“What makes the Cultural Trail unique is that it’s an urban exploration trail, as opposed to an urban escape trail.” / Photo: Indianapolis Cultural Trail

Back in 2007, we highlighted the Indianapolis Cultural Trail project in Bold Moves, Brave Actions, a feature that looked at five cities on five continents making exceptional strides toward becoming more people-friendly places. Indy, we wrote, was “taking what may be the boldest step of any American city towards supporting bicyclists and pedestrians” – an especially exciting thing to see happening in a city that may be most famous for speeding cars.

Now, five years later, the project’s big debut is upon us! Today marks the official grand opening of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. Tomorrow, May 11^th, 2013, the city will host Get Down On It, a massive, downtown-wide effort to stage 75 cultural and entertainment events all along the eight-mile trail route.

We are particularly thrilled to see this project come to fruition, and not just because we had the opportunity to serve as part of the design team. The Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a significant project in and of itself, but it gains even more significance when considered in the larger scope of the transformation taking place in this Midwestern state capital. Driven largely by the efforts of the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) over the past decade, Indy is fast becoming a city where Placemaking is a way of life for all citizens. The focus on place, from the top down and the bottom up, is creating a stronger, more vibrant city that doubles down on the local people and places that make it most unique.

To mark the opening of the Cultural Trail, we spoke with Brian Payne, the president and CEO of the CICF and the “zealous nut” who took this amazing project from inspiration to implementation. Congratulations to Brian and everyone at the foundation for this remarkable accomplishment! We’re lucky to have had the pleasure of working with him, and to have seen the potential that a community foundation can have in leading a Placemaking agenda for a city.

We’ve gotten to know many of the projects of his Inspiring Places Initiative through having PPS lead trainings and technical assistance, and are looking forward to starting work shortly on major transformation of Monument Circle (a project that Brian had us help kickstart back in 2008 with a concept paper), the heart of the city and the Cultural Trail.

Why don’t we start this off by having you tell us a bit about what the Indianapolis Cultural Trail is, and how the project came about?

The trail is, from an experiential perspective, a great way to experience all of the great stuff in downtown Indianapolis; it’s also meant to serve as a catalyst for areas that need a catalyst. It is a curbed, buffered, beautifully paved, richly landscaped, and artfully lighted bike and pedestrian pathway that connects to every arts, cultural heritage, sports, and entertainment venue in the urban core. The inspiration for the idea was that it was going to connect to five designated cultural districts downtown in order to make those districts more vibrant and viable by connecting them and giving people a way to get to them that was walkable and bikeable.

Most bike trails are greenways; they’re a way to escape the urban environment and experience nature. The Cultural Trail is actually an urban trail that connects you to everything that’s good in the city center. What makes it unique is that it’s an urban exploration trail, as opposed to an urban escape trail.

One of the big benefits of this project is that it’s changing what we value in Indianapolis. We value beautiful design more since the trail came up; we value bicycle culture; we value sustainability. It’s also a major amenity that the tourism and convention industry is selling and appreciating. It’s a unique experience that makes Indianapolis different or better than it was as a destination. Even in these tough economic times, it’s actually been a catalyst for over a hundred million dollars of new real estate development. People are even moving their offices in order to be on the trail. We’ve had three major nonprofits relocate so that they can connect to the vibrancy this project is generating.

How did you first come to realize the importance of focusing on place? Did you come to Placemaking while you were working on the trail, or was it something you were aware of before?

It’s funny…today, I’m considered a local expert on Placemaking, but it was actually the trail project that taught me what I know. It wasn’t like I was an expert going in. Before I joined CICF as the president and CEO, my career was in managing professional theater companies. A few months after getting hired at the foundation, I was appointed by the mayor at the time, Bart Peterson, to be a commissioner of a new initiative that was originally scheduled to be a five-year, $10 million effort called the Cultural Development Commission. The goal was to establish Indianapolis more as a regional or even national cultural destination city.

We wanted to make our own citizenry connect to our local cultural offerings at a higher deeper level, but also to establish ourselves as a cultural city. My perspective was always: what are we going to offer that’s different, authentic, or unique compared to the cities around us? Why would someone from Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis—or, thinking nationally, Denver, Austin, etc—why would they come to Indianapolis for a cultural experience if we just offer what every city offers: regional theater, symphony, dance company, etc? What was going to make us a destination?

