Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think [...]]]> This is the third of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part two, click here.

With some temporary materials, a roadway can become a bocce ball court, and a street can become a great place / Photo: PPS

Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think about the colors, sights, smells, and sounds; imagine the sidewalk ballet in full swing, with children playing, activity spilling out of storefronts and workspaces, vendors selling food, neighborhood cultural events and festivals taking place out in the open air. Take a minute, right now. Close your eyes, and really picture it.

Now, here’s the million dollar question: in that vision, what are you doing to add to that bustle?

If vibrancy is people, and citizenship is creative, it follows that the more that citizens feel they are able to contribute to their public spaces, the more vibrant their communities will be. The core function of place, as a shared asset, is to facilitate participation in public life by as many individuals as possible. Ultimately the true sense of a place comes from how it makes the people who use it feel about themselves, and about their ability to engage with each other in the ways that they feel most comfortable.

“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table,” says Katherine Loflin, who led Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. “It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place; it’s not something that you construct, physically, it’s something that you feel. And it is us as humans that convey that feeling to each other—or not!”

“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table…It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place.” / Photo: PPS

Getting Started: How You Can Make a Place Great Right Away

As Sustainable South Bronx founder and advocate Majora Carter famously put it, “You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one.” Each of us can participate, right now, in creating the city that we want to live in. If you think of enlivening a place as a monumental task, remember that great places are not the result of any one person’s actions, but the actions of many individuals layered on top of one another. It may take years to turn a grassy lot into a great square, but you can start today by simply mowing the lawn and inviting your neighbors out for a picnic.

In an essay for The Atlantic back in 1966, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey touched on this when he wrote about his father’s public spirit, and his active participation in the life of the small town of Doland, South Dakota, where the family lived. Hubert Sr. was a pharmacist, and he strove to make his pharmacy into a community hub, a place where neighbors came to meet and discuss the issues of the day. “Undoubtedly, he was a romantic,” writes Hubert Jr. of his father, “and when friends would josh him about his talk about world politics, the good society, and learning, he would say, ‘Before the fact is the dream.’

When you think about making your neighborhood a better place, think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC). In public space design, the LQC strategy is framed as a way for communities to experiment with a place and learn how people want to use it before making more permanent changes. That experimental attitude can be adopted by anyone. Just ask yourself: what’s one thing I already enjoy doing that I could bring out into the public realm?

Make it Public: Bringing Existing Activity Out Into the Streets

For some of us, there may be opportunities to take the work that we do in our professional lives and turn it into a way to engage with our neighbors. Perhaps there’s a certain activity we perform that could be moved to a nearby park, or a skill that we could teach at a local library. One graphic design firm in Cape Town, South Africa, has taken the idea of public work to a delightful extreme through their Holding Public Office initiative, where they move their office out into a different public space for one day each month and interact with curious passersby. “It keeps us on our toes,” says Lourina Botha, one of the firm’s co-directors. “It forces us to be aware of our role as designers and is a fairly stark reminder that what we design has a real effect on the world.”

In other words, this project illustrates how taking a LQC approach to work enriches not just the public space where the intervention takes place, but the work that the firm does, as well. This kind of activity blurs the line between private and public, and re-frames work as a mechanism for building social capital. According to Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, “We need professionals to think about themselves not narrowly disciplinary professionals, whose work is to simply solve a narrow disciplinary problem, but as citizen professionals working to contribute to the civic health and well-being of the community.”

“Holding Public Office” brings co-workers out into the streets, re-framing work as a mechanism for building social capital / Photo: Lisa Burnell, Graphic Studio Shelf

Many people may not have any particular job function that can become more public, for whatever reason, but there are still plenty of activities that mostly take place in private that can be used to enliven public space. Active citizenship needn’t be all work and no play, after all. “Any kind of community [that is supportive of engagement] is not just going to be about the problems that residents want to solve,” explains Matt Leighninger, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. “It also has to be about celebrating what they’ve done, through socializing, music, food.”

Building off of that last point, the organizers of Restaurant Day have turned cooking into an excuse for a carnival, giving residents of Helsinki, Finland, a chance to showcase their creativity in the kitchen and turning the city’s streets into a delectable buffet in the process. Their idea to organize a one-day festival where anyone could open a restaurant anywhere (from living rooms to public plazas), started when Antti Tuomola was struggling through navigating the onerous process of starting up a brick and mortar restaurant in the city. Recalls Kirsti Tuominen, one of the friends who works with Tuomola on organizing the event, “We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do something that would be fun, easy, and social at the same time. Something positive. We didn’t want to go the protest route. That’s the not-so-efficient way of trying to make a difference; it’s often better to show a good example and then it’s harder for the opposition.”

