Project for Public Spaces » Lighter Quicker Cheaper

Book Review: Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models

Brendan Crain — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:40:23 +0000

As citizen-driven urban action becomes increasingly potent and well-disseminated, the tension between spontaneous, bottom-up improvements and top-down planning and policy is thrown into higher and higher relief. As often as that tension might manifest through loud, messy confrontations, a great deal of it simply takes the form of confusion. The bottom-ups and the top-downs aren’t quite sure what to do with each other, so the future of cities remains cloudy. How we get from here to a more harmonious future seems anybody’s guess.

“[Citizen-led] urban renewal instruments might take an important role,” opines Istanbul-based planner Erhan Demirdizen in the new book Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models, “but only if the local authorities can turn these applications into local development programs.” In other words, policymakers need to figure out better ways to facilitate and channel the energy of engaged citizens, in order for their cities to reach their full potential.

While its tone can, at times, be a bit aloof (read: academic) given the informality of the subject matter, Handmade Urbanism is a significant contribution to those who are trying to figure out how to adapt governance structures to ease the tension between citizens and officials and encourage more action at the grassroots level. The book’s unique format presents diagrams and statistics illustrating three transformative, citizen-driven interventions in five rapidly developing cities and analyzes their impact and meaning through interviews with local activists, designers, and academics. The result is something of a hybrid between a guidebook and a handbook.

The case studies, all of which were selected through the Urban Age program, highlight a wide variety of interventions in slums and favelas in Mexico City, Istanbul, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Mumbai. Presented together, they lead the reader on a journey through a potential place: a city where public spaces truly belong to the public, and everyone is encouraged to contribute. The analysis of these projects looks at each city through a five distinctly different lenses, discussing the role of citizen-led projects with community actors, government officials, academics, artists, and intermediaries, defined by the editors as “those operating at the middle level (between top-down and bottom-up interventions) intermediating scales, and different layers of knowledge and action.”

One of the book’s many detailed diagrams / Photo: Jovis

Unsurprisingly, given this staunchly multidisciplinary approach, there is a heavy focus on the role of partnerships in driving success with bottom-up projects. The success of any public space relies heavily on a strong network of partners, from individuals to organizations. This is especially true of citizen-led projects because unsanctioned improvements often require substantial public support to avoid being dismantled for any number of bureaucratic reasons once they are discovered. Thus, almost every case study presented in Handmade Urbanism involves some interesting examples of people from different constituencies working together. More importantly, several illustrate the power of partnerships and collaboration to transform and expand the reach of the groups that participate.

Take, for instance, Mumbai’s Triratna Prerana Mandal (TPM), which started out as a group of boys who gathered in an underused space to play cricket. They eventually began to take some ownership of the site, cleaning it regularly. This activity led to the site’s selection for a new toilet facility constructed through a World Bank/SPARC program. TPM was charged with maintaining the facility, and smartly capitalized on the centrality of this sanitation space within peoples’ daily routines by relocating their office on-site. Once there, they continued to care for and improve the space, eventually working with the community to create public cultural and educational programming. Their efforts have now been expanded into adjacent abandoned buildings, illustrating “how even basic infrastructure…can provide an impetus for much wider community activism and urban change” when woven into existing social networks.

The capacity for bottom-up projects to drive more systemic change is another key theme seen throughout Handmade Urbanism. Strong partnerships create the kind of productive bustle and vitality that spills over into the streets surrounding a public space, creating what the book’s editors refer to as a “ripple effect.” A case study from Istanbul, Music for Peace, illustrates this particularly well. The group set out to organize a music school and, taking a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper-style approach, worked to improve surrounding buildings and public spaces “to create a proper spatial environment” for children to learn music.

They also considered how their activities would change the neighborhood’s social system: music was seen as a way to develop youth role models, and to fill the street with music as a way of enlivening public space. Kids carrying their instruments around the neighborhood affected the tone of the area’s street life. Altogether, this created a self-reinforcing cycle that generated support for and participation in Music for Peace’s programming. Within four years of starting up, the group was building a new music center. In 2012, a school was added. The group transformed their community; in return, the community transformed the group.

So how can the official systems in place today become more flexible and adaptable to allow for more responsive solutions to urban problems? There is, of course, no silver bullet for easing the tension between the bottom-ups and the top-downs. But Handmade Urbanism is a helpful tool for illustrating how collaboration can enhance the work that everyone is doing. Its case studies demonstrate for people at the top how citizen-led initiatives can create more bang for the buck. Through the interviews with policymakers and government officials, the book can also help citizens to better understand how contemporary decision-makers think about and approach this type of work, and what challenges need to be addressed.

