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.

Brooklyn's Court Street is often bustling with pedestrian activity. / Photo: PPS

“Walking: It’s What You Do Once You’ve Parked Your Car…”

Or so lamented Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, in his keynote address at last week’s Walking and the Life of the City Symposium, organized by the NYU Wagner School’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Vanderbilt set the morning’s theme by charting the history of walking from its criminalization with the first jaywalking laws in 1915, to its sharp fall from public favor in the 1970s following a spike in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), changes in land use (widened streets, trees removed between roads and sidewalks), and the popularization of our favorite modern conveniences, like drive-throughs and escalators.

“Walking is like sex” Vanderbilt postulated. “Everyone is doing it, but nobody knows how much.” Quipping that we haven’t yet had “the great Kinsey report of walking,” he proposed that much work needs to be done to define not just the quantitative indicators for walking, but also the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make truly complete streets. Together, the researchers’ presentations started to present a Kinsey-like breadth of information about the role that walking plays in contemporary culture. Full presentations will soon be available online here, and a publication of the day’s proceedings is in the offing. In the meantime, brief summaries of the presentations are coupled below with a big question raised by each researcher’s findings.

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  Pedestrian satisfaction is closely linked to motivation; vibrant walking streets like this one in Lisbon can encourage people to get out and enjoy traveling on two feet. / Photo: B G via Flickr

  McGill University’s Kevin Manaugh aims to fill the gap between behavioral psychology and the built environment. Arguing that there’s a difference between choosing to walk (the environmentalists), and having no choice but to walk (poorer populations), his research categorized types of walkers to understand who’s doing the walking and why they’re doing it. Manaugh’s research shows no relationship between the distance walked during a trip and the satisfaction experienced by the walker, illustrating how the enjoyment of walking relies heavily on one’s motivation. How can we motivate more people to start walking by choice?

• Picking up where Manaugh left off, Dick Ettema, of Utrecht University, explored how well-being has been defined by academic researchers. He suggested that urban design could be improved through deeper research into the relationship between sensory experience and behavior change, noting that “Physical experience is much more important when walking [than other modes of travel].” Ettema’s research into understanding optimal arousal for pedestrians raises an interesting question for anyone interested in the idea of re-thinking Streets as Places: What are the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make out streets truly complete?
  

• Columbia University’s David King looked at the relationship between transportation system funding and walkability, making a strong case for “person-oriented development” by highlighting key problem areas, such as fuel taxes driving transit investment decisions, wealthy areas enjoying the majority of bike and pedestrian investment, and a planning preference for increasing speed. With lawsuits against cities for decades of underinvestment in pedestrian infrastructure and non-ADA compliance becoming increasingly common, he asked “Are pedestrian environments something we should be engineering, the same way we engineer road environments?“

• The second panel of the day kicked off with the Rudin Center’s Andrew Mondschein, who discussed his research into how people cognitively map their streets and neighborhoods. Presenting different processes of spatial learning, he explained how we engage in ‘active learning’ when walking, noting that frequent pedestrians tend to have a better understanding of their streets and neighborhoods than transit riders. With this in mind, Mondschein raised the question: Might mobile apps, GPS, and other ICT platforms be chipping away at our ‘walking IQ’ by making us less reliant on our cognitive maps?

• Sarah Kaufman, also of the Rudin Center, also presented research on the impact that digital technology is having on walking. “Right now,” Kauffman explained, “we know that physical & augmented reality are separate; in future, we will feel more transported and immersed by AR apps…especially in areas such as navigation, tourism and translation.” Kauffman’s primary question, regarding the future of this field, is worth repeating verbatim: “Are we aiming to augment reality, or substitute it?“

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  Data on mid-block crossings is hard to come by, but important / Photo: Ian Muttoo via Flickr

  UC Berkeley’s Robert Schneider’s work aims to better quantify pedestrian activity by gathering more complete data. Explaining the need for different types of data that are currently lacking (middle-block crossings, trip generation, travel within activity centers and parking lots, and movement within multimodal trips key among them), his talk highlighted innovative forms of data collection which might make this process easier, such as video and GPS tracking using stationary cameras and smart phones. If we’re currently missing a great deal of data on shorter walking trips, how might collecting that data more efficiently change how we design for walking?

So what do you think? How can we get more people walking? Are digital apps the answer–or do they just raise even more troublesome questions? Is contemporary research on walking even asking the right questions, to begin with? Join the discussion commenting below!

These are just a few of the dozens of ideas that the people of San Antonio contributed by visiting the online PlaceMap that PPS created as part of an ongoing engagement with the city’s government and citizens to to help them bring back downtown as a vibrant, livable place for a new generation of residents. This interactive map, based on PPS’s core “Power of 10” principle, called on citizens to “Re-Imagine the Heart of San Antonio.” And they proved ready for the challenge.

