Jane’s Walk Weekend is this May 4th and 5th!

The fact that Jane Jacobs’ name is so often attached to the idea of gentrification today seems a cruel irony. Jane’s writing was focused on how to create strong neighborhoods that fostered robust social networks; she was far from a “NIMBY”, and her interest in preservation was more about economics than aesthetics. Unfortunately, the complexity of her ideas is often vastly oversimplified or taken out of context today by people looking to generate a bit of controversy. Reports that ‘Jane was wrong’ are greatly exaggerated, often by people who wind up making many of the same arguments that Jane, herself, made.

So it is always wonderful to see people gathering in communities across the country for Jane’s Walk Weekend. Over the next two days (May 4th & 5th), thousands will meet their neighbors to explore, observe, and appreciate what makes their neighborhoods great. In honor of one of our very favorite Placemakers, we’ve rounded up several walks scheduled to take place this year that focus on the theme of resilience, a concern at the core of much of Jane’s work. She was a champion of complexity and flexibility in urban form because these qualities allow communities—and the people that inhabit them—to address challenges more nimbly and effectively. Or, in her own eloquent words:

“Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties … Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

And now, without further ado:

1.) Levee Disaster Bike Tour, New Orleans: The Crescent City’s comeback post-Katina, while far from frictionless, has been nothing short of miraculous. This bike tour will visit the sites of several levee breaches around the city, giving participants an opportunity to discuss what happened to their city, and how far they’ve come since.

2.) Not Your Typical Regent Park Walk, Toronto: This walk, in the city where Jane moved after her time in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, will “[shine] a light on the capacity of local residents and [reframe] Toronto’s negative ‘public housing’ narrative,” focusing on the importance of generating new economic opportunities from within local communities rather than attracting them from somewhere else.

3.) The Roots of Mack Avenue, Detroit: This tour will focus on an historic neighborhood commercial corridor in the Motor City, which recently played host to the Placemaking Leadership Council’s inaugural meeting. The tour will explore Mack Avenue’s economic decline, and look forward to the bright future outlined through the “Green Thoroughfare” revitalization plan.

4.) Hometown Security, The Bronx, NYC: Led by South Bronx-based advocate Majora Carter, this tour will examine the impact of the Spofford juvenile detention facility on the neighborhood. The tour will end with a performance by a group of people whose lives were affected by Spofford, and who have worked with the Theater of the Oppressed to tell their stories. Observations from the performances will inform how the 5-acre Spofford site will be re-developed in the future.

5.) Recycle Kingdom Walk, Calcutta: This year Jane’s Walk is making its way to several cities in India. This unique walk will meander through the East Calcutta Wetlands, providing an intimate look at the vital role that the site plays in the city’s ecological resilience. The wetlands “take in all the solid and liquid waste of the city and generates fish, rice and vegetables and sends it back.”

One last thing: if you’re in New York, the Municipal Art Society will be offering a host of free tours of neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy last fall. You can check out the full list of related events by clicking right here.

Pittsburgh’s brand may be rusty, but like every city, it has its bright spots / Photo: Brendan Crain

“At the heart of my argument,” writes Jim Russell in his response to last Wednesday’s blog post, “is the fact that [Placemaking] initiatives are intrinsically place-centric. Instead of place-centrism, I’m looking at talent migration through a lens of people-centrism…I’m convinced that placemaking is useful, but not for talent attraction/retention. People move for purposes of personal economic development.”

Focusing on talent attraction and retention is what leads to gentrification, the phenomena that people who voice concerns about Placemaking are most often trying to avoid. There is an oft-voiced belief today that there is a finite amount of talent and creativity available in the world, and that cities must compete to draw creative people away from rival communities in order to thrive. But truly great places are not built from scratch to attract people from elsewhere; the best places have evolved into dynamic, multi-use destinations over time: years, decades, centuries. These places are reflective of the communities that surround them, not the other way around. Placemaking is, ultimately, more about the identification and development of local talent, not the attraction of talent from afar.