Benjamín González, a cultural manager from Mexico City, offers perhaps the most succinct summary of the central message of Handmade Urbanism in his interview. Asked what he thinks the next steps would be for sparking more collaboration between arts and cultural programming and city governments to revitalize communities, González suggests that “[We need] to recognize that cities are also cultural projects, and that any particular initiative is also a cultural project, regardless of the subject, because in all of them we are talking about a change in people’s conception and behavior.”

As surely as we shape and change our cities, our cities shape and change us. Why not make that process as hands-on as possible?

A bustling street in Mumbai, one of the five cities explored in Handmade Urbanism / Photo: Jovis

Learning From Knight’s Soul of the Community, Leaning Toward the Future of Placemaking

Dr. Katherine Loflin — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:45:19 +0000

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.

How to Be a Citizen Placemaker: Think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper

Project for Public Spaces — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 17:45:12 +0000

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.

Detroit Leads the Way on Place-Centered Revitalization

Project for Public Spaces — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:29:00 +0000

Future plans for Cadillac Square call for a lively marketplace / Image: PPS

You may have heard about downtown Detroit’s big comeback story. Campus Martius has become one of America’s great urban squares. Demand for housing has outstripped supply for months. Major tech firms like Twitter are opening up offices in refurbished historic buildings. The Motor City’s historic core is ascendant.

Yesterday, at an event hosted by Dan Gilbert of Rock Ventures LLC, downtown Detroit became the Rust Belt comeback kid to watch. Gilbert, who moved thousands of employees downtown from his company Quicken Loans’ former headquarters in the suburbs, has bought more than a dozen downtown properties in recent years and is deeply invested in the revitalization of the district. He is a new kind of visionary who understands the fundamental value of great places, and the need to work with his fellow citizens to shape the city’s future together, rather than imposing a singular vision from the top down. The movement that he has built is about turning everything in Detroit up-side down and reorienting the role of each player, from pedestrian to CEO, to maximize their contribution to the shared experience of the city.

The Woodward Avenue corridor will be defined by its key public spaces / Image: PPS

Our own involvement in that movement began last September, when PPS joined Terremark Partners, Shook Kelley, and Gibbs Planning Group for a charrette organized by Rock Ventures. “We proposed developing a Placemaking vision for the major public spaces, and refining the plan through the Power of 10 concept,” says Meg Walker, a Vice President at PPS who worked on the project. “That’s been a key factor from the start. A lot of developers aren’t as enlightened as Dan Gilbert…they wouldn’t necessarily think about the glue that’s holding this all together.”

The Power of 10 framework suggests that a great city needs at least ten great districts, each with at least ten great places, which in turn each have at least ten things to do. Great public spaces produce an energy and enthusiasm that spills over into surrounding areas. By being conscious of this and planning for it from the start, Placemakers can speed up the process of revitalization by making sure that the key places within their district complement each other and great a major regional destination. That is the promise of the Placemaking vision for downtown Detroit. It is a grand experiment made up of many small, human-scaled parts: the largest full-scale Power of 10 exercise undertaken yet.

And of course, the citizens of Detroit have played a fundamental role in shaping the plan and identifying the attractions and uses that they want to see in their downtown. “The people in Detroit love their city so passionately,” says PPS president Fred Kent, who presented the public space plans at Rock’s unveiling event yesterday. “It’s unlike any other city I’ve ever been to. When people love Detroit, they really love it. That’s what makes it such an ideal place to try something like this. Dan’s vision has been to get everyone involved, and tap into that love that Detroiters have for their city. Revitalizing cities around place is all about the community organizing, and his passion for that, and understanding of it, is truly revolutionary.”

That passion was channeled via a slew of engagement activities over the past several months. This included a series of Placemaking workshops last November and December, and an interactive pop-up “Placemaking hut” at the annual holiday tree lighting ceremony in Campus Martius. This activity was bolstered by interviews and focus groups, input from which was used to create a stunning, detailed report in February that was used by Rock to create the vision plan for downtown, which is available online as a PDF here. (Really, don’t miss it!) “We knew that we need public input,” says Walker. “You can’t just come up with this kind of plan in a vacuum.

Grand Circus Park will be the northern anchor for the downtown plan / Image: PPS

Now, with so much momentum behind the project, the real thrill will be watching the plan take off in just a couple of months. Rock will begin implementing the Placemaking vision this summer via a large-scale Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategy that will include installations, pop-ups, and other activities in key public spaces like Cadillac Square, Capitol Park, and Grand Circus Park. This experimental approach will inform the long-term transformation of downtown’s public realm. The focus is on re-orienting downtown around the pedestrian experience and making walking a joy. The Motor City, the focus has long been on the streets—and turning Detroit around will require a total re-thinking of critical arteries like Woodward Avenue as streets for people, rather than cars.

Or, as Fred put it in his presentation, “We want to create a city where you don’t drive through the center, you drive to it.”