It’s all a great illustration of the way that online community engagement — Digital Placemaking — expands and enhances the work that PPS does face-to-face with community members and municipal officials to create great places and to plan for more livable, sustainable communities.

San Antonio's downtown is filled with unrealized Placemaking potential. Photo: Matthew Egan via Flickr.

The PlaceMap was launched in June as one element of PPS’s “Placemaking Academy” for San Antonio city officials. Acting as strategic advisers, PPS led the city’s staff to completely rethink the way they think about planning — not only in terms of community outreach, but in the way they work together, and also in the way they see the places around them.

“PPS has really helped us to get our staff excited about Placemaking,” says Lori Houston, assistant director of the Center City Development Office for the City of San Antonio. “They’ve done a great job with that.”

In August, the first phase of the PlaceMap project ended with citizens coming together in meetings at the library and at a “Views and Brews” event hosted by Texas Public Radio (TPR) to discuss the results. Participants sifted through, discussed, refined, and expanded on the varied concepts that had come up, including many that fit into the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC) category.

Now TPR is planning a new campaign to solicit more LQC ideas via the PlaceMap, then have a vote on which one should be implemented, find a sponsor, and make it happen.

More and more cities are looking to enhance and open up their planning process, and Digital Placemaking is a great way to achieve that. In Baltimore, PPS added online mapping to the outreach mix to connect with a wider circle of voices, while making the community process more transparent. With the Institute for Urban Design in New York City, PPS launched a version of the PlaceMap that gathered ideas and raised awareness of urban design by leveraging the inherent “place-context” of online mapping.

For San Antonio, getting to the next level of public involvement in planning is key. The PlaceMap is part of an overall strategy to achieve the city’s goals of revitalizing its downtown in a holistic, community-led way. “I really think that the PlaceMap has given us an interface with the public that allows them to participate meaningfully,” says Houston.

She adds that having an online option expanded the city’s ability to include people beyond the usual suspects. “It allows people to come to the website on their own terms,” she says. “It allows for more thoughtful presentation. Public meetings are not convenient for everyone. You typically get the same stakeholders.”

Houston added that being able to submit pictures was another real plus. By uploading images to the map, users can share their vision for the city’s public spaces in a very concrete way.

Many of the San Antonio PlaceMap users illustrated their ideas with photos — some from the streets they wanted to see improved, some from other communities whose successes they’d like to emulate. “People are saying, ‘I saw this in another city,’” says Houston. And if other cities can have these things, the implication is, why can’t San Antonio?

The possibilities of Placemaking in San Antonio were clear to Janet Grojean of Texas Public Radio as soon as she heard a presentation from PPS’s Phil Myrick back in June. “I really liked what Phil was saying, when he was talking about Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper particularly,” says Grojean, the station’s director of corporate and community outreach. “I raised my hand and said, You can count on your local public radio station. We’re in.”

Grojean is a lifelong San Antonian, and she is well aware of the problems faced by her city’s downtown. It’s a place that has for a long time held little appeal for residents. “Locals only go downtown when there are relatives in town who want to see the Alamo or the Riverwalk,” says Grojean, with a laugh.

The nature of the problem — a city that had its heart hollowed out — made a Placemaking approach resonate with Grojean. “That’s what Placemaking is, right?” she says. “Taking something that isn’t and trying to turn it into something that is.”

PPS’s Myrick says that the PlaceMap was a great way to spread the news about the Placemaking approach to revitalizing San Antonio’s downtown — an effort that PPS has been involved with for several years now.

“We wanted to use the Power of 10 as one of the ways to talk about downtown strategy,” says Myrick. “We liked the idea of having an online component that invites the community to participate. It’s simple but structured. It’s a way to get community input into a variety of planning initiatives. I’d recommend it as a framework even on a regional planning level — it helps communities have concrete conversations about where investments and growth should occur, in ways that puts the sense of place back in our most cherished places.”

Grojean says that for her and her colleagues at TPR, the community-led Placemaking process, enabled in this case by the PlaceMap, is a natural fit.

“Radio is community,” says Grojean. “Placemaking resonates with who we are. We are community, trying to make a difference.”

We’ll be watching to see what the San Antonio community and TPR come up with in months to come, and we’ll keep you posted!

Contact Phil Myrick or Dan Latorre if you’re interested in incorporating Digital Placemaking into your community’s Placemaking practice.

Photo: Matthew Egan via Flickr

Now that most people are online, or soon will be, we’ve got a whole new way of bringing people into the process, and we’ve embraced the potential of today’s 2.0 social media to enhance our existing Placemaking services.