A key difference in definitions here is that what some would call ‘place’, I (and others) would call branding. There’s an oceans-wide gap between those two things. “Young, college-educated talent is moving from decaying Pittsburgh (brain drain) to cool, hip Austin (brain gain),” writes Russell, explaining the Creative Class concept. “It’s a place-centric understanding of talent relocation.” In fact, what he’s describing is a brand-centric understanding. Pittsburgh’s brand is rusty (heh); Austin’s brand gleams with the silvery-green gloss of techno-optimism. But to categorize entire cities as singular places gets you nowhere at all. Pittsburgh has its bright spots, and Austin has its warts.

Looking at cities from what Jan Gehl calls the “airplane scale” is what allows proponents of cut-and-paste urbanism to do what the Modernists did, using lifestyle instead of architecture. Rather than suggesting that the city be reorganized into tower blocks amidst grassy lawns, today’s one-size-fits-allers call for cafes and artisan markets. They are presuming that the city as a whole will benefit from the indiscriminate application of a specific set of amenities. It won’t. Neighborhoods need to define their priorities for themselves; in so doing, they often discover that there are untapped opportunities to grow their own local economies, without needing to import talent from elsewhere. Even if your city’s brand is busted, your community is still capable of re-building itself. As Jane Jacobs once argued, “the best cities are actually federations of great neighborhoods.”

“The best cities are actually federations of great neighborhoods.” — Jane Jacobs / Photo: Brendan Crain

When cities jump into the talent attraction death match arena, they often wind up losing to win: they spend millions of dollars on insane tax incentives to woo corporate headquarters and factories; they drop millions more on fancy amenities that haven’t really been asked for, in the hopes that (since it worked elsewhere) each bauble will magically cause a crowd of American Apparel-wearing, Mac-toting graphic designers to materialize out of thin air; they sell their souls in order to “create” jobs that are, in fact, merely shifted over from somewhere else.

If “people develop, not places” as Russell argues, economic development and gentrification are one and the same. If your strategy for improving local economic prospects is to drink some other city’s milkshake, you won’t get very far. It’s economic cannibalization. To really grow an economy, opportunity has to be developed organically within each community, and that requires that people dig in and improve their neighborhoods, together, for the sake of doing so–not convincing Google to open a new office down the road.

As Aaron Renn put it in a recent post on The Urbanophile, “We need to be asking the question of what exactly we are doing to benefit the people without college degrees beyond assuring them that if we attract more people with college degrees everything will be looking up for them. We need to sell ideas like transit in a way that isn’t totally dependent on items like ‘enabling us to attract the talent we need for the 21st century economy.’ If I read half as much about providing economic opportunity and facilitating upward social mobility for the poor and middle classes as I do about green this, that, or the other thing, we’d be getting somewhere.”

Places aren’t about the 21st century economy. They are about the people who inhabit and develop them. They are the physical manifestations of the social networks upon which our global economy is built. Likewise, Place-making is not about making existing places palatable to a certain class of people. It is a process by which each community can develop place capital by bringing people together to figure out what competitive edge their community might have, and then working to capitalize on that edge and improve local economic prospects in-place, rather than trying to import opportunity from elsewhere.

Decades ago we, as a society, detached people from place. We decided that places should be shaped based on theories and ideas, rather than the needs of people who already lived, worked, and played there. The development of people and places is the same process. If we keep trying to separate the two, our cities will remain divided.

At Cleveland’s Market Square Park, local residents, businesses, and leaders have invested heavily in Place Capital. / Photo: PPS

“We’ve been wrong for the last 67 years,” Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, announced in his closing address at last month’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place (PWPB) conference. “Ok. Time to admit it, and move on! We have completely screwed up transportation in this country. We can never expect to see the legislative or policy change until people understand the fundamental underlying problem. Asking for 20% more bike lanes is not enough.”

The following week, at the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, the same attitude was present. In her opening remarks to the gathering of market managers and advocates assembled at the Renaissance Hotel, USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan stated that “We’re all here because we recognize that markets can be far more than places just to buy food. We’re looking at markets as venues for revitalizing their communities.”

These statements capture a sentiment that permeated the discussion at both of the conferences that PPS organized this fall: that reform—of transportation, food systems, and so many aspects of the way we live—is no longer about adding bike lanes or buying veggies from a local farmer; the time has come to re-focus on large-scale culture change. Advocates from different movements are reaching across aisles to form broader coalitions. While we all fight for different causes that stir our individual passions, many change agents are recognizing that it is the common ground we share—both physically and philosophically—that brings us together, reinforces the basic truths of our human rights, and engenders the sense of belonging and community that leads to true solidarity.