Capitol Park will become a hub for arts and creativity / Image: PPS

We’ll be keeping you updated on progress as Rock moves forward with the implementation of the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper plan this summer. The process won’t only be exciting for Detroiters, but for anyone who sees the potential in a struggling downtown and is looking for a way to transform a whole district. By focusing on creating great public destinations with residents rather than building trophy buildings or designing spaces as showpieces without involving the people who will use them, Detroit has the potential not just to change its own narrative, but to change how cities around the world take on urban revitalization. We’ll also be in Detroit in two weeks for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council, and will have plenty of exciting new info to share with Placemakers afterward. More to come soon!

For more reactions to yesterday’s unveiling, check out some reportage from around the web:

Dan Gilbert (left) and Fred Kent (right) at the unveiling of Detroit’s new downtown plan / Photo: @OpportunityDET via Twitter

To Make a Great Third Place, Get Out of the Way

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:49:58 +0000

The following article was written for the Fall 2012 issue of Shelterforce magazine.
Click here to view the original version on their website.

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Great third places are stages for public life, and should reflect the people who live, work, and play nearby / Photo: PPS

You are never finished. That is one of PPS’s 11 principles for creating great community places. For anyone working to create a great “third place” in their neighborhood, it is critical to remember that there will never be a time when the work is done. Real-world communities are incredibly dynamic, ever-changing things. A public space cannot be finished any more than the city in which it resides can be. At their best, public spaces are the most tangible reflections of cities and neighborhoods and the people who make them special. They are stages for public life, and should reflect the people who live, work, and play nearby.

“Ninety percent of success in public spaces is about management,” says Fred Kent, PPS’s founder and president. “Lots of cities create spaces but don’t manage them.” The key to successful management is understanding and being responsive to the people a space currently serves. Since people come and go, great places must be understood as sites that are in constant flux.

Placemaking, the process that PPS uses in our work with communities around the world, is designed to involve people directly in deciding how their public spaces will look, feel, and operate. Normal citizens are the best experts that you can ask for when planning how a place should be designed or used—but they often question or ignore their own intuitive knowledge. For far too long, the shaping of public spaces has been left to architects and urban planners, who plan from the top down.

This has left many people feeling disconnected from the places that are supposed to serve their needs. Parks and plazas go unused because they don’t feature activities that excite local residents; waterfronts languish because they remain disconnected from their cities even after renovations; streets are seen as conduits for traffic instead of places for bumping into neighbors on the way home from work. Ask many citizens why they don’t go to a given place and they’ll probably have a few good reasons; ask them how they’d go about changing it, and they’ll shrug their shoulders. “That’s for the planners to decide.”

Placemaking teaches people how to evaluate places based on sociability, accessibility, uses, and comfort, and helps them to articulate and build confidence in the value of their own observations about how a place is working—or not working, as is often the case. In this way, Placemaking is a fundamental part of any attempt to create a local third place, since it simultaneously ensures that changes to a space will reflect the needs of the existing community and builds that community’s sense of ownership in a project.

Privately-owned third places like neighborhood cafés or pubs are forced to be responsive to the local community; if they aren’t providing programming and services that their neighbors want, they will most likely go out of business. Public spaces, by the very nature of being publicly owned and operated, can shirk responsibility if the community does not feel either empowered to make them their own or hold local leaders accountable. The Placemaking process encourages people to connect in public spaces, creating the kinds of engaging and memorable third places that anchor strong communities.

Pittsburgh’s Market Square illustrates the “spillover effect” created by good place management / Photo: Brendan Crain

Opening and Programming

Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle” is a central business district located at the convergence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. At its heart sits Market Square, roughly one and a half acres surrounded by historic warehouses and glassy skyscrapers, historically one of the primary marketplaces for the region.

Sadly, the solid old Diamond Market building that filled the site was demolished in 1961, when the Steel City went through one of the most dramatic urban renewal programs in the slum-clearance-crazed country. Huge chunks of the bustling downtown waterfront were cleared for a new park and sterile office complex, while several of the city’s most densely-populated central neighborhoods, including Old Allegheny Center and The Hill, were completely leveled, scattering many of the market’s core customers to suburbs and public housing complexes on the edges of the city.

When PPS got involved in the planning process for Market Square in 2006, the site had been through numerous re-workings, none of which had managed to restore it to its former status as a gathering place for the greater Pittsburgh region. Working with the city’s Downtown Partnership, PPS facilitated a public Placemaking workshop with neighborhood groups and individuals to generate ideas for uses and activities that would inform the future design and management of the square. The process led to an opening up of the square, including the eventual closure of several streets that ran through its center, to create a more welcoming space. This created one continuous piazza-style square instead of four quadrants, putting the activity at the heart of the space rather than pushing it to the corners to make way for automobile traffic.

