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It’s hard for me to [...]]]>

A guest post by Dr. Katherine Loflin

Today, as the inaugural meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council kicks off in Detroit, Michigan, we are thrilled to bring you this special guest post by Dr. Katherine Loflin, a powerful advocate for the importance of place to local economies, and one of the event’s keynote speakers.

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It’s hard for me to believe that, just six years ago, I had never even heard the word “Placemaking.” I’ve been a community practitioner all of my life, trained as a macro-practitioner with a Masters and Ph.D. in Social Work and a dissertation on civic engagement and social capital. I believed there were certain characteristics that inherently enabled places to identify and solve their own problems, and I believed that some of the answers related to civic engagement and social capital. Still, I was haunted by the thought that there was more to it: pieces of the puzzle that hadn’t been placed yet.

Then, in 2007, I found myself the Lead Consultant on Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. Soul was created by Knight and the Gallup organization to study communities in a new way. It is important to note that, from the outset, Soul was very open in terms of outcomes. The study was not attempt to justify the field of Placemaking. We had no preconceived notions about what we would discover. Today, I think that fact contributes to the power of the findings, insofar as they support this burgeoning field. The basic research questions were simple yet profound, yet they’d never been asked before: What makes people love where they live? And why does it matter?

We were in for a shock…and a steep learning curve. The Knight Soul of the Community study investigated community attachment—a multidimensional construct that went beyond measuring just satisfaction to also look at community pride, community optimism, and other emotional feelings about place. Attachment is not the traditional idea of engagement that is usually studied in places, but a separate construct. Understanding residents’ emotional bonds to place represented by attachment took our examination beyond the outward behaviors of traditional engagement and gave new insights into the dynamics of how place affects people. That, alone, was a significant contribution to understanding place success that had basically gone unmeasured.

The shock came as the results poured in: from 2008-2010, we received responses from 43,000 people in 26 communities across the US, in cities large and small. What we saw were findings, year after year, that for many seemed counter-intuitive—even radical at times. We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

Knight Soul of the Community found out that the “softer sides” of place matter to economic development / Photo: Lafayette College via Flickr

These findings seemed like a messaging nightmare at first, because they were so groundbreaking and surprising—but as I considered how to use this new information to spread the word, make the case, and translate the findings into on-the-ground action, the nightmare became great opportunity. The Soul findings forced me to reexamine what I thought I knew about what made places tick. Eventually, I realized that this was the missing piece of the puzzle that I had been searching for.

Here are the primary findings of Soul of the Community, from 2008-2010:

• There is an important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth. What this means is that the more people love their town, the more economically vital that place will be. In an economy still deep in recession, that got some attention and raised some eyebrows. How is this possible? It seems that, when people love where they live, they spend more time there and invite others to do the same. They may choose to stay-cation versus travel. They are also more productive at work and more satisfied in their jobs. They are more likely to buy a house. There are so many little ways in which a love of place can translate to economic impacts, and these all add up.
• What most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place. It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way. Little did we still know, at first, that Soul had just empirically justified some of the core principles long advocated for by Placemaking advocates.

It was in looking for some framework that could help to organize the findings in a useable way that I stumbled across the Project for Public Spaces’ website. Serendipitously, this happened right around the time they were catching wind of Soul’s first-year findings. They gave me an organizing framework, and Soul gave them empirical justification for things that they had learned and known intuitively for years.

Of course, we’re only just getting started. The Soul findings have had significant implications for the Placemaking field, and in so doing have opened up whole new avenues for research, learning, and practice. Below are nine of the key lessons learned so far, which also represent some of the most interesting topics for future examination and discussion:

1.) Optimizing place. The thing about Soul of the Community is that it allows places to be who they are—just optimized—and that was incredibly welcomed by civic leaders. Instead of changing who your community is, it’s about being the best version of yourself that you can be. This means that no place is left behind. All cities can take advantage of this information. Places have to know their narratives: what constitutes their unique identity? If that is unknown, Soul can help places to discover that. The important point of this is: communities don’t have to try to be something that they’re not, but each must capitalize on its own distinct identity.

2.) Lead with strengths. Places often know chapter and verse what they are not good at. And that deficit-based start can be an immobilizing when talking about the future. The Soul findings allowed me to walk into any of the 26 communities that we were studying and lead off the conversation by talking about their strengths. The most powerful path to change for people and places is to leverage strengths to address challenges. Any community intervention should lead with strengths, and Placemaking leads by example.