Even when we disagree with our neighbors, we still share at least one thing with them: place.  Our public spaces—from our parks to our markets to our streets—are where we learn about each other, and take part in the interactions, exchanges, and rituals that together comprise local culture. Speaking at PWPB, Copenhagenize.com founder Mikael Colville-Andersen made this point more poetically when he said that “The Little Mermaid statue isn’t Copenhagen’s best monument. I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.”

“I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.” / Photo: Spacing Magazine via Flickr

Our public spaces reflect the community that we live in, and are thus the best places for us to begin modeling a new way of thinking and living. We can all play a more active role in the cultural change that is starting to occur by making sure that our actions match our values—specifically those actions that we take in public places. At PWPB, April Economides offered a simple suggestion for softening business owners’ resistance to bicycle-friendly business districts: tell the proprietors of businesses that you frequent that you arrived on a bike. At another PWPB session on social media, Alissa Walker advocated for users of popular geo-locative social media platforms like FourSquare to start “treating buses and sidewalks as destinations,” and ‘checking in’ to let friends know that they’re out traveling the city by foot, and on transit.

And of course, when trying to change your behavior, you often need to change your frame of mind. At the Markets Conference, Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman recalled the efforts that were required to change the way that vendors at the West Side Market thought about their role within the local community when the market decided to remain open for more days each week. While many vendors didn’t need to be open extra days, Cimperman helped to re-frame things: “[I asked people to consider:] Who are we here for? We’re not here for ourselves. We’re here for the citizens of Cleveland.”

Individual action is invaluable, but when working to spark large-scale culture change, it is even more critical to develop an overarching strategy. Putting forth a constructive vision, along with clearly-stated goals that people can relate to, provides the framework that helps to guide the individual decisions that people within a movement make as they work to change the culture on the ground. To put public space at the heart of public discourse where it belongs, we should focus on changing the way that folks talk about the issue that’s already on everyone’s mind: the economy. Bikenomics blogger Elly Blue was succinct in her explanation of why tying culture change to economics is a particularly fruitful path in today’s adversarial political climate: “We can shift the paradigm of how we build our cities; thinking about economics is a great way to do that because it cuts through the political divide.”

Great places foster human interaction & economic opportunity / Photo: Fred Kent

Across the political spectrum most of us, after years of economic hardship (and decades of wayward leadership), have learned to react to things like “growth” and “job creation” with an automatic thumbs-up. We too rarely ask questions like “What are we growing into?” and “What kind of jobs are we creating?” This brings us to the concept of Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts. Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible. Strong networks of streets and destinations are better at fostering human interaction, leading to social networks that connect people with opportunities, and cities where economies match the skills and interests of the people who live there. Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.

At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community. Today’s economy is largely driven by products: the stuff we make, the ideas we trademark, the things that we buy (whether we need them or not). It’s a system that supports the status quo by funneling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands. Leadership in this system is exclusively top-down; even small business owners today must respond to shifts in global markets that serve only to grow financial capital for investors, without any connection to the communities where their customers actually live. (For evidence of this, consider the fact that food in the average American home travels an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to table, turning local droughts and floods into worldwide price fluctuations).

Through our own Placemaking work, we’ve found that public space projects and the governance structures that produce them tend to fall into one of four types of development, along a spectrum. On one end there are spaces that come out of project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership is often behind these projects, which value on-time, under-budget delivery above all else. Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires. Next, there are spaces created through a design-led process. These spaces are of higher quality and value, and are more photogenic, but their reliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places. More and more, we’re seeing people taking the third kind of approach: that which is place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.

Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards. They make sure that the sidewalks are clean, the gardens tended, and their neighbors in good spirits. They are involved meaningfully throughout the process—the key word here being “they,” plural. Place-led processes turn proximity into purpose, using the planning and management of shared public spaces into a group activity that builds social capital and reinforces local societal and cultural values.

After participating in the discussions at PWPB and the Markets Conference this fall, we believe that the concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general. If we re-build our communities around places that put us face-to-face with our neighbors more often, we are more likely to know each other, and to want to help each other to thrive.