Participants also said Market Square needed a more robust and dynamic slate of public programming. Physical changes combined with features like a farmer’s market and lunchtime concert series have helped to turn the square into an extremely popular spot for downtown office workers to gather on lunch breaks and for drinks after work. Programming, from a Carnegie Library–run reading room to the annual Zombie Fest, which celebrates the city’s status as the setting for director George Romero’s Living Dead series, has made Market Square a destination for residents across the metropolitan area as well.

By focusing on programming rather than a dramatic redesign, Market Square has once again become a major gathering space for Pittsburghers. On a recent Saturday afternoon, even without any events in progress, the square was packed with people sitting, talking, playing, and enjoying each other’s company, illustrating the spillover effect of great public space management: once people have reasons to visit a space and experience its unique sense of place, they’ll keep finding their own reasons to come back.

At the Perth Cultural Centre, a “lighter, quicker, cheaper” approach got things moving quickly, changing the way that locals viewed the precinct’s public spaces / Photo: PPS

Getting People There

The Perth Cultural Centre (PCC) is a cluster of institutions located at the hinge point between the central business district of Western Australia’s largest city and one of its burgeoning nightlife districts, Northbridge. It features a mix of historic buildings from the 1800s and Brutalist structures built in the 1960s and ‘70s, and includes art museums, theaters, a history museum, a major library, and a compact college campus. When it came time to revamp the PCC in 2008, the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA) decided that they would work to connect the 23 institutions within the precinct to each other by improving the public spaces that surrounded them, and to extend the precinct past its formal edges, with cultural activity reaching out into the surrounding area like an octopus.

But these myriad spaces were no-go zones for many residents due to poor visibility, lack of activity, and public perception of the PCC as a high-crime area after dark, so the MRA reached out to PPS in 2009 to lead a Placemaking process to determine how the staid grounds could be turned into a series of lively public gathering places. The MRA’s understanding of the importance of careful management and cohesive vision proved to be key to changing the public’s perception of the space in a very short period of time.

“One of the big things for us was to take the focus off of the buildings and put it on the things that happen in the spaces between them,” MRA’s executive director of place management Veronica Jeffery explains. “That’s why what we call the ‘quick wins’ strategy was so important: it basically went from planning straight to implementation, and was really powerful. It didn’t leave time for contemplation, which meant that people could see their ideas transform into action.”

This “lighter, quicker, cheaper” approach focused on creating more flexible space through the addition of seating, improvement of lighting after dark, and ample programming to draw people into the PCC precinct. PPS encouraged the institutions clustered in the area to bring their programming out into the public realm and take better advantage of their co-location with other major cultural and educational organizations. Fast-paced collaboration led to a burst of activity that drew people to the site and encouraged them, in turn, to mix and mingle with each other. This created the sense that the PCC was not a walled-off precinct that “belonged” to the MRA or the institutions within, but a great third place that Perth residents were welcome to claim and use as their own “back yard.”

“Ultimately, the centre is a public space,” says Jeffery. “We want everybody to feel comfortable here.” The MRA’s willingness to try new things and actively work with a variety of organizations and local constituencies has made the PCC into the kind of place where locals feel that comfort and sense of attachment—because it directly represents their needs and interests.

Residents of Nairobi’s Kibera slum discuss the future of Silanga Field / Photo: PPS

Tapping Local Wisdom

Currently, PPS is working with UN-Habitat to adapt the Placemaking process for use in developing world cities and towns. One of the first projects that we are undertaking through this partnership is a slew of Placemaking workshops in Nairobi, Kenya, where the mayor has promised to create 60 new public spaces around the city in the next five years. This is no small feat in any city, much less one where a full half of the population lives in informal settlements and slums, on just 5 percent of the land area. The spaces created will undoubtedly be filled with people due to the density of human life here, but a truly successful place is not just a busy space, it is a great destination.

Especially in cities like Nairobi, the need for great destinations is acute. Says PPS vice president Cynthia Nikitin, who is leading our efforts in the Kenyan capital: “In Kibera [the massive slum where PPS is working on a project to upgrade an athletic field], the streets are truly the public spaces, and people are out all day, every day: selling, socializing, trading. People make their living—they live their lives—right out in the streets. Having safe and adequate places for that activity is as vital in these areas as water or electricity.”

Creating destinations that people choose to go to, rather than just spaces where people go out of necessity, is an ideal way to improve the quality of life for people living in slum settlements. Public spaces in these areas can serve many necessary functions: as marketplaces, as places for getting water, as hubs for social services like healthcare and education. But the concerns in these areas are often very different from those that might be found in more established cities in developed countries. Safety, especially for women, is a major factor. And as always, the people who understand the problems that need to be addressed are the people who are already using the spaces.