We refer to this as Digital Placemaking. It’s the integration of social media into Placemaking practices, which are community-centered, encouraging public participation, collaboration, and transparency. In the last year, we’ve completed five pilot projects that have demonstrated how integrated, authentic digital engagement can extend and deepen Placemaking.

Some call this Open Source Placemaking, which connects with the values of the Open Government movement. What we’re really talking about here is getting out of the current oppositional vicious cycles and creating virtuous cycles… an effective way to reboot the relationship between bottom-up efforts and top-down institutions in place-based work.

The Environments of Our Lives

Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” and Marshall McLuhan famously said, “We shape our tools and they in turn shape us.” At PPS, we like to tweak that a little, saying, “We shape our public spaces; thereafter they shape us.”

Today, it’s just as insightful to also say, “We shape our media; thereafter they shape us.”

Bricks, cement, asphalt, or electronic information in bits and pixels … all of these are media we use to shape our world, and have a responsibility to use well. Likewise buildings, public spaces, video, the web, mobile apps … all of these are environments.

How we make these environments, at all scales, has an impact on how we communicate with each other and on our quality of life. Starting the process by listening to the communities who will use these environments leads to authentic great places.

For our first Digital Placemaking effort, we started by adapting and evolving our time-honored Power of 10 approach, which asks community members to look around themselves and take inventory of the things that make their places great — and the things that could be better. The Power of 10 proved to be a natural fit for the online space, and the results to date have proved that digital engagement enhances and amplifies authentic Placemaking at the citywide or district-wide scale.

The excitement and attention this exercise generates in these communities is just the beginning. There are many cities ready to embrace this holistic approach of Placemaking, and in our world today the urgency to change only grows louder each day.

Our recent work with UN-HABITAT frames the reality we face today quite clearly. Here’s what they have to say in one of their publications:

“There are four mega-trends that are marking our modern society. The first two are omnipresent. They visibly shape our societies and our daily lives — globalization and information and communication technology. The latter is often referred to as one of the main driving forces of the new economy. Third is climate change and the growing number of disasters wrought by this scourge, and finally, the trend less spoken about but most profound in its impact on the way we live: urbanization and the growth of cities.”

We are in an age of sweeping change. Communities engaged in Placemaking benefit from the acceleration that authentic community-centered digital methods can enable.

The Pilots: Digital Placemaking Services in Action

Screen shots of recent Digital Placemaking projects in Baltimore, NYC, Denver, and San Antonio

PPS has been busy putting these ideas into action in the field with several pilot digital Placemaking projects. These include an open-space plan for all of downtown Baltimore; a re-visioning pilot for the National Trust Main Streets program in Tupelo, Miss.; “By the City / For the City” an awareness and education campaign for the Institute for Urban Design in New York City; corridor visioning in Denver; and a downtown-wide master plan project (local video) for San Antonio, Texas. We’re about to start our sixth project for Gothenburg, Sweden. Each of these projects gives us an opportunity to review and refine the way we weave digital services into the overall Placemaking effort, and also build on the Ushahidi Open Source platform we use. In upcoming posts we’ll talk further about these insights, our methods, and the technology.

In all our digital work, we always remain grounded in a human-centered approach. Some of my personal inspiration comes from Christopher Alexander, author of the seminal book A Pattern Language, who has profoundly influenced the practices in both public spaces and software. Alexander once said this:

“…What one would hope is that pieces of software make each person that encounters that software, more of a person. We’re all of us more capable of doing harm to other people by simply treating them or our transactions as something machine-like. That danger is right there at the core of it, and yet this very computer phenomenon also has the capacity to go to a much much richer place, that actually makes a person, man, woman, child, more humane and caring.”

This is the kind of authenticity we are striving for in our community-centered digital work.

Why? Placemaking is a sacred multi-faceted approach that capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential. Recently we’re seeing a pattern in which more cities are looking for game-changing ways to improve their places. These cities are choosing to work with new partnerships and coalitions for a broad process that is more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative. Digital Placemaking can be a critical success factor in these Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper approaches to re-making our public environments.

Authentic democratic participation depends on quality dialogue — both discussion and debate. And in today’s world we talk with each other across all forms of media, increasingly centered around our digital networks. Some traditions are worth leaving behind, and others must be cherished enough to renew again and carry forward. It is with this spirit that Digital Placemaking is being co-created here at PPS and with the communities we work with.

This is the first post on Digital Placemaking by Daniel Latorre, PPS’s VP of Digital Placemaking. Upcoming posts will share more info about our pilots, Placemaking insights in this digital context, relevance to Open Government, the Open-Source-urbanist community and civic digital innovation stories related to our work in helping people make great public spaces that strengthen communities.

Contact Phil Myrick or Daniel Latorre if you’re interested in incorporating Digital Placemaking into your community’s Placemaking practice.