There was this idea presented to us, as new commissioners, that there was a significant opportunity in  the historic retail villages that were either part of downtown or just outside of it. It struck me that, inherently, cultural neighborhoods are unique from other cultural neighborhoods. Focusing on drawing out those neighborhoods’ distinctive qualities seemed like a great way to make the city a unique destination that people would travel to. I tried to raise money for that and got nowhere, because everyone said it wasn’t going to work because these districts were too disconnected: from downtown, and from each other.

So, I thought, let’s connect them! I was a new bicyclist at the time, and was enjoying this rail trail that we had called the Monon Trail. And I thought well we can just connect these downtown districts by creating an urban version of the Monon Trail. Over the years, the idea got more and more ambitious. We could have connected the districts with a five mile trail, but the trail wound up being eight miles. It also became a bigger idea, to connect every significant venue downtown. It’s also now the hub for an entire countywide system of trails. It connects the three other major trails in our multi-county area.

Placemaking has played a major role in transforming Indianapolis / Photo: Indianapolis Cultural Trail

There are a lot of other exciting new public space projects happening in the center of Indianapolis. Can you talk about the role that the trail has played in driving that shift toward the Placemaking idea?

PPS was certainly a big influence, but what’s happened is that, at CICF, the trail became the first of what we now call community leadership initiatives. The foundation used to be a straightforward, donor-advised grant-making organization. But we saw the trail project as a community leadership opportunity, and we started tying other community leadership efforts to what we were learning while working on the trail.

In 2005 (the trail idea started in 2001) we created two community leadership initiatives, one of which was called Inspiring Places, which has played a major role in encouraging people in Indianapolis to care more about Placemaking. We now have this idea that we should be a leading city in America for creating access to art, nature, and beauty every day, for everybody. Today, many of the people who cared about this trail project have been emboldened by the success of the Cultural Trail and Inspiring Places; they feel like they can get their ideas done, too. They feel like it’s worth being an advocate and having big ideas because they know there’s momentum around that now. There is now a huge, huge focus, and a lot of energy and people who are spending their creative time and resources making Indianapolis this great place.

You said something interesting earlier about cultural neighborhoods, and how each one is inherently different from other neighborhoods. How has the trail’s development affected the city’s neighborhoods? Is this energy spreading out from downtown?

It really is. Since we took on the Cultural Trail project we’ve been making sure that we balance that with our neighborhood efforts. We’ve had opportunities through that to work with some great partners. We have a very dynamic LISC in Indianapolis, and they had this idea of doing neighborhood quality of life plans. They’ve gone in and worked from the grassroots, doing neighborhood organizing around this idea of what the neighbors want to do to improve their local quality of life. The trail created major awareness, so among other things these neighborhoods want walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, they want cultural assets, and beautiful green spaces. All of these things reinforce each other.

Another great partner has been Keep Indianapolis Beautiful. They used to just be a neighborhood beautification initiative, but over the past ten years KIB has become a major community development organization. They use their principles of enhancing nature, expanding the tree canopy—the tools that they’ve always used—but they frame it with a much bigger ambition. Now, their work is about transforming neighborhoods and quality of life. They think much more comprehensively about what they do. All of these great organizations, we’re working together from different angles, but we all reinforce each others’ work.

You’ve been talking about connectivity; how do the Cultural Trail and the Inspiring Places initiative improve connectivity in Indianapolis?

At our foundation, we think that connectivity is the theme of the 21^st century. Whether it’s physical connectivity, digital, social, community—we think that a city that creates connectivity at all different levels is going to be a successful city. We’re big believers that innovation and creativity come from the collision and connection between different sectors and different kinds of people. We organize all of our work around connectivity.

The trail project is all about the journey, and the idea that the journey should be as exciting and inspiring as any of the destinations in our city. In fact, the journey itself should be a destination. The journey needs to be a great inspiring thing to do.

“We’re trying to create a city where the journey is as powerful and inspiring as the destinations.” / Photo: Indianapolis Cultural Trail

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!

Downtown Madison, NJ, in full swing during the Bottle Hill Day festival / Photo: Borough of Madison

PPS heartily congratulates the Borough of Madison, New Jersey, whose downtown was recently named one of the 2012 Great Places in New Jersey by the state chapter of the American Planning Association. It is an affirmation of the Borough’s unwavering dedication over the past 30 years and demonstrates the power of a community to transform a place through persistent efforts over time.

