most acclaim exemplify what we might call a kind of new “Brutalism.” They recall that style’s monolithic disregard for human scale and for connection to the surrounding streetscape.”

Photo: PPS

2.) Seven Ways to Disrupt your Public Space

“Placemaking tosses out the idea that an architect or planner is more of an expert about how a place should be used than the people who are going to use it. By bringing people together around a shared physical place, it’s also a powerful tool for disrupting local complacency.”

Photo: Universal Pictures

3.) Ten Great Movies for Placemakers

“While the best way to learn about what makes a great place is often to get out and observe how public spaces work first-hand, there are films that illustrate Placemaking principles quite beautifully.”

Illustrations: Andy Singer

4.) Levels of Service & Travel Projections: The Wrong Tools for Planning Our Streets?

“When we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.”

Photo: Fred Kent

5.) Whom Does Design Really Serve?

“The design professions have been given free reign to set up a wholly dysfunctional system when it comes time to promote the best and brightest, and the results are devastating our public spaces…Whether [competition] jury members actually have to use the spaces that they praise is irrelevant. They are tastemakers, not Placemakers.”

Photo: PBS Newshour

6.) You Are Where You Eat: Re-Focusing Communities Around Markets

“[Public markets are especially viable] today because the global economy has skewered our sense of being able to support ourselves. Markets are very reassuring places, because they give you a sense of responsibility for your own health. People are experimenting, and reinventing what it means to have a good life.”

Photo: PPS

7.) Is Your City Design Centered or Place Centered

“It is critical to remember, in any project, that you are creating a place, not a design. While good design is important to creating great places, it is but one tool in your kit–not the driving force behind good Placemaking.”

Photo: PPS

8.) What Makes a Great Public Destination? Is it Possible to Build One Where You Live?

“Making a great place requires lots of participation from lots of people. That creates lots of new Placemakers, and inspires a whole new group of zealous nuts. Placemaking can change the way that people think about their role within their community.”

Photo: Brendan Crain

9.) Place Capital: Re-connecting Economy With Community

“Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.”

Photo: Dover Kohl & Partners

10.) Creating Great Streets: What Does it Take? An Interview with John Massengale & Victor Dover

“Although a lot of time and money was being put into large projects, they weren’t necessarily leaving behind streets that are better to grow a business on, or to make a home…We thought, ‘Why is that?’ It’s the Placemaking piece, actually.”

Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

11.) Creativity & Placemaking: Building Inspiring Centers of Culture

“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.”

Photo: Ethan Kent

12.) How Small Change Leads to Big Change: Social Capital & Healthy Places

“Many people have become so used to their surroundings looking more like a suburban arterial road than a compact, multi-use destination that they’ve become completely disconnected from Place. Real life is lived amongst gas stations and golden arches; we have to visit Disneyland to see a thriving, compact Main Street.”

Great places like Vancouver's Granville Island come from focusing on people and place, not design. / Photo: PPS

Last week, Fast Company posted a list, adapted from the book Smart Customers, Stupid Companies, of 7 Ways to Disrupt Your Industry. Reading through the list, we were struck by how applicable the recommendations that the authors put forth are to our own principles for good Placemaking. But it makes sense, when you think about it: by directly involving communities in shaping their public spaces–leading with people, not design–Placemaking is in fact a highly disruptive approach.

Placemaking tosses out the idea that an architect or planner is more of an expert about how a place should be used than the people who are going to use it. By bringing people together around a shared physical place, it’s also a powerful tool for disrupting local complacency. Great public spaces give people a tangible way to connect with their neighborhoods, building a stronger local constituency–aka sense of community–over the long term.

With that in mind, we’ve taken Fast Company‘s list and tweaked it slightly to create a roster of 7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space for anyone who’s looking to use a local spot to build social capital in their neighborhood. Without further ado:

1) Identify and eliminate your place’s persistent visitor pain points.
If there’s a place in your neighborhood that seems forlorn or forgotten, there are probably just a few key things about it that don’t work for the people who live nearby. In the words of Yogi Berra, you can see a lot just by observing–so watch how people use the space when are there, and try to figure out what the most glaring impediments are: maybe it’s an unnecessarily obtrusive fence, or a lack of shade. There are plenty of reasons for people to stay home (TV, video games, the internet, et al), so public spaces have to be fun and easily accessible to be successful at drawing them out. Find your space’s ‘pain points,’ and wipe them out first.