The first Restaurant Day took place back in 2011; today, it has been celebrated in cities all over the world. The festival is a brilliant example of how a completely normal daily activity can totally transform a city’s public spaces when approached in a creative way. “The street experience itself was a joy to behold,” wrote City of Sound blogger Dan Hill after participating on one of the festivals. “It truly felt like a new kind of Helsinki. International, cosmopolitan, diverse yet uniquely Finnish…It felt like a city discovering they could use their own streets as they liked; that the streets might be their responsibility.”

Tuominen echoes this in her own reflection on the event, explaining that “[Finland] is so full of regulations that people tend to see regulations even where they don’t exist! That’s been hindering things for a long time, but Restaurant Day has encouraged people to use their public spaces in a new way. Sometimes people just need someone to show them, or give them a gentle kick in the butt, and things will start happening.”

Understanding this is key for citizens who want to take a LQC attitude toward activating their neighborhoods: public spaces have a way of amplifying individual actions. One thing from the above comments that is not uniquely Finnish is the tendency of people (particularly in the developed world) to see regulations where they don’t exist. After decades of society turning its back on public life in favor of the private realm of home, office, and car, a lot of people now feel that they need permission to use public spaces the way they’d like to. We can give that permission to each other.

In a wonderful example of triangulation, jazz musicians perform for the assembled crowds near a Restaurant Day pop-up eatery in Helsinki / Photo: Karri Linnoinen via Flickr

Leading From the Bottom-Up: Work Fast, Work Together

If you are a change-oriented person, we need you to lead. Whether you want to move your office outside, organize a citywide cooking festival, or start small by making a concerted effort to engage directly with your neighbors every day, know that your own actions are an essential component of your neighborhood’s sense of place, by virtue of the fact that you live there. Explains Loflin: “If you don’t spend at least some time thinking about the state of mind of Placemaking—every decision, behavior, everything that we do as residents in our place every day—on top of the infrastructure that’s provided by the place itself, then you miss a really important part of the conversation, where everybody gets to have some of the responsibility.”

Whatever you decide to do, know that there will be bumps in the road. One of our 11 core Placemaking principles is that they’ll always say it can’t be done. But keep pushing. Meet your neighbors, and find your allies. Creating great places is all about getting to know the people who you share those places with. Thinking LQC doesn’t just mean experimenting with what you do, but with how you do it. Look for unconventional partners, and always be willing to consider doing things a bit differently.

In an interview for the Placemaking Blog late last year, Team Better Block co-founder Andrew Howard explained how his own LQC street transformations in cities around the US have caused his understanding of how people engage with places to evolve. “As a planner,” he explained, “I always thought that, if I made the best plan, that would attract the right people to come from somewhere else and make that plan happen. What I’ve realized through Better Block is that every community already has everybody they need. They just need to activate the talented people who are already there, and shove them into one place at one time, and that place can become better really quickly.”

Great places are not created in one fell swoop, but through many creative acts of citizenship: individuals taking it upon themselves to add their own ideas and talents to the life of their neighborhood’s public spaces. The best news is that we seem to be living at a very special time, when people are once again realizing the importance of public life. It’s something we’ve seen first-hand in communities where we have worked around the world, and something we’ve heard from many others. “I think that these are the early first steps,” says Tuominen, “but I think we’re heading to something that is very good, and interesting. I love this time. You can feel it, it’s almost tangible: that things are happening and moving forward.”

Before the fact is the dream. Just a few minutes ago, at the beginning of this very article, you conjured up a vision of a better neighborhood. Go make it real.

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This coming week, the Placemaking Leadership Council will meet for the first time in Detroit, Michigan, to begin developing a campaign to put Placemaking on the global agenda. In the lead-up to the big meeting, we’d love to hear from you about what you’re doing to activate the public spaces in your community. Tell us what you’re up to on Twitter with the hashtag #thinkLQC, and we’ll share some of the awesome work citizens are taking on with other Citizen Placemakers around the world!

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

Sarah Ordover is the founder of the NewBo City [...]]]>

Sarah Ordover speaks at the opening of the NewBo City Market; to her right sit Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett / Photo: Sarah Ordover

In our Citizen Placemaker series, we chat with amazing and inspiring people from outside the architecture, planning, and government worlds (the more traditional haunts of Placemakers) whose work exemplifies how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

Sarah Ordover is the founder of the NewBo City Market, a new public market that opened October 27th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We worked with Sarah on a feasiblity and site selection plan for NewBo, and checked back in with her recently to chat about her experience with getting the market up and running, and how food is helping small towns like Cedar Rapids to re-establish a sense of place.

Why don’t we start off by talking a bit about the community of Cedar Rapids?

Well, I’m originally from New York, and my background is in marketing. I moved to Iowa in 1989 for a job, and I didn’t know a soul. My first night in Cedar Rapids was a beautiful Saturday in August, and I decided to go out and explore, looking for nightlife, someplace where people hang out. I didn’t know the first thing about the city, but there’s a riverfront, and I thought, ‘I’ll just go down to the river, there’s always something going on by the river.’