Here at PPS, it has been exciting to witness the “before and after” of Downtown Madison, beginning with a plan we created in 1980. “It was one of my first projects at PPS,” recalls Senior Vice President Steve Davies. “Since I had grown up in a similarly sized town, I immediately felt an affinity for the community. It’s been wonderful to have worked periodically with Madison over such a long period.”

In 1980, Downtown Madison, located on hour by train west of New York City, was in better shape than other small town centers across the U.S., though it was sliding downward. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, located in nearby Morristown, had a special interest in Madison, given that it had been the original home of the Dodge family. It was their support, and other support which followed, that helped reverse the downward momentum and get the wheels going in a positive direction. But it was the citizens and leadership of Madison that really drove the transformation over time.

The revitalization of downtown Madison has focused on key public spaces and thoroughfares: Main Street (a state highway, which made it more challenging), Lincoln Place, Waverly Place, and the train station. Madison’s downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places, so amidst all of the physical changes and improvements, the question was always about how to build on downtown’s distinctive historic character and make it even better.

While much of the effort has been on improving the design of streets, sidewalks, and public spaces, the effort has been multi-dimensional. Based on PPS’s recommendation, Mayor Elizabeth Baumgartner created the Downtown Development Commission (DDC) in 1981, which took the opportunity to involve all stakeholders, from landlords and merchants to residents and the arts and non-profit communities – tapping into the inherent passion of the 16,000 people who call the place home. Playfully underlining the later feat, Davies adds, “No one agreed with anybody in 1981. Merchants thought that the problem was with parking.”

The commission, in turn, hired the first downtown manager in New Jersey, and one of the first in the country. “You know, we didn’t say it this way in 1980, but 80% of the success of public spaces is in the management,” says Davies. “In recommending they hire a downtown manager, the outcome in Madison was trendsetting.”

The manager began with programming, marketing, filling retail, and getting everyone on the same page. Programming was launched to highlight what is local and seasonal, and has also been an important kernel for spurring Madison’s renewed vibrancy. Today, the downtown is marketed under the banner of the Love Madison Shop Madison campaign.

Madison went beyond great programming and well-designed spaces to earn its distinction as one of the state’s Great Places. In another move, the Police Department created a “town man” post with an officer stationed at the intersection of Main Street and Waverly Place. The town man acts as a local ambassador, giving directions, making suggestions, and helping shoppers cross the street. Good management practices like this have been indispensable to the revitalization of downtown and the experience of Madison as a safe and welcoming place.

The road to establishing successful programs is not always a straight one and usually requires experimentation. One of PPS’s recommendations back in 1980 identified Waverly Place as an ideal spot to get a farmers market going in downtown. A market was created, but it started as a smaller affair sited in a parking lot outside of the center. When the lot needed to be repaired, the market was relocated to Waverly Place and became an even bigger hit. Mary Anna Holden, Mayor from 2008 to 2011 and long time community advocate, sent an email to PPS at the time saying “It took 25 years to follow the recommendation, but it worked!”

In addition to the now hugely popular farmers market, the DDC and community partners organize other programs throughout the year. These include Bottle Hill Day, a community festival celebrating local culture and downtown businesses, and May Day, a town-wide streetscape beautification day to improve Madison’s parks, business districts, and public spaces. The DDC also links with local colleges to provide shuttles and welcoming tours of downtown for students.

Easterly view on Lincoln Place from Madison’s train station showing roadway, sidewalk, accessible crosswalks, curb, drainage, lighting, shade tree and landscaping improvements / Photo: Robert Vogel

More recently, the Borough came to PPS because they had to replace utilities under Lincoln Place, where the train station, post office, and movie theater are all located. Davies notes, “It felt like a back alley, not a major entrance into downtown.” Following ideas generated at a public Placemaking workshop, PPS prepared a plan to remake the street – which had to be completely torn up in any case – to make it more walkable, including a planted center islands to calm traffic in front of the train station, new sidewalks, and simple interventions at problem intersections with stop signs. Construction was completed in 2011.