2) Dramatically reduce complexity
When a public space is over-programmed, people can feel it, and it tells them to look elsewhere when they just want to find a place to relax. Good management is critical to the success of a public space, and that means striking the right balance between programmed activities and open, flexible space. Modern life is hyper-scheduled–communities need places for people to come together and experience the unique pleasures of just sharing some space with their neighbors.

3) Cut costs 90 percent or more: think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper.
You don’t need to make major capital improvements to a place to make it feel radically different when it’s already underused. In fact, Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper improvements are often much more productive when you’re starting out. It’s easier to get people using a space by hosting play days, planting petunias, and setting out movable folding chairs and tables than it is to raise funds for a new design. Ask yourself: “How might this community want to use this space, and what’s the most efficient, immediate way to make that possible?” LQC allows you to try many different things before sinking big money into permanent improvements.

4) Make stupid places smart.
The same digital toys that keep people on couches when a space isn’t functioning well enough to offer a compelling alternative can also be used to get them plugged into their public spaces now. Using Digital Placemaking tools is a great way to reach people on their smartphones and computers (where they are) and engage them in a discussion of how they want to use a nearby public space. Once they see LQC changes happening that reflect their input, they’ll be much more invested in the long-term process of turning a forgotten space into a great gathering place.

5) Teach your stakeholders to talk.
Silo-busting is critical to the success of public spaces. To create places that are responsive to the needs of people, you need to make sure that people are communicating with each other. When mapping out your revitalization strategy, consider every local organization and business as a potential partner. See if they’re willing to help you generate ideas for your space by reaching out to their customers. No one organization or individual can create a strong sense of place for a neighborhood; either people work together do what’s best for the community, or you lose any sense of civic life.

6) Be utterly inclusive.
Fast Company recommends utter transparency, but when it comes to public spaces, it’s probably better to think of this pointer in terms of inclusiveness.  People need to be directly involved with changes being made to their public spaces, so if you are leading a local charge to revamp a space, it’s crucial that you remember that the community is always the expert when you’re developing a vision for the future of a place. An inclusive process is inherently transparent.

7) Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.
When it comes time to kick back and relax, people often have plenty of choices–many of them across town. Placemaking is as much about the process as it is about the product, since you can only create a great community gathering place by working directly with the community that you want to gather. When people can meet their needs for socialization and relaxation right in their own neighborhood, they keep coming back, engendering a deeper sense of community as social ties grow stronger through the small change of casual interaction.

Says commenter Suzan Hampton of Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, which is in the Architecture of Place Hall of Shame: "It feels like being in an airport terminal in there." / Photo: heyskinny via Flickr

Over the past couple of months, we have written several times about the need to move toward an Architecture of Place, creating design that makes people feel empowered, important, and excited to be in the places they inhabit in their daily lives. Two blog posts generated some lively discussion around the subject, which has led to new insight about how those of us concerned with the current direction that architecture is headed in can steer things onto a more productive track.

One of the principal challenges facing architecture today seems to be the lack of understanding of how people relate to the context of a site. Words like “community” and “stakeholders” have been bandied around so much that they have become abstract, and the need for individuals to have agency and a sense of ownership of their surroundings is lost in the mix. Commenter Richard Kooyman, for example, argues that:

It’s a fad today to say that everyone is ‘creative’ or to use terms like  ‘stakeholders’ as if by doing so we are now all empowered to make the changes society needs. The reality is that not everyone is equipped or even cares to be creative and real stakeholders are still those that hold the purse strings of projects.

The idea behind good Placemaking, and using a Place-centered approach when designing a building or public space, is not that each individual within a given community is the expert on what that space should look like, but that the community, as a group, has an important expertise about how that space is used, and how the people most likely to enliven it on a day-to-day basis (themselves) are most likely to do so. Another commenter, Gil, makes this case quite well:

At the end of the day it is people’s perceptions of how great, or not so great, their places are that matters most…I have yet to attend a public hearing on a proposed project where anything resembling “community attachment” has emerged in the dialogue that emanates from the planners, or engineers, or architects, or those that interpret the rules.