“It’s because our public spaces got so bad that we have led the world in developing ways to make them great,” argued Eastern Market director Dan Carmody at the Markets Conference, explaining the surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades. We have momentum on our side; if we focus on creating Place Capital, we can continue to build on that forward motion, and bring together many different voices into a chorus.

Like capital attracts capital, people attract people. As Placemakers, we all need to be out in our communities modeling the kind of values that we want to re-build local culture around. Our actions in public space—everything from saying hello to our neighbors on the street to organizing large groups to advocate for major social changes—are investments in Place Capital. Great places and strong economies can only exist when people choose to participate in creating them; they are human-powered monuments. So let’s get to work.

Charlie Gandy and Bikeable Communites Executive Director Josh Frank enjoy Berlin Bistro's new parklet. / Photo: Allan Crawford

What happens when local small businesses bring a healthy dose of creative talent and out-of-the-box thinking to their entrepreneurial mix? What happens when they see themselves as progressive artisans and thought leaders and feel empowered to spread their enthusiasm with fellow local business owners? Business zones in cities and towns that were once depressed and/or even blighted are resurrected and revived. Economic prosperity blooms and grows in fresh and remarkable ways.

There’s a name for these small business mavericks and innovators – they’re called “gazelles.” They take a fresh look at a place and its elements; they rearrange things, turn things over, add new twists. They notice new possibilities for creating appealing places. They let go of labels, status quo and tradition and instead put out the welcome mat for fellow citizens to rediscover areas and neighborhoods of their city anew.

The elegant and spot on “gazelle” term was coined by economist David Birch. He characterized gazelles less by the size of their business than by their rapid expansion. In a 2009 article by Joshua Zumbrum on Forbes.com, Zumbrum explains that “Birch defined the species as enterprises whose sales doubled every four years. By his estimates these firms, roughly 4% of all U.S. companies, were responsible for 70% of all new jobs. The gazelles beat out the elephants (like Wal-Mart) and the mice (corner barbershops).”

We’re very fortunate to have several of these “gazelles” here in Long Beach: small business entrepreneurs who have the vision, focus and leadership savvy to grow their business in leaps and bounds. Two inspiring local examples are Kerstin Kansteiner, owner of Portfolio Coffee House, Berlin Bistro and head of the 4^th Street Business Improvement District, and Luis and Brenda Navarro owners of Lola’s Mexican Cuisine on 4^th Street. The three embraced a Placemaking tactic called “parklets” that have brought extraordinary results to both their businesses and very positive media attention to Long Beach as a progressive city ready to try out new ideas.

The idea for these parklets came from successful experiments in San Francisco. Kerstin, Luis and Brenda did meticulous research (including a trip to San Francisco to see parklets in action) and it sold them on moving forward with the concept. Their credibility from working successfully with the City on other recent community projects made them a welcome partner at City Hall.

In January 2012, the first parklet in Southern California was installed at Lola’s. It measures seven and a half feet wide and thirty feet long – equal to one and a half car parking spaces.  But what is a parklet?  In this case it’s 225 square feet of highly visible, beautifully designed outdoor dining space for twenty plus people. This is prime real estate owned by the City of Long Beach that was previously being used to park two cars for free. The second parklet at Berlin Bistro opened just this past April.

Both the Lola’s and Berlin parklets are organized on a private business model. The business deal Lola’s has with the City allows the restaurant to use the space as an extension of its sidewalk space.  Lola’s pays $850/year for a “Sidewalk Restaurant Service Permit” from the City. Lola’s paid all costs of design, construction, maintenance and operations of the parklet to the City’s standards. Luis estimates $25,000 has been invested in creation of their parklet. Lola’s retains ownership of the parklet and can remove it anytime or for any reason.

“Prior to putting in the parklet we had been seriously considering moving. We’d outgrown our space and other business districts in Long Beach had come courting, encouraging us to relocate.” Say Luis and Brenda Navarro, “But the parklet has done so well for us we’re happy to stay now.”