“I always knew this was one of New Jersey’s great places, so it’s nice to have it recognized” said current Mayor Bob Conley about the recent APA designation. “The process we went through with Lincoln and Waverly Places was well thought-out; using PPS resources to help, we brought in residents and merchants to all have an input, and it’s obvious that it came out beautifully!”

The work of creating great places is never over and done, but step-by-step communities like Madison are making huge progress. Congratulations, Madison, on this exciting milestone. We look forward to more stories about the life of your public spaces yet to come!

Click to purchase from Powell’s

Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, is worth a read for its acerbic wit, alone. The author fits a remarkable collection of data and anecdotal evidence from his long career in urban design (which included a four-year stint at the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts’ design department) into a mere 260 pages while maintaining a tone that is both punchy and urgent. It’s not often that I’ve found people who can make the discussion of parking minimums entertaining, but Speck has a way with words.

Walkable City begins with Speck’s General Theory of Walkability, before proceeding on to an overview of the challenges facing our built environment today. The author’s deep understanding of the topic at hand thus becomes clear early on, and by the time the book launches into its meatiest section—a detailed breakdown of the Ten Steps of Walkability—the author-reader bond is already established. Barely a fifth of the way through the book, it is hard not to already feel engaged, like a comrade-in-arms.

But this is not the next great book on American cities; Speck says so himself in the prologue, arguing that “That book is not needed. An intellectual revolution is no longer necessary.” This struck me as odd, and it nagged at the back of my mind throughout what was otherwise a mostly enjoyable read. For, as Speck explains a mere paragraph after the line quoted above, “We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities—after forgetting for four—yet we’ve somehow not been able to pull it off.”

That “we’ve” is instructive; the book is seemingly intended for a mass audience, but I got the sense that I was part of a choir, being preached to with the church doors thrown open. While it is a very accessible book, Walkable City comes off feeling a bit more specific than it seems the author himself had hoped. There is a preoccupation with the physical cityscape that suggests the underlying assumption that the reader has some knowledge of and access to the proper channels to act on the information that’s being presented. But many (or even most, if the book is intended for a mass market) won’t.

Indeed, for a book about walkability, Walkable City seems much more concerned with cars and buildings than with people. “America will be finally ushered into ‘the urban century’ not by its few exceptions,” writes Speck, in wrapping up the prologue, “but by a collective movement among its everyday cities to do once again what cities do best, which is to bring people together—on foot.” Yet at the outset of the section titled The Useful Walk, he writes that “Cars are the lifeblood of the American city.” Are we to understand, then, that it is a collective movement among our cars that will create more walkable cities?

Of course not.  People are the lifeblood of cities, and if we’re going to pull off the feat of ushering America into the urban century, we have to show those people not only why walkability is important, but how their own actions and decisions can help to create more of it. [Of note, via PPS's transportation director Gary Toth: even AASHTO included the following line in the 1984 edition of the Green Book: “…it is extremely difficult to make adequate provisions for pedestrians.  Yet, this must be done, because pedestrians are the lifeblood of our urban areas…”]

“Specialists,” Speck writes in no uncertain terms, “are the enemy of the city, which is by definition a general enterprise.” Yet the urban designer seems not to heed his own advice. If he had, we may have seen a fifth category in the book’s General Theory of Walkability; alongside The Useful Walk, The Safe Walk, The Comfortable Walk, and The Interesting Walk, perhaps a section on The Considered Walk.

If we’re going to create more popular support for walkability in the US, we need people in auto-centric places to start thinking differently about the benefits of getting around on foot instead of by car: improved health, more time to spend with families, lower transportation costs, more unplanned social encounters, better sense of purpose and community. If you’ve lived your whole life in a landscape dominated by cars (as most Americans have), walkability may be far from the front of your mind. The idea that an intellectual revolution is no longer necessary assumes that everyone is already on the same page. They’re not.

For those of us who are already advocating for more walkable urban fabric, Walkable City offers a wealth of facts and figures with which we can load our cannons. But it also serves as a reminder that we have to keep working on how we present that information to broader constituencies. We’re getting there, but we’re still en route.

A colorful crosswalk scene / Photo: Alex E. Proimos via Flickr

For more, check out Brendan’s conversation on Walkable City with Next American City’s Brady Dale, part of the #NextCityBooks online book club series.