Silanga Field is a wonderful example of how this valuable knowledge is being tapped. One of PPS’s local partners, the Kilimanjaro Initiative, had been working on making improvements to a soccer pitch over the course of several years. “KI enlists the help of the community throughout each phase,” their web page explains, “to give its members a sense of ownership and pride in the field.”

During the first Placemaking workshop Nikitin led with local residents in the spring of 2012, Silanga residents were encouraged to participate in creating a long-term plan for the site. They voiced a strong interest in improving safety in their community, which led to a plan that incorporates environmental improvements and a slate of programming for children and families that are specifically geared toward making the field a place where everyone can feel safe.

The process illustrated the true value of a great third place in any community: a sense of community ownership and control of one’s place in the world, which can be expressed in the way that people engage in discussion and collaboration around a site plan, long before permanent changes to that site are implemented.

It Doesn’t Have to be Big

In developed and disenfranchised communities alike, the assumption around great destinations is that they cost a lot of money to create and have to take the form of new parks or flashy waterfront promenades. “When talking about expanding public space within Nairobi,” Nikitin says, “I kept bumping up against this assumption from city staff that this meant they had to buy big chunks of land and even clear people out of existing neighborhoods to make room for new parks. The idea that schools and sidewalks, streets, plazas, and fire stations could be meaningful places within the city’s public realm was new to them. There’s a division there between ‘public spaces’ and spaces that merely happen to be public.”

In fact, the kinds of great community third places that build social capital and encourage people to take an active role in the daily life of their neighborhood are often smaller, more manageable spaces like community gardens, street corners, and schoolyards. These hubs provide places for people to gather and organize, and are vital to building constituencies for broader efforts to create more equitable cities. This is not necessarily an expensive or labor-intensive process; it merely requires the people who are currently “in charge” of a given space to step out of the way and let the people who use it play an active role in how it is shaped.

25 Mini-Adventures in the Library

Project for Public Spaces — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:27:24 +0000

It takes a village, the saying goes, to raise a child. Embedded within this age-old nugget of wisdom is the assertion that parenting is, at least in part, a public affair. From streets to parks, children learn so much from interacting with public spaces, both in terms of learning about their physical environment and interacting with other people. Kids have an insatiable curiosity; they want to touch, climb on, smell, taste, and otherwise interact with everything around them. In a way, they’re some of the best tour guides you could ask for, because they don’t miss a single detail when exploring a new place.

Recently, we came across a Amy Bowers’ MamaScout, a blog that “celebrates passionate, creative family living through posts showcasing open-ended play and projects, stellar resources, weird ideas, and gentle encouragements to slow down and embrace the ordinary.” Amy often writes about inventive ways that parents can use public space to spark their kids’ imaginations, with posts on everything from poetry bombing to hands-on exploration and the importance of wandering.

But it was a post on libraries that caught our attention last week, for how it exemplifies the kind of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper thinking that each individual can use to activate their public spaces in new and exciting ways right now. Amy was kind enough to agree to let us re-publish her post, so without further ado, here are 25 mini-adventures that you can have at your local library—whether you have kids, or not!

We spend many afternoons at our neighborhood library. At one point our time switched from going to find particular books, to just hanging out.

For hours.

Reading, exploring, asking questions, sharing, talking….

I wanted to share a quick list of fun things you can do at the library other than just check out books. Any of these ideas would be a great boredom buster. Just tell your kid you have an adventure in mind and embrace the mission with verve. You will have a great time!

Please share the interesting, fun or just odd things your family does at the library in the comments!

You can download a copy to keep in your purse or journal here.

1. Look at microfilm from your birthday, or a hundred years ago, or when grandma was born.

2. Look for the biggest book in the library. Take your picture with it.

3. Browse the travel section, find a place you want to visit, make some plans.

4. Go to the cookbook area, choose a recipe, go the store, get the ingredients and cook it that day.

5. Everyone find a poem, read it out loud and then copy it into your journal.

6. Choose a random CD, listen to it all the way through.

7. Kind Bomb

8. Scan the books of quotes. Find a good one and write it outside on the sidewalk with chalk.

9. Bring paper and colored pencils. Draw from the easy I-Can-Draw-Books for an hour.

10. Take a present to the librarians.

11. Leave a thoughtful review on a post-it note in a book you really loved.

12. Find out what services your library offers. Ellison machine? Study prints? Study rooms?

13. Occupy! Have a meeting, writer’s group, books club, homeschool co op, adventure planning committee at the library.

14. Make photocopies of your hand, funny book titles, weird images….

15. Make a list of suggested books and media for your library to buy. Make the library YOUR library.

16. Arrange a library tour.

17. Browse books on the flora and fauna of your area. Learn to identify something new.

18. Check out the corresponding children’s or adult section to your favorite area (reptiles, art, mystery…)

19. Ask about the special collections.

20. Read a biography from the children’s sections on someone you know very little about.(I choose Justin Beiber).

21. Find a baby name book, make a list of funny name combinations, choose a new name for the day.

22. Hunt for authors with your same last name.

23. Look in the reference section. What is the weirdest reference book you can find?

24. Buy old magazines, cut them up and make happy posters, rehang in the library.

25. Make sure each kid has their own library card and bag. Do not fuss about late fees. Ever.

Click here to jump over to the original post on MamaScout!