Optimism about a place’s future plays a big part in local resilience. / Photo: Daniel Horacio Agostini via Flickr

3.) Place optimism matters. Optimism is empirically linked to attachment. That means that the more optimistic people feel about the future of their city, the more likely they are going to be attached to it today. We have seen places in the Soul findings where attachment increased even when the local economy worsened. Optimism about the place’s future seems to be a big part of that resilience. In 2008, Biloxi, MS, was the second-most attached place that we studied, even though they were still in the throes of Katrina recovery. In 2009, there was a meaningful increase in optimism in Detroit. Why does this matter? Because it is with this spirit, commitment and dedication that community turnarounds begin. This speaks to the importance of public messages and leadership to cultivate optimism and then follow through with sound leadership to realize that optimism.

4.) Young talent is leading the place renaissance. According to the Soul findings, young talent is consistently perceived as the least welcomed group in a place. Yet in other polls, Gallup was finding increasingly that young talent was choosing a place to live first, and then finding a job. The fact that people are now prioritizing place before deciding what jobs to pursue has to change the way communities are imagined if places are to succeed. Optimizing place has to be moved to the front burner as an economic imperative, immediately. Place has clearly earned a seat at the economic development table.

5.) The corporate world gets this. They may have not had an empirical model to use until now, but many corporations had already noticed that, to attract and retain the best talent, they had to be able to successfully sell the place where the job is located. As a result, they want to be in places that sell themselves. This was all reinforced by the Soul finding that there’s an empirical relationship between job satisfaction and community attachment. Not surprisingly, the business community is now interested in applying Placemaking not only to their corporate giving, but also to their business models.

6.) A solution on the “growth” tug of war that immobilizes many places. Placemaking often allows residents to finally put their finger on what had kept them stuck. For many, this was the fact that, while the ‘growth’ people are saying if we don’t stay modern and provide the place people want to live we are economically in trouble, the ‘anti-growth’ residents are really worried that growth for growth’s sake would cause them to lose who they were as a place—that they’d become generic. The Placemaking framework enables these folks to re-frame the issue by saying: We will cherish our unique narrative as a place as we continue to grow in a smart and sustainable way.

7.) You’ll see impact sooner. Because Soul of the Community found a relationship between social offerings, openness, and aesthetics, and resident attachment, if you change public perception of one of those things you can see same-year differences in attachment. We saw this happen in places like Detroit and St. Paul…and I have to say: Wow. This makes Placemaking a very attractive framework, especially in places that need quick wins to restore some optimism and fuel additional social change efforts. This core strength of the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” approach to places is one that few other models can claim.

The core strength of the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” approach is that it can change minds & turn things around faster than anyone expects / Photo: troistoques via Flickr

8.) It’s totally scalable. One of my favorite things about Placemaking is that it’s totally scalable. You can truly start anywhere and see impact, sooner than you might think. I’ve seen everything from places starting to turn around because they mobilized to get a strip of sidewalk installed where it was missing, to places coming together around crafting and decorating their town’s trees with lit balls of fashioned chicken wire. Sometimes, it’s all about reminding people of the greatness of their place by helping them to rediscover what’s already there. The best ideas often come from the residents themselves, who are really the true keepers of the soul of their community.

9.) The power of place. Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply. Everyone has a personal relationship with their place and people can see themselves and their communities in the Soul findings.

Because of this journey, today I am forever changed. And we’re all on this journey together. That our disparate disciplines have brought us together around the cause of Placemaking is also one of the unique strengths of our practice: a key advantage that we must leverage in this critical time. We have an economic, social and human responsibility to do so—and now, we have a much-needed piece of the puzzle in place.

Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached [...]]]> This is the first of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part two, click here. To read part three, click here.

You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. / Photo: PPS

Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved and build shared wealth in their communities. “Placemaking, applied correctly, can show us new ways to help cultures emerge where openness is not so scary,” notes Dr. Katherine Loflin, the lead project consultant for the Knight Foundation’s groundbreaking Soul of the Community study, which showed a significant correlation between community attachment and economic growth. “We could find with consistency over time that it was the softer side of place—social offerings, openness, and aesthetics—that really seem to drive peoples’ attachment to their place. It wasn’t necessarily basic services: how well potholes got paved over. It wasn’t even necessarily for peoples’ personal economic circumstances.”