Detroiters crowd the Placemaking Hut to vote for their favorite ideas for improving downtown spaces / Photo: PPS

What do you want to see happening in your favorite public spaces? This is one of the questions at the core of the Placemaking process, and getting responses from as many different people as possible has always been central to what we do at the Project for Public Spaces. But now, as our work in Detroit evolves, we’re taking our own oft-given advice about thinking Lighter, Quicker, and Cheaper, and testing out some new ways of gathering input and getting more people excited about shaping their public spaces.

Over the next few weeks, PPS’s Steve Davies, Elena Madison, and Meg Walker will be conducting a series of “Pop-Up Placemaking” workshops with Detroiters at the Downtown Detroit Partnership’s D:hive, an innovative social gathering space along the city’s famed Woodward Avenue corridor. Packing the punch of a standard day-long Placemaking workshop into a few hours, these specially-designed sessions will offer participants a unique opportunity to be intimately involved with the continued transformation of downtown Detroit. Workshops will take place from 5-6:30pm on December 5, 11,12, & 18.

And based on the response that we’ve been seeing at events in the Motor City recently, we’re on the edge of our seats, excited to see what people come up with. Recently, Davies, Madison, and Walker set up a “Placemaking Hut” at the Christmas Wonderfest tree-lighting ceremony and holiday market in Campus Martius Park, where people were invited to share what kinds of amenities and uses they wanted to see more of in downtown public spaces.

Upon entering the Placemaking Hut, everyone was given eight dot stickers. They were then able to peruse images of 12 different amenities and 12 different uses, and place their dots next to the images of the things that they wanted most (four from each of the two categories). This visual voting system not only made the important data-collection phase of the Placemaking process fun and interactive, it also built off of the festive atmosphere at the Christmas Wonderfest event (which attracted tens of thousands of Detroit-area residents) and generated a steady dialog between people about how downtown should evolve, putting place at the center of the discussion that evening.

The Placemaking Hut proved to be so popular, in fact, that we ran out of dots just a few hours into the festival! Considering that there were 3,000 stickers on-hand, an estimated 150 people moved through the hut per hour, providing a wealth of feedback about desired uses. That information, along with results from the upcoming Pop-Up Placemaking workshops, will be used by PPS and D:hive to craft a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper plan for the activation of Downtown Detroit this coming summer.

Dog parks were a popular request / Photo: PPS

In case you’re thinking that 16 amenities and uses sounds a bit too prescriptive, fear not: plenty of crayons were available, and participants young and old were welcome to draw things that they wanted to see in their public spaces on a large flip chart if they couldn’t find a corresponding image on the hut’s walls. “We forgot to include a dog park image,” Davies recalled while recounting the story in the office this week. “Big mistake! So many people were using the crayons to ask for that; if you flipped through the chart, it was ‘dog park, dog park, dog park!’”

We’ll keep you posted on how things turn out at the pop-up sessions this coming month; if Detroit lives up to its burgeoning reputation as a hub of urban innovation, these Pop-Up Placemaking sessions could soon be making their way to a public space near you!

In Washington Square Park, light writers make the most of the dark / Photo: Alex Fortney

On the eve of Halloween, I ventured across the East River to cycle through the eerily dark and silent streets of lower Manhattan. With Sandy’s storm surge freshly receded and my sister a refugee on my futon in Bed Stuy, we hopped on bikes and rode into the Financial District to gather clothes and valuables from her apartment one block from the South Street Seaport.

This week, the internet has been abuzz with articles on the relief efforts, the role of climate and ecology in the storm’s severity, and the stark illustration of how a NYC that commutes by car is a NYC in constant gridlock.

While I’ve been very conscious of all of that, what I noticed most on the ground was how social behavior has adapted to this nearly disparate nighttime landscape of the city below 34th Street.  There are no traffic lights, no street lights; there just aren’t any lights at all. For the most part, streets signs and traffic control devices are simply meaningless or invisible. Save for the few with traffic cops, intersections play host to a bizarre dance between cross and opposing traffic. Intuition prevails: minor streets stop for major streets; cars stop for bikes; everyone is stopping for pedestrians. The natural order of transport, untamed.

With no moon and with the light pollution uptown blocked out by the midrises and highrises inbetween, electric light has become an important part of human interaction. Stirring in the shadows of one’s peripheral vision is at once routine and unsettling. We quickly fell in step with the apparent norm when approaching others: each party shines a light at the other, makes an immediate judgement that the strangers are twilight wanders like themselves, and passes by, cordially cautious. It all feels rehearsed and official, as if we all did it in elementary school libraries right after practicing stop-drop-and-roll.

After crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, the incredible darkness was all consuming. Then suddenly, the awe and anxiety terminated by the tower of City Hall, lit like the surface of a star, as though we were astronauts reaching the point of orbit where the sun suddenly bursts forth from Earth’s horizon. Our ride up Broadway was quiet. It is only when we reached the rear entrance to my sister’s building that we began our interactions, talking with the staff loading a truck with the piles of garbage bags filled with 32 floors’ worth of rotting refrigerator contents, and squeezing past other tenants in the fire stairs, meagerly lit by a single glow stick. Out of necessity or fear, everyone simply deferred to trust, assuming others had legitimate reasons to be there, and that no one was up to mischief or criminality.

The NYSE building, presumably lit by generator / Photo: David Nelson

The Financial District was the darkest of all, perhaps reflecting it mostly daytime population. The reds and blues of cop cars and the Stock Exchange’s up-lit columns cut through the darkness. Those columns had attracted a few handfuls of twenty-somethings and I wondered if they had anything to do with Occupy.

Once I had my sister were safely back in Brooklyn, my girlfriend and I rode back into the city, this time to venture uptown. Chinatown, Little Italy, and NoHo were perhaps where the de facto traffic pattern was most pronounced, when crossing the big streets of Canal, Delancey, and Houston.

We were now taking the familiar route of my afternoon commute. In the hard-hit East Village, we passed by a few resilient restaurants and bars operating by candlelight. Glow sticks and LEDs were accessories with purpose here, a part of individuals’ advertised identities. My favorite example was a flamboyant individual who wore a large medallion blinking with orange, green and purple lights. On Saint Mark’s Place between 1st and Avenue A, we found ourselves in the midst of a crowd. As soon as we were about twenty feet away, someone off in the shadows pressed play. We were comically startled. A dozen people started dancing to the harmonies of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel.  There vehemence of the lyrics seemed particularly apropos, given the situation: “Ain’t no river wide enough,” the radio blared.  We headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge. It was nearly 2am; time to go home.

Reflecting on the sights and sounds of the evening on the chilly climb up the bridge, I was struck by adaptability and endurance of the urban experience. People were defining new norms for social interaction, on the fly. Behavior toward key aspects of city life–individuality, mobility–were adapting to extreme conditions. And, as it turns out, even in the dark, people are still fundamentally attracted to people.

The Pearl Brewrey's Farmers' Market has helped to make the site a food destination / Photo: John W. Schulze via Flickr

Food – we need it, we love it, and we structure our lives and cultures around it. San Antonio, Texas, is a city that is starting to structure its neighborhoods around it, starting with an ambitious redevelopment project called the Pearl Brewery. Located on 22 acres along the banks of the San Antonio River north of downtown, today’s Pearl is a multi-use campus of buildings originally founded as the J. B. Behloradsky Brewery and City Brewery over 120 years ago. The current vision for the site is for a vibrant urban district to grow out from a culinary destination that brings people together around the celebration of local food and culture.

Since PPS first got involved with the master planning process for Pearl in 2005, we’ve watched this place change the way that San Antonians think of food and its role in their city. Senior Vice President Phil Myrick, who is working now on the next phase of expansion, describes Pearl as “the vision and bold scheme of a local entrepreneur of hot sauce and salsa.” This entrepreneur and visionary developer is Kit Goldsbury, who purchased the fallow Pearl campus in 2001 through his investment firm Silver Ventures. Developments currently underway at Pearl include a plaza and hotel and the addition of retail, restaurants, and residential units that now number over 200.

The main brewery building's landmark tower watches over the site / Photo: RedTail_Panther via Flickr

A key development milestone was Kit’s courtship of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) which led to the establishment of  a third campus at Pearl in 2010 (their other two residences are in Hyde Park, New York and Napa Valley, California). Says PPS’s Meg Walker: “CIA was an early anchor for Pearl, which was housed in a smaller building before moving to its current and larger home. The Farmers Market at the site also got going early on, along with food festivals in the parking lot.” The weekly market in particular was a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper way of weaving local, fresh, and seasonal foods into daily life of the site’s neighbors. Together, the CIA and Farmers Market have been key in re-framing Pearl as a major destination at the intersection of community life and healthy, local food.