When is a Market More Than Just a Market?

Kathy Madden — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 16:35:55 +0000

Holiday markets in Germany are more than simply “markets” in an economic sense. More importantly they play a much broader role in the social life of people who live in the communities where they are held. Not only do they provide unique and beautiful settings in the cold winters with dark afternoons, but they are places where people can bring their families, meet their friends, eat and (of course) shop.

In these settings a variety of seasonal “rituals” also take place: the lighting of the holiday tree; music and dancing, often performed by people in traditional dress; consumption of local food and drink like sausages and Glühwein (hot spiced red wine). People go to the markets (and adjacent shops) to pick up special local holiday foods like fresh truffles, oysters, carp, and duck.

Amenities such as ice skating rinks, carousels, temporary cafes, sitting areas and games and a variety of events and performances held over the course of a month or more are an important part of the markets. And iconic elements such as large-scale and lighted ornaments, pinwheels, and decorated trees create landmarks where people can meet, adding depth to the market experience and identity. These markets are the original “pop-up” destinations that have become so popular in many US cities today.

Sixty cities in Germany have Christmas Markets. While the first Christmas Markets lasted only a couple of days, today’s markets usually start the last week of November and extend until a day or two before Christmas, and are open every day from morning until evening –usually until 9:00 pm. To be open this many hours and days, there needs to be a lot to do and there generally is. There are activities and destinations that appeal to people of all ages. People bring their children and grandchildren to share the experience with them.

Skating rinks usually start later (in December) and last longer (into January) and include not just the rink but a warming area, skate rental or change room, a café, bar, stage, sound system and deck overlooking the rink. All of the structures are “pop-up,” of course, even the wooden log houses set up each season at some markets.

Most markets tend to specialize in local delicacies and traditional products, in part because in the past, only local tradesmen were allowed to sell their wares at the city’s markets, which led to the distinctive regional character of today’s markets. Markets are generally located in city squares, and are nearly always surrounded by retail uses and major destinations such as city government buildings or churches that help to create very active edges. Originally, the Christmas Markets were held around a city’s main church to attract church-goers, but in some cities they were so popular that a priest (in Nürnberg in 1616) complained that he could not hold the afternoon service on Christmas Eve because no one attended!

Most cities have multiple markets, some interconnected, and each with a slightly different focus: one might center on a skating rink and café; another on seasonal prepared foods; another on handmade crafts that can be purchased for Christmas gifts; children’s games and rides; concerts, performances, holiday ceremonies, and more. Because of the combination of a series of squares connected by a commercial street, it is possible to create a series of markets along one path connected by permanent retail shops and, in a sense, get much more “bang for the buck.”

The Christmas Markets are often physically connected to regular daily or weekly food markets as well, broadening the experience even further. In Munich, for example, the six-day-a-week Victualmarket becomes an even more important destination during the holidays as the place to purchase special local and seasonal food items. These special holiday places are integrated into the life and culture of the city; they are how local customs are passed down through generations. They are, in short, much more than “just” markets.

I snapped all of the photos in this post on a recent trip to Germany. Below are descriptions of the markets that we visited in three different cities.

Munich

In 1642, the ”Nicholas Market” was held near the Church of our Lady (the Frauenkirche) and the main Christmas market is now held in the heart of the city on the Marienplatz. It specializes in traditional Bavarian crafts (e.g. wood carvings, gingerbread, candles, glassware, and chimney sweeps made of plums and almonds) and each day, a Christmas concert is held on the balcony of the Town Hall, located on the square. Inside the town hall, the “heavenly workshop” is held, where children between the ages of 6 and 12, with the assistance of professional artists and other instructors from the Children’s Museum, do arts and crafts projects, bake Christmas cookies, and dress in Angel costumes.

There are twenty Christmas Markets located throughout Munich specializing in various products or to attract different audiences (e.g. a specific product such as cribs, mangers and nativity scenes): a medieval market, a gay market, an international market which has tents for a mix of international music and theater performances, handicrafts and foods from all over the world, and a Christmas Market at the Munich International Airport that is an integral part of a new airport concept called “Airport City” that uses the market and a variety of other attractions throughout the year to attract tourists, travelers, and local people from the surrounding region and villages. (The market pictured above is the Victualmarket.)