The study’s other key finding was that there is an empirical relationship between higher levels of attachment and cities’ GDP growth. This is important because, in Loflin’s words, “We have not recognized, as a society, the importance of [place]. Studies like Soul of the Community are helping to give us all permission to spend some time working on this stuff—and not in a kumbaya way, but an economic way.”

Placemaking, in other words, is a vital part of economic development. And yet, there has long been criticism that calls into question whether or not this process is actually helping communities to develop their local economies, or merely accelerating the process of gentrification in formerly-maligned urban core neighborhoods. We believe that this is largely due to confusion over what Placemaking is, and who “gets” to be involved. If Placemaking is project-led, development-led, design-led or artist-led, then it does likely lead to gentrification and a more limited set of community outcomes.

Who is the community, and what is their role?

The key question right now seems to be about ownership and belonging, in regard to who  has a right to participate when a Placemaking process is underway. In an article for Next City last fall, Neeraj Mehta started a great deal of chatter after raising this very issue when he asked:

“Which people do we want to gather, visit and live in vibrant places? Is it just some people? Is it already well-off people? It is traditionally excluded people? Is it poor people? New people? People of color?”

This builds on a common frustration among people who work in community development and related fields: oversimplification of what we mean when we talk about “the community.” Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community, but the intersection and overlapping of multiple or many diverse groups. “The community” often includes people who never speak to each other, or may not even notice each other, depending on the quality and availability of welcoming public spaces in which to connect.

Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community / Photo: PPS

This is the very problem that Placemaking aims to address. The most important tenet is that the process must be open and welcoming to all who want to participate. This is not to say that everyone will get what they want out of Placemaking. The point is that there will be an opportunity for people not just to share what they want, but also to listen to their neighbors’ ideas, and to be part of the process of shaping the public spaces that they share with those neighbors. The end result should be a space that’s flexible enough to make room for many different communities, and encourage connections between them.

What role do artists play?

Perhaps one of the most significant changes that has taken place in the public dialog around Placemaking, over the past several years, has been the rise of the “creative” modifier. Creative Placemaking’s proponents (including the Knight Foundation-supported ArtPlace) have contributed substantially to the public awareness of the importance of public space, and the role of public art in creating great places, by positioning artists at the center of the Placemaking process. Unfortunately, this privileging of one type of activity over others also seems to be the source of many of the recent questions around who benefits, and who is allowed at the table.

Whether we like it or not, “creativity” has come to mean something quite specific over the past decade or so. Dr. Richard Florida’s movement-sparking book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was boiled down into sound bites so frequently and consistently after its publication, that the idea of “creativity” became the purview of a specific group of people. Suddenly everyone was talking about “creative types,” and scheming to build more coffee shops and bike trails in order to lure young people with liberal arts degrees to their city to create design blogs and tech start-ups. The idea, perversely, and in contradiction of what Florida was actually arguing, became that a certain kind of person with a certain kind of creativity was most valuable to local economic development, and cities should try to be more like the places that were already attracting that kind of person in order to steal them away—rather than fostering the creativity of people who were already living in a given place.

The sidewalk cafes so often cited as indicators of gentrification can be a great way to enliven some public spaces–but only in response to an existing need within the neighborhood / Photo: PPS

Roberto Bedoya hits the nail on the head in a provocative post originally published shortly before Mehta’s:

“What I’ve witnessed in the discussions and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment, e.g., artists live-work spaces, cultural districts, spatial landscapes. And this meaning, which operates inside the policy frame of urban planning and economic development, is ok but that is not the complete picture. Its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong. Before there is the vibrant street one needs an understanding of the social dynamics on that street – the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.”

In other words, while the intentions of Creative Placemaking’s proponents are undoubtedly good, and their work very frequently wonderful, the fact that a lot of people just don’t consider themselves to be “creative types” limits the potential outcomes. No doubt, part of the drive is to expand creativity and the arts to impact community development and open the arts up to more people, but to start off by limiting the Placemaking process to a certain set of outcomes from the get-go is not the way to go about it.

Every place can be vibrant. Vibrancy is people.