So, I started driving up and down the river looking for signs of life, and there was nothing going on. I went back to my hotel and I thought, ‘Ok, I’ll try again tomorrow.’ I spent the next couple of weeks trying to find the center of town and find where life happened. Eventually, I realized that Cedar Rapids is a wonderful community, but that it was missing a central congregating spot, the place someone like me could go to meet people and find camaraderie.

That’s a story that a lot of people are familiar with, where they’re in a town and there’s no there there, as the saying goes. What inspired you to actually get involved in changing that?

In 2008, Cedar Rapids had a big flood. Before that, there had been the beginnings of an arts district called New Bohemia along the riverfront. New Bohemia was in the very early stages of development, but then the neighborhood was wrecked by the flood. At the same time, one of the concerns that people who are interested in healthy eating, like myself, had was that there was little year-round access to healthy or specialty foods. If you wanted to get anything other than regular supermarket fare, you had to go to a food co-op in Iowa City, which is about 25 miles away.

Shortly after the flood, some girlfriends and I were having our standard conversation: “When are we going to get a Trader Joe’s? Will the New Pioneer food coop ever move to Cedar Rapids? Etc.” As a marketing person, I understood that our demographics weren’t such that we’d be at the top of anybody’s list for expansion. But Cedar Rapids did already have a fantastic farmer’s market downtown, with 150-200 vendors of all different kinds; food, arts, crafts, and 15,000-20,000 visitors each Saturday it was held.

My friends and I started talking about the downtown farmers market, and how fun that was, but that it was really needed in the middle of January when people were looking for things to do. It operates on eight Saturdays in the summer. There had been a proposal for the riverfront, River Run, that had included a year-round farmers market, and the conclusion of the conversation with these girlfriends was, “Hey, Sarah, why don’t you go see who’s working on the year-round farmers market?” I figured I’d make some phone calls, see who’s working on it, and get on whatever committee it was. Well, it turned out there was nobody working on it.

Is that something that you are prone to do? To see that something’s not happening and to just say, “You know what, no one’s running this, I’m going to step up and do it”?

Yes; I’m an entrepreneurial person. I love starting businesses, but I had never done anything like this before. I’d been on nonprofit boards, but I’d never started a nonprofit or done any fundraising. And I’d never worked with governments before. But sometimes, ignorance is the best way to go forward, because you don’t have any preconceived notions about how something should be done, or whether it can even be done or not.

“In Iowa, the idea of a Public Market is new; it’s not a museum, it’s not the symphony, it’s not a theater.” / Photo: Amber

Do you have advice for people who are interested in getting more involved in their communities, but don’t have that same entrepreneurial spirit?

One of the things I have to say that I did pretty well was learn, and listen to people. I just went to everybody I could think of for advice, help, mentoring. One person would introduce me to somebody else. A number of influencers got excited about the idea, people within the community who had clout. I, of course, had no clout. I was not a community insider. But they were able to help point me in the direction of the first few steps and use their own influence to open doors. There was a guy who was running a nonprofit that was looking at how to redevelop the New Bohemia neighborhood, who introduced me to his board, and they introduced me to people, so it just becomes this exponential power, if you’re willing to be open and make those connections.

The other thing is that I put together a board of directors that represented all of the different organizations that were necessary to be a coalition that would legitimize the idea. I find that a lot of people who are in the food movement, or who are involved with Placemaking, get very insular with who they’re talking to. As a business person, some of the first people I sought out were from our Downtown District organization, the Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitors Bureau. I understood that, if this was going to be accepted, it had to be accepted by a broad swath of the business, government, and nonprofit community, not just people within my own cohort. So the board of directors represented the chamber, the CVB, the city council and other key decision makers.

Building the coalition happened incrementally. I used third party endorsement. My strategy was that if I could get somebody from the Convention and Visitors Bureau to say yes, then I could get somebody from the Chamber to say yes, then from the Downtown District, and so on. In Iowa, the idea of a public market is new; it’s not a museum, it’s not the symphony, it’s not a theater. And I was an unknown, so building a coalition from the stakeholder community was essential to our success.

You just listed off a couple of examples of more familiar revitalization ideas, and they were all “old-school” cultural institutions. Do you see the NewBo City Market as a new kind of cultural center?

You know, when I started with this idea, I got a lot of push back that the market wouldn’t work here. New Pioneer, a food co-op from Iowa City, where the University of Iowa is based, tried opening a branch in Cedar Rapids 20 years ago, and that failed, so conventional wisdom was that we didn’t have the population to support the concept. But what folks didn’t realize about Cedar Rapids was that peoples’ consciousness about food and eating has really changed. People of every stripe are interested in food these days. You have the Food Network, and tons of cooking shows. Being a foodie is no longer only limited to those interested in organic cooking.

Food is a cross-demographic link, a common interest that does not know boundaries of age, income, gender or race. Everybody eats. Add to that the rising obesity rate in Linn County and surrounding areas, and there’s a real opportunity to create an environment where we can educate them about better eating habits, while making good food more accessible in a non-institutional way.