Heidelberg

Markets are located in six squares along the “Haupstrasse” (the main street), in the old city in Heidelberg. Each square specializes in a different type of market that includes gifts, an antique carousel, a Christmas Pyramid (pictured above) around which schools and associations present their work, a nativity scene and large scale toy train for children next to a railway which takes people a mountain to a castle where there is another market. One square (Karlsplatz) has a 4,305-square-foot ice skating rink that is open until 1:00 a.m. on New Year’s Eve! The makets are one component of the larger Christmas Market program, which also includes theater and music performances, events for children and families, and concerts in churches adjacent to some of the squares.

Freiburg

Freiburg also has several interconnected markets located in four of the ten squares in its old city. The market has traditional crafts from the Black Forest region (e.g. straw shoes, colorful wooden toys and games, beeswax candles) and a variety of local foods. The daily market, located in the largest square, the Munsterplatz, has a variety of locally made products as well, like the brushes and brooms sold at the cart pictured here.

Better Block, Better City: An Interview With Andrew Howard

Project for Public Spaces — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:35:46 +0000

Andrew Howard

Andrew Howard is one of the founding members of Team Better Block, a group that works to implement Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies for the temporary revitalization of streets and public spaces in the short-term, to inspire people to think differently about how those places could evolve. Team Better Block recently took recommendations straight from PPS’s report on how to improve the hotly-contested historic plaza at the Alamo in San Antonio, and found LQC ways to do almost everything on the list to get the ball rolling on building a more cohesive constituency permanent change.

Now, we’re working with Team Better Block on plans for the temporary transformation of the Plaza de Armas, a forlorn public space at San Antonio City Hall, and the adjacent arterial, Commerce Street. In anticipation of that event, which will take place this Saturday, December 8th, 2012, we spoke with Andrew about how his team approaches their work, and how LQC strategies are changing the planning profession in Texas and beyond.

Alamo Plaza bustles thanks to a temporary market during Team Better Block’s last San Antonio project / Photo: Better Block

What Better Block does, in terms of short-term implementation, is a pretty important part of any implementation strategy, isn’t it? These interventions may only be around for a few hours, but changing peoples’ mindsets is often a major hurdle that needs to be overcome, that you guys have kind of cracked the nut on.

The Midwest and the South have a very auto-centric culture, so that is often the first step. The test for us with a Better Block is: can we get more advocates? That’s what they wanted in San Antonio. They only had this small group of folks coming to the table and talking about the Alamo, but it’s a public space for the whole city. How do we broaden the discussion about it? That’s where we said, let’s take the PPS study and go implement it temporarily and get some data while we’re there.

The first time we got a glimpse of working with PPS, we were still kind of in the guerrilla phase of Better Block. We did the Living Plaza on Dallas City Hall. William Whyte had done a study of that space about 25 years ago, and it was sitting on the shelf. We pulled it off and we built what he’d recommended in a weekend. That was where we started to see there the power of getting out and demonstrating this stuff.

At the Plaza de Armas, they did a study on downtown transportation [note: PPS worked on the Downtown Transportation Study, which can be downloaded here], and they want to test changes to a major arterial, Commerce Street, and take it down to one lane and add pedestrian and transit amenities to it. That’s our main focus with the Better Block coming up this weekend. We’re also going to activate the space with a pop-up coffee shop, a holiday market with vendors, movable seating, a food truck. The whole idea is to try to get folks to a part of downtown San Antonio they don’t often go to, and also to get them to walk a bit further.

Based on PPS’s recommendations, Team Better Block built this “ghost gate” to give visitors a sense of height and extent of the original fortifications of the Alamo fort / Photo: Better Block

In getting in and doing these things so quickly, can you hear minds changing, so to speak? That’s the core of what a lot of this LQC stuff is about: getting people to change their minds, and see spaces differently than they had before, and to see the potential in them. Do you hear people talking about that as they’re walking around?

Definitely. It’s great to eavesdrop and hear people, both the tourists who think a Better Block space is like that all the time, and then the visitors who say “I am so glad that we live in a city that will do stuff like this.” There’s a lot of negative talk around the Alamo. It is like fast-paced learning for folks to get into a Better Block and experience it. It’s also great for engineers and planners who are locked up, working on a desk, maybe reading theory on this stuff, to get out and do it. They learn so much more quickly, and they start getting the eye. They know how to look at a place, and how to make it better afterwards. You don’t get that from theory and drawing pictures.

In San Antonio, we caught this group of young folks that had just formed a downtown leadership group. They had had some meetings, and were trying to figure out what they were going to do. They did the Better Block with us our first time in San Antonio, and it changed the whole focus of their group! They started becoming doers, and having fewer meetings.