Future plans for Pearl reflect a well-curated mix of creative uses in support of food endeavors of all types. The presence of the CIA will act as a major stimulus for other food and cooking events on the campus, tapping into the power of triangulation to enhance the vibrancy of the place. Ideas for the public plaza, for instance, include edible gardens and a chef’s table, while the Black Box aspires to be a pop-up space for young entrepreneurial restaurateurs.

Latin American food  is a common thread throughout these ventures, as are creativity and comfort. “This stems from an articulated vision and desire to give back to the San Antonio community in a nurturing way through food,” Meg explains. Part of the nurture is designing a space that provides comfort to its users in the most practical of ways. Elizabeth Fauerso, chief marketing officer at Pearl, says, “The need for shade and water provisions to make the campus feel welcoming and usable in a hot climate was one of the key considerations in designing the landscape.”

Plenty of shade makes Pearl enjoyable even in San Antonio's hot summer months / Photo: The Brit_2 via Flickr

Pearl also hosts a variety of activities and programs, including cultural events (films, parties, conferences, and live performances) and engaging services and retail like the independent Twig Book Shop and Bike World bike rentals. Well-connected by an expanded Riverwalk and a bike share station , Pearl uses the Power of 10 to create a magnetic destination for the surrounding community. “Pearl is helping set an exciting drumbeat for San Antonio,” says Phil. “In several of the local workshops that PPS has conducted recently in the city, when asked to map San Antonio’s best places, participants have mentioned Pearl despite it being brand new to the scene. There is a feeling of serendipity that people associate with it.”

The momentum behind Pearl’s transformation is remarkable, but at the same time planning remains responsive and flexible. Meg emphasizes, “Pearl is not springing full-grown out of the developer’s head. While some developers want everything at once, build-out at Pearl has been evolving incrementally over the past six years, gradually bringing restaurants in and creating places people want to visit as a destination. And it’s working. People love it.”

In the larger context of the city, Pearl is the leading edge of River North’s rebirth as a vibrant arts district that promotes an urban lifestyle and creative living opportunities. In fact, the combination of dense urban housing and the infrastructure to embolden its growth is a key tenet of the plan for a vibrant central city. In February 2012, HR&A published a report, Center City Strategic Framework Plan, Implementation, commissioned by Centro Partnership of San Antonio and the City that illustrates how Pearl helps fulfill the city’s goal to encourage more people to live downtown. “Residential growth is the key to unlocking the benefits sought by the city,” the report explains, “including downtown amenities, redevelopment of existing building stock, and the presence of more vibrant neighborhood life on the street and in the public realm.” Anchored by the amenities and vibrancy of Pearl’s food and cultural attractions, the River North district  is enjoying a population boom that would have been unimaginable just five years ago when it was mostly vacant industrial land by the highway.

Going back to Kit’s original vision, Elizabeth says, “Pearl is his love letter to San Antonio.” In helping create the heart and soul of the neighborhood, Pearl’s potential as a public multi-use destination is kickstarting the economic development of a more livable, nourishing downtown.

The Peaches & Greens market played host to a Placemaking-themed Harvest Festival last fall / Photo: PPS

Detroit has become a media darling in recent years, as the story of its rapid de-industrialization and population loss has given way to a new narrative: one of entrepreneurial arts groups, neighborhood farmers markets, and corporate investment downtown by the likes of Quicken Loans and Compuware, catalyzed in part by the new public square at Campus Martius. America loves a good underdog story, and after seeing Motown emptied out, and staring at so many decadently macabre “ruin porn” photos of the city’s deteriorating train station and empty Deco office towers, Detroit is an underdog par excellence.

The green shoots of renewal have generated so much interest that we’ve heard that  many Detroiters are beginning to develop a sort of “planning fatigue” as a rush of independent efforts launched to help turn their city around have left some wondering when the analyses, studies, and public input forums will produce some real results. “This is where PPS’s Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper approach comes in,” according to PPS’s Elena Madison. “There are a lot of great initiatives going in the city, but it is hard to connect them to a larger vision. The fact that farmers markets are often temporary and flexible means that they can spark immediate improvements and build local confidence today, while also informing strategies for long-term change at both the site and neighborhood levels.”