The benefits to Lola’s have been swift, bountiful and ongoing.  Immediately upon installation people took notice.  The twenty plus prized sidewalk dining spaces became a highly visible calling card for Lola’s. Elegantly crafted, designed, and built by local progressive architectural firm Studio 111 and JR Van Dijs Builders & Developers the parklet has garnered serious media attention, including a profile in Sunset Magazine on this innovative new way of using public space. Lola’s sales numbers have already started moving up significantly compared to last year and Luis reports he has hired four new employees to keep up with the new demand.

That is the power of place: the power to allure, to engage, to entice people to feel welcome, to spend time, to enjoy themselves.

The success of the Berlin Bistro parklet has been even more impressive. At less than three months old the increased business brought in by the parklet has meant Kansteiner has needed to hire six new employees. Yes, I said six. Film and television locations scouts discovered both parklets almost immediately. Berlin’s parklet has already shot one car commercial and has another one scheduled. Luis and Brenda have hired a location agent to help them manage growing interest in Lola’s for TV & film.

A third parklet is planned at Number Nine, another restaurant in Retro Row located about ten doors down from Lola’s.

The benefits of parklets to the City of Long Beach include new revenue from permits and increased sales tax. Both parklets are part of vibrant Long Beach business districts (Lola’s on 4^th Street Retro Row, Berlin Bistro in the East Village) that have worked long and hard to create an interesting mix of businesses to create unique dining and shopping experiences. An additional benefit for all customers and residents was found while doing the overall parking inventory for both sites. Space was found for four new car parking spaces. Both districts are two of the first “Bike Friendly Business Districts” in the country as well, and have worked diligently to educate local citizens on the ease and benefit to themselves and the community of bicycling to support local shops.

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Charlie Gandy is the President of Livable Communities Inc., and is serving as the Local Host Chair for Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, which will take place in Long Beach this September 10-13. Charlie is the founding director of the Texas Bicycle Coalition (now Bike Texas), and the former Director of Advocacy Programs for the Bicycle Federation of America (now the National Center for Bicycling and Walking).

Photo: Mark Plotz / National Center for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW)

Govern + Invest is a theme that will be explored at Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. A question that will be examined is how bicycling and walking investments can add value to a community by creating economic activity, creating jobs, and improving quality of life.

Already we know that when it comes to jobs created per million dollars, bicycle facilities are one of the most efficient transportation investments. But once the paint dries and the asphalt cools, are there lasting economic effects? Can bicycle infrastructure build bicycle culture that will build a bicycle economy?

The answer seems to be yes — at least in the case of Long Beach, California. More than 20 new bicycle-related or bicycle-inspired businesses have opened at last count. I toured some of these business with Charlie Gandy and Melissa Balmer during a recent trip to Long Beach to meet these entrepreneurs, and prospect for locally-sourced goods and services for our conference. Twenty new businesses is a lot, especially in this economy, so you may be skeptical of these numbers (I was); but after meeting some impressive young people, I can assure you that it’s all real.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Yellow 108
A year-old business that recently relocated to Long Beach after being inspired by the city’s funky bicycle culture, Yellow 108 is a headwear company that produces its hats and accessories from salvaged and recycled materials. I met with co-founder Lauren Lilly, who has grown her business to ten employees and is now branching into bicycle accessories. What Lauren has already accomplished is impressive enough; watch Charlie Gandy’s interview with her, and you’ll see she’s destined for more.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Long Beach Pedaler Society
This pedicab upstart can be found plying the green sharrow lanes of Belmont Shores in search of fares. I spent part of a morning over coffee talking to Jesus Chavez and Joseph Bradley, co-founders of the Pedaler Society. These guys think big; they’re not afraid of risk; and they have clearly thrived thanks to the bike culture milieu in Long Beach. They are expanding into grocery delivery, and are even contemplating locally sourcing the manufacture of their vehicles as they expand their business. Building bikes in the United States? Sign me up. Look for the Pedalers when you make it to Long Beach.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

The Bicycle Stand
One of the newest businesses in Long Beach — and one of its friendliest — Evan Whitener’s shop specializes in refurbished vintage road bikes, and new city/commuter bikes. They were doing a very brisk bicycle restoration business when I stopped by. The Bicycle Stand is part bicycling museum, part fully functioning bike shop. If you worship lugged steel frames, you’ll like their Facebook page (linked above).