There is a misconception of how community knowledge should be integrated into the design process that we have encountered often in our work around the world. The idea is not that the pen and paper should be handed over to community members to create a final design, but that their needs and concerns be treated as contextual factors that are just as important as the shape of the site, the surrounding buildings, or the site’s location within a city. People make a space into a place–or, as Cindy Frewen writes:

When integrated and understanding place and people, design can mean thoughtfully imagined, beautiful, remarkable, moving…Design can help place, if we understand the need to be relevant and connected.

Commenter Cindy Frewen cites Kansas City's River Market as an example of a "place based, grassroots, emergent" design process. / Photo: Scott Unrein via Flickr

A good designer is someone who thinks creatively about how to develop the most efficient and attractive solution possible to a given problem. For architects, this means creating places that are not just visually appealing, but that are also responsive to the needs that the people who will use those places–not the needs that the architect thinks those people want addressed. When design is responsive (not enslaved) to local needs, it’s better for everyone involved: the people who use a place, and the architects, who can point to a well-used and loved place rather than a pristine object. It is our belief that, if more architects were to take a Place-centered approach in their work, it would create a much broader constituency for their work.

It’s also important to acknowledge, though, that non-designers are part of the problem, too. Decades of top-down decision-making have led large chunks of the vocal public to be distrusting of architects and urban planners today. In some cities, this has created a culture where any change is seen as bad change, and community involvement can be, for designers, a headache at best. As The Overhead Wire writes, about San Francisco:

When there is an open piece of land, often times people don’t think it should be anything.  It’s kind of crazy, especially with housing costs so high.

While NIMBYism won’t disappear overnight, architects and designers can begin to counteract this knee-jerk fear of change by treating the communities that surround a project site as part of the context that informs the building or public space they are trying to create. It’s important to remember that, as Ben Brown writes in a recent post on the Better! Cities & Towns blog, most people are “driven by intuition first, reason second.” People are very good at intuiting whether or not a new addition to their neighborhood is saying “come visit” or “keep away!”

So how do we communicate the value of understanding people as a fundamental part of a site’s context–both to architects who would choose to operate as “lone geniuses,” and to members of the public who would rather fight development than try to improve it? As commenter Greg cautions:

I don’t think the argument [for an Architecture of Place] will be broadly persuasive until we find a way to take it out of the purely subjective. Because others can and will respond “but that building doesn’t make me feel that way,” and then there is an impasse.

Thorbjoern Mann, shortly thereafter, suggests that scale is the critical issue to be addressed:

The disconnect between ‘high architecture’ and the life of places can be traced to several factors. One is the habit of making decisions about projects looking at scale models of the proposed buildings. The larger the building, the more the viewer’s attention is drawn to its overall shape, form, geometry, and away from what happens at the ground level where people interact with it.

Says The Alley Project's Erik Howard: "The best design is built around people." / Photo: youngnation.us via The Huffington Post

And Graig Donnelly points to an article on the Huffington Post about The Alley Project (TAP) in Detroit that beautifully illustrates how a participatory design process–especially one that builds off of existing community efforts–can create a more powerful sense of place than any of the buildings listed in our Architecture of Place Hall of Shame. Explains TAP’s Erik Howard: “Good design speaks to activities and people. Then those get translated into design solutions. The best design is built around people.”

We couldn’t agree more.

One of the key principles to remember when trying to create a great public square is that the inner square and outer square must work together. Active edges (sidewalk cafes, museums, shops) feed into the center; in turn, a lively scene at the heart of a square creates a buzz that draws more people to the area, generating more activity for edge uses. It’s symbiotic!

The video above illustrates this principle using imagery from our study of Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, Texas. Home to one of the most iconic buildings in America, the plaza itself is more of a place to stand for a photo op than a place where people linger and enjoy. As you can see, creating a sense of connection and flow between the inner and outer square is key to success.