There’s clearly an emphasis, in Team Better Block’s work, on social networks, and the idea that what you call “rapid city-revitalization” happens by connecting people. Can you talk more about how that plays into what you do?

As a planner, 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.

Better Block is like a big matching service, too, because when we start working together and we’re doing that “barn-building,” folks are talking, and making friendships, and business relationships. It’s very unlike what happens at a public meeting or a charrette, where you have your dinner table manners on and you’re talking formally. Better Block is like speed dating for doers. You start building furniture out of shipping palettes and, at the end of the day, it’s like “Well hey, let’s go build a building!” There’s so much courage, and people just feel empowered, like they could do anything.

Since the network-building that you do creates so many new advocates and doers, do you consider the human capital that’s created one of the biggest legacies of these projects that you work on?

That’s a great way to put it. It’s definitely about the human capital. People focus so much on the monetary and the physical capital of a place; but with human capital, if you concentrate in a place, you can change that place. It used to be that we graded Better Blocks based on how many people came. “Oh, 5,000 people came, we won, we did it!” Now our main question is: how many advocates are still working for it a year later? Did anybody out of the Better Block become a leader? That’s the win. We’ve definitely changed our idea about what the Better Block is supposed to do, and how to move from the temporariness to permanence.

Children play at an improvised LQC fountain at the Alamo Plaza Better Block event / Photo: Better Block

In addition to PPS, who are you working with for this Plaza de Armas project? Who’s part of the network that you’re working on developing right now?

This one is being done a lot with city council members. Every council member is having someone from their district operate a pop-up market stall. VIA is a part of this too, because they’ve got a bus stop on the plaza, so we’re going to jazz up their transit stop. I think a big part of bringing Better Block into a city is the acknowledgement of wanting to be progressive and wanting to be open to new ideas and new ways of the city operating. San Antonio’s City Hall is saying right now that they want to be one of the most progressive cities not just in Texas, but in the States. They’re open to trying new things, and they’re not going to be bound by the norms in Texas. They’re going to try out these crazy things that look like they’re from New York City.

That’s one of the best things about Team Better Block: that it’s not from a coastal city where you might expect to find a bunch of urban guerrillas; it’s from Dallas!

We’ve had to take a lot of these edgy ideas from the coasts and figure out how to recalibrate them for the south! How do we make it work in an auto-centric, hot, boot-scootin’ environment? But people are people. They like each other. They want to rub elbows.

Pop-Up Placemaking: Connecting the Dots in Detroit

Project for Public Spaces — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:55:34 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dog parks were a popular request / Photo: PPS

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

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

Houston Library Plaza: Building Knowledge, Building Community

Project for Public Spaces — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:35:37 +0000

Children play on the central library’s “front porch” during LibroFEST / Photo: Houston Public Library

Library culture in the city of Houston is undergoing an exciting shift as the Houston Public Library reconsiders its public role. Instead of thinking of its programming as needing to remain within the building’s four walls, recent efforts are pulling the activity into outdoor spaces. Building upon the momentum of other successful downtown projects, Director of Libraries, Dr. Rhea Brown Lawson, reached out to PPS to help them realize their new vision.

Earlier this year, PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin and Elena Madison traveled to Houston to train more than 150 people—library staff as well as community partners and stakeholders—on how libraries can maximize the role they are inherently equipped to fill. Libraries are natural hosts of community life. They are recognized as broadly accessible places, intentionally inclusive, and welcoming for everyone seeking knowledge and cultural enrichment. Throughout the workshops, participants explored the potential of libraries to be active centers of public life and creativity, not merely static warehouses for books.

Today, the staff at the Houston Public Library’s central branch is directing their attention toward the plaza out in front of the building. In little time, this space has been transformed from a barren expanse of concrete into a public stage par excellence. Taking the core Placemaking principles to heart, the library has begun implementing a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategy to attract more people to the space through a variety of programming and design improvements. With an eye toward connecting the plaza to what already exists in the surrounding area, particularly the weekly Farmers’ Market that takes place in front of City Hall across the street. The Central Library plaza now provides seating to accommodate spillover from the market, hosts a library card sign-up at the farmers’ market, and organizes book sale events. Lunch-hour readings are also creating an inviting gathering spot for the community of surrounding office and business workers.

It is important to note that much of the new programming is being organized without great additional strain on the library’s resources. For an institution that habitually deals with limited funds and staff capacity, community partnerships have been key in helping to implement the vision for the plaza. The mix of activities that’s taking place in this exciting new downtown destination—from simple events like readings all the way up to major celebrations like the recent LibroFEST, organized with Arte Publico, the Society for the Performing Arts, and Writers in the Schools—directly serves the needs of the business and residential communities that had heretofore stayed off of the streets, preferring to frequent the shops in the climate controlled underground tunnels instead.

Getting ready to perform during LibroFEST / Photo