Photo: The Academy

The Academy
Have you ever tried to find affordable clothing that’s not made in a sweatshop? It’s nearly impossible; or at least I thought it was, until I walked into The Academy. They sell clothing designed to look good on the street and work well when you’re riding your bike. The Academy utilizes sustainable and reclaimed materials, and you can meet the person who sewed your clothes. If that’s not awesome enough, try the prices: shirts and kakis run about 43 bucks each. Stop by to meet Sam: he may lend you his bike for a roll around Long Beach.

And let’s not forget that Long Beach is also home to the original bicycle-related business: Bikestation!

There is hope and optimism in Long Beach; I hear it when talking to these brave, young entrepreneurs. Each cites Long Beach’s bicycling infrastructure investments, and its emergent bicycling culture as key to sparking, sustaining, and expanding their businesses.

Downtowns can be museums of economic development fads and crackpot schemes all designed to breathe economic life back into blighted areas. The pedestrian malls of the 70s; the aquariums of the 80s; the convention centers and stadiums of the 90s; the creative class coffee shops, wifi hot spots, and lifestyle centers of the 00s — these massive public/private expenditures may have provided an attraction, but they didn’t retain or attract the Laurens, the Jesuses, the Josephs, the Evans, and the Sams who will provide sustainable economic growth. There is a lesson in Long Beach. Let’s hope that walking, bicycling, and place become the new form of Economic Gardening.

See you in Long Beach!

Mark Plotz is the Conference Director for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. Registration for the conference is open now, and special rates apply until May 16, 11:59 pm Eastern. Large group discounts are available. Please contact Mark at (202) 223-3621 or mark@bikewalk.org for more info.

• Check out the Livestream coverage of our February 8 event with Marcus at our New York City offices.

Lessons from Newcastle, Australia: An Interview with Marcus Westbury

Marcus Westbury

“We have changed how space behaves for creative people and they in turn have brought their creativity and innovation to the problem of bringing the city back to life.” -Marcus Westbury

Place-by-place interventions are emerging as a powerful way to create new life for an entire district, especially in cities where great economic hardship encourages innovation and entrepreneurship.

Nowhere have Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper interventions been more elevated to a city-wide, cohesive revitalization strategy than in Newcastle, Australia. Decades of decline left the city’s CBD riddled with vacant properties and lacking vibrant public life. Yet, less than two years after interventions facilitated by Marcus Westbury’s Renew Newcastle campaign, the city has been catapulted to Lonely Planet’s List of Top 10 Cities to Visit in 2011. PPS has also lead Placemaking training in Newcastle in late 2010 where we witnessed some of Marcus’s impacts. Newcastle’s success points to signs of a growing international movement towards iterative, creative development strategies that harness the creative power of the local community.

• Create dynamics that foster experimentation rather than expecting solutions to arrive fully formed.

• Do the leg work required to be familiar with right kind of legal agreements, management structures, and governance needed to bring about LQC projects in your city

• A “network of networks” approach to outreach is a really effective way to recruit the merchants and artists necessary to enliven a district. Use multiple means to reach a broad group of people:  Facebook, the local media, public meetings, and Etsy.com

• Don’t overlook large property companies. They can be unlikely but powerful partners and, because they often own a lot of land, can provide access to the critical mass of places necessary to revitalize a whole district

• Healthy, dynamic public spaces are very important for healthy cities. However, you need to be careful to get beyond the idea of cosmetic improvements and actually create new dynamics that generate more interesting and engaging public spaces.

• Part of the challenge is to see your liabilities as opportunities and find the fastest, cheapest, most effective way to get them activated.
• By all means dream up all the great, fantastic, capital intensive schemes but make sure than while you’re doing that you don’t neglect the small stuff. Do enough of the small stuff and the big stuff starts to take care of itself.

PPS: Tell us about the transformation Newcastle has undergone. What does it feel like to walk down the street today compared to two years ago?