Last year, with the support of the Kresge Foundation, Madison and a team of PPS Placemakers (including Senior VP Steve Davies and Senior Director of Markets David O’Neill, both of whom previously worked on developing the plan to revamp the city’s iconic Eastern Market) traveled to Detroit to work on food markets in two very different neighborhoods. One market, sited in a church parking lot in the Grandmont-Rosedale neighborhood on the city’s northwest side, was located in a relatively stable, middle-class area. The second site was around Peaches & Greens, a non-profit produce market in Central Detroit, an area with high rates of vacancy, unemployment, and a population in greater need.

As Davies explains, “Markets often arise to address existing food deserts—in Detroit, a lot of the markets are citizen-driven: they sprang up because people were responding to a local need. But another major issue that we’re addressing is that many Detroit neighborhoods are also Place deserts. These are communities where there’s just nowhere to go; you have all of these people living near each other, you have schools, churches, and social services, but there’s little public civic life to speak of.”

In Grandmont-Rosedale, market vendors and the neighborhood association (which owns North Rosedale community park) came to realize how Triangulation could lead to a more symbiotic relationship: the park can galvanize support for its new capital campaign by incorporating site preparations for the market into its plans, while the market vendors will benefit greatly from relocating to a multi-use site with a strong sense of Place. Over in Central Detroit, meanwhile, people were more than ready for a change. “They basically said to us, ‘Anything we can do to create a stronger sense of place, we are willing to try,’” Madison recalls. The PPS team wound up organizing a Harvest Festival with local partner Central Detroit Christian CDC, which runs Peaches & Greens, in order to test out different uses and develop a strategy for how the market’s building, a once-abandoned storefront, can become the heart of a “mini Main Street” with a variety of services, parks and gardens on vacant land, and even traffic calming measures.

Markets often arise when residents living in a food desert take action to get more healthy food into their neighborhoods / Photo: PPS

Today, both markets are working to implement their Placemaking visions. Peaches & Greens will soon begin cleaning up vacant sites and next year construction will start on a small addition to accommodate more programming and a commercial-grade community kitchen, where it will offer community dinners, cooking classes, and job skills training. At North Rosedale Park, plans call for moving the farmers market to its new home as early as  mid-summer. Madison attributes progress being made at both sites to the fact that Placemaking is a process that produces projects that communities can really act on: “We’re not talking with people abstractly about how to ‘improve their food system.’ We’re working with them to implement very specific, concrete improvements.”

Recently, PPS began working with another group of markets in Detroit, this time in partnership with the Kellogg Foundation. The three sites involved are all part of the nascent network known as the Detroit Community Markets, with smaller markets learning from each-other and receiving support from Detroit’s spectacularly successful Eastern Market.  Two of the markets are currently located on hot and unattractive parking lots, but this summer will open with new “Place Makeovers” featuring new tents, seating areas, and greenery that were planned during recent Placemaking workshops with local residents.  One of Kellogg’s goals is for this new initiative to plan strategically for including markets into Detroit’s long-term planning efforts–meaning that markets could play an integral role in the city’s turnaround not only as places for commerce and healthy food for families and children, but as anchors and destinations for their surrounding neighborhoods.

In a city like Detroit, where needs far outstrip resources, public markets offer a lot of bang for the buck. Markets need people, and plenty of them–vendors, customers, volunteers–meaning that they offer plenty of easy ways for people to interact and take part in changing the way that their public space is used. “The people we worked with in Central Detroit kept saying, ‘We want more places to get together, to just be together,’” says Madison, echoing Davies’ observation about the importance of addressing Place deserts. “They’ve been really responsive and productive; what’s happening at that site is a great example of how people can help themselves.”

Through our work on markets across Detroit, we’ve also witnessed all the ways that Detroiters are working rebuild their public spaces from the bottom up–creating farms and gardens, walking and biking paths, and restoring community parks.  And since the only cure for planning fatigue is action, that’s the best news we’ve heard about the city yet.

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Big thanks to all of our partners in Detroit, who are making amazing things happen on the ground every day: The Kresge Foundation, CDCCDC, Grandmont-Rosedale Development Corp, North Rosedale Park Civic Association, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Eastern Market Corp, Warren/Conner Development Coalition, CHASS, Joy-Southfield Development Corp, and. last but not least, the Detroit Community Markets.