Also problematic is the fact that so much debate has centered on a flawed definition of “vibrancy” that further limits the Placemaking process’ capacity for transforming communities. Ann Markusen, who co-authored the original paper on Creative Placemaking for the NEA, highlights this problem in an essay that she wrote for arts management hub Create Equity, questioning the movement’s early evolution. Markusen asks:

“Just what does vibrancy mean? Let’s try to unpack the term. ArtPlace’s definition: ‘we define vibrancy as places with an unusual scale and intensity of specific kinds of human interaction.’ Pretty vague and…vibrancy are places?  Unusual scale? Scale meaning extensive, intensive? Of specific kinds? What kinds?”

This definition is not just vague, it’s unnecessarily limiting. If vibrancy is defined explicitly as an “unusual” condition, it furthers the idea that Placemaking is geared toward the production of specific kinds of spaces and amenities, rather than toward the enabling of citizens to use their public spaces to highlight their neighborhood’s unique strengths, and effectively address distinct challenges. We may have come to think of vibrancy as a finite quality after seeing our cities stripped of their dense social networks through decades of freeway-building and suburbanization, but that is a misconception.

Vibrancy does not need to be limited to a few ‘unusual’ areas; vibrancy is people / Photo: PPS

Every neighborhood—every plaza, square, park, waterfront, market, and street—can be vibrant, but if people don’t feel like they can contribute to shaping their places, vibrancy can’t exist. Period. Gentrification, which is often blamed on honest attempts to create more vibrant, livable places, is what happens when we forget that vibrancy is people; that it cannot be built or installed, but must be inspired and cultivated. Says DC-based community organizer Sylvia Robinson: “I consider gentrification an attitude. It’s the idea that you are coming in as a planner, developer, or city agency and looking at a neighborhood as if it’s a blank slate. You impose development and different economic models and say that in order for this neighborhood to thrive you need to build this much housing, this much retail.”

Cities’ “soft” sides matter—and so does how we talk about them.

When Placemaking is perceived to be geared toward a specific set of outcomes, it undermines the work that everyone in the field is doing, and leads to the kind of criticism that we saw from Thomas Frank, whose blistering takedown of Placemaking in The Baffler should make even the most seasoned Placemaking advocate wince. Frank writes:

“Let us propose a working hypothesis of what makes up the vibrant. Putting aside such outliers as the foundation that thinks vibrancy equals poverty-remediation and the car rental company that believes it means having lots of parks, it’s easy to figure out what the foundations believe the vibrant to be. Vibrant is a quality you find in cities or neighborhoods where there is an arts or music ‘scene,’ lots of restaurants and food markets of a certain highbrow type, trophy architecture to memorialize the scene’s otherwise transient life, and an audience of prosperous people who are interested in all these things.”

And then, toward the end of the article, the clincher:

“Let’s say that the foundations successfully persuade Akron to enter into a vibrancy arms race with Indianapolis. Let’s say both cities blow millions on building cool neighborhoods and encouraging private art galleries. But let’s say Akron wins…What then? Is the nation better served now that those businesses are located in Akron rather than in Indianapolis? Or would it have been more productive to spend those millions on bridges, railroads, highways—hell, on lobbyists to demand better oversight for banks?”

This is a straw man argument that many of us are tired of hearing: that focusing on the ‘soft’ side of cities, the very things the Soul of the Community study found most important, is a waste of money when cities should be focusing on hard infrastructure. But if we allow Placemaking to be framed (or even worse, practiced) in a way that leaves people feeling unwelcome or excluded, we’re setting ourselves up for exactly that sort of criticism.

Better communication between the people who share rapidly-changing neighborhoods is vital to the future success of our cities—and, considering the fact that 70% of the world’s population will be urban by 2050, to the future of global society. That is what we advocate for when we advocate for Placemaking. We do not work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and eat gelato; we do it so that they will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors. Whether or not that conversation is about art (or politics, or food, or education, or sports…) is beside the point.

You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. When people feel encouraged to participate in shaping the life of a space, it creates the kind of open atmosphere that attracts more and more people. In their inclusiveness, our greatest places mirror the dynamics of a truly democratic society. As we put it in our introduction to the Guide to Neighborhood Placemaking in Chicago (written for the Metropolitan Planning Council), “Placemaking allows communities to see how their insight and knowledge fits into the broader process of making change. It allows them to become proactive vs. reactive, and positive vs. negative. Simply put, Placemaking allows regular people to make extraordinary improvements, big or small, in their communities.”

Over the next few weeks, as we prepare for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council in Detroit on April 11th and 12th, we will be exploring the relationship between individuals and the Placemaking process in further detail. More to come soon.

We work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors / Photo: PPS

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