Westbury: The area where we have been mainly working – which is a 3 or 4 block stretch of the city centre around the Hunter Street mall has changed dramatically. When we began at the beginning of 2009 the strip had more than 20 empty shops in that area – a number that had been growing every year since the 1980s. Today there are only a handful still empty. In the last two years we have used those spaces and the spaces around them to incubate 60 new creative projects and enterprises of various kinds – many of which are still in the area.Newcastle has galleries, fashion designers,  studios, small publishers, and dozens of other arts projects and creative enterprises that would not have otherwise been there as a result of Renew Newcastle. That is building a vibrant creative community that is in turn building new creative and economic life in the city.
Today if you visit the Hunter Street Mall area it is full of new commercial tenants that have moved back in following the foot traffic that has been generated by Renew Newcastle. One estimate was that the foot traffic had tripled.

LQC Interventions are a creative means to transform vacant storefronts from liabilities to assets

PPS: How do you foresee the project evolving in the next 2, 5 and 10 years?

Westbury: As for the long term, I have always described Renew Newcastle as “a permanent structure for temporary things” – we aren’t aiming to own properties or even make a claim over a particular area. The Renew Newcastle model is to constantly provide new spaces for experimentation and incubation- as we have done more than 60 times already. Some of those projects will succeed some will fail, but the point is to unleash experimentation. Our role will expand and contract with the number of empty spaces available – some of our project will be there in 10 years time but many probably won’t be.
As an organization we are actively moving into new parts of town, trying to build new clusters in new precincts and hopefully launching many new projects and initiatives. We have a reasonable amount of turnover so it’s always a rapidly changing dynamic. Further afield, I’m personally working with other cities and towns to see if we can repeat the same process there and there is evidence from some other parts of Australia at least that it can and does work.

PPS: How were you able to build faith for the implementation of your vision?

Westbury: I’m not entirely sure of that. I accidentally backed into it in many respects! The key thing was working quietly behind the scenes to get the details right. We had to get the right kind of legal agreements, the right kind of management structures, the right kinds of governance figured out. From there we went about convincing key stakeholders from the local media, the business chamber, the creative community and elsewhere to sign up to the same project. A lot of that was about breaking down the “zero sum game” idea that had often polarized people with very different ideas of what was appropriate development in Newcastle. We had to convince a lot of people that for someone to win someone else didn’t necessarily need to lose.

PPS: Where did the merchants/artists come from? How did you recruit them?

Westbury: A variety of places. Most broadly it was a network of networks. Both myself and Marni Jackson (Renew Newcastle’s General Manager) had a background as festival directors so that gave us some good networks but in reality very few of the people who took up the opportunities were ones that we actually knew. Most came out of the woodwork through public meetings, through the media, through facebook (our group has over 3000 members), through contacting local sellers from Etsy.com – it was a very broad approach and very deliberately so.
Many of our projects were what I call “digital cottage industries” – people who were making clothes and selling them at markets, people who were running online enterprises from a spare room, some were online communities – such as local photographers who had been connected on Flickr previously – that came together around a physical space when offered.

PPS: What unexpected partners made the biggest contributions?

Westbury: Our most unexpected big contribution came from the GPT Group, a large Australian publicly listed property company. They gave us the keys to dozens of properties that were lying empty as a result of the financial crisis stalling a major development they had planned. Their properties gave us an immediate critical mass that made a huge difference. They have reaped the benefits on several fronts – they’ve turned a liability into an asset, their other properties in the area have become far easier to rent, they have gotten great publicity and the genuine respect of the people we have been working with, we have jointly won several awards, and they – and now some of their competitors – are actively looking at how they can deploy the same model elsewhere.

PPS: What were your initial biggest hurdles regarding government, property owners, etc? How did you overcome these challenges?

Westbury: Badly designed incentives. There are a myriad of incentives for property owners not to make available their empty properties – Newcastle had more than 150 empty buildings in the two main streets in large part because owners were better off to board them up and write off the losses than use them as going concerns. Essentially, Renew Newcastle exists as an intermediary designed to change how that process works – we use some clever but legal contracts and risk management processes to make that work a lot better. We manage risk and remove complexity which is essentially the key to it.
In many respects, on the surface, Renew Newcastle looks like an arts and cultural project – and it is – but from my end it is really a series of mechanisms for changing access to and governance of space. We have changed how space behaves for creative people and they in turn have brought their creativity and innovation to the problem of bringing the city back to life.

PPS:  Many places around the world boast pockets of creative activity. What makes Newcastle stand out?

Westbury: In many respects Newcastle is very similar to a lot of former industrial cities around the world. It has about half a million people in the area, it was once home to heavy industry that is gone. On the upside I think Newcastle has always had a strong DIY creative culture which helps. It has some great features – it has old city centre still relatively intact, it’s on the beach – an old mining and port town, it has a bit of the “second city syndrome” compared to Sydney which is two hours down the road. Also, in an odd kind of way it has long been politically and practically ignored – which means it’s a good candidate for finding its own way of doing things.

PPS: How did you go about catalyzing creative collaboration amongst the artists and the surrounding community?

Westbury: Strictly speaking, we don’t. Renew Newcastle isn’t in the business of organizing collaborative projects or actively engaging in running collaborative projects. We work with and facilitate people who do but the process is actually quite organic and spontaneous not driven by us. The projects that we work with and broker space for organize all kinds of projects and collaborations and we help them. We don’t run community arts projects in the traditional sense though.

In Newcastle, formerly vacant storefronts are now community destinations that support the local economy.

PPS: How has the revitalization impacted the surrounding public spaces? How do you see the role of public spaces in creating new energy in neighborhoods/cities?

Westbury: There is a greater degree of activation of and pride in public spaces although we don’t approach it from that end. The activation of public spaces is an outcome and a byproduct rather than a specific aim of our approach. We bring creativity, creativity brings experimentation and innovation, experimentation and innovation bring activity and that activity spills over into the public realm – both formally and informally. Healthy, dynamic public spaces are very important for healthy cities. However you need to be careful to get beyond the idea of cosmetic improvements and actually create new dynamics that generate more interesting and engaging public spaces. In Newcastle’s case there has been many millions of dollars spent on physical improvements to the public realm that made little difference to the underlying dynamic. The danger is that communities can end up with superficial improvements that paper over structural problems – I think public spaces work best when they are the outcome of vibrant communities.

PPS: What lessons have you learned through Newcastle and what advice would you give to zealous nuts who aspire to transform their communities?

Westbury: I keep going back to the need to think about and work with the underlying dynamics. How incentives work, how spaces behave, how practical initiative can take root – or what is preventing it from doing so. I tend to be suspicious of single grand visions and a big believer in experimentation. In Newcastle’s case rather than try and define “the answer” we have tried to create a dynamic where we seed a lot of experiments – more than 60 at last count – and see what works. I’m a big believer in creating dynamics that foster experimentation rather than expecting solutions to arrive fully formed.
Also, I’m a big believer in cheap. Part of the challenge is to see your liabilities as opportunities and find the fastest, cheapest, most effective way to get them activated. By all means dream up all the great, fantastic, capital intensive schemes but make sure than while you’re doing that you neglect the small stuff. Do enough of the small stuff and the big stuff starts to take care of itself.

PPS: How does your approach differ when dealing with artists, merchants, government officials, developers, etc. and how have you rallied these groups to collaborate around shared community vision?

Westbury: Mostly it doesn’t. We are very transparent when dealing with each party – I think it’s important that each party sees what the other is getting out of it and why. Obviously there are some differences in language and emphasis depending on whether you are talking to a publicly listed company, a small shop owner, an artist or a community group but fundamentally the proposition is the same. We take space  that is otherwise empty, we find creative people to care of it and activate it and give it to them rent free, those people incubate their own ideas and passions, through that we make places interesting and active, and if and when the owner wants it back they can take it. There’s no rent but no security – if the tenant wants security beyond our rolling 30 days they can start paying rent. It’s transparent, simple, and in many respects obvious but what we also do is manage the complexities of it: the liability, insurance, risk, the big complexities, the trivial management issues, curation of projects, the finding of the best possible projects and people, the permits, and all the rest of it. We make it easy and the process is one where it should be transparently obvious to everyone why people are doing what they are doing.

PPS: Who are you targeting through Renew Australia and what services will you be offering?

Westbury: We are establishing a national, not for profit social enterprise that will offer training and consultancy services. We are aiming to work with governments of all levels and with property owners, economic development agencies, developers and others to deploy creative initiative based projects in different communities around Australia – and perhaps further afield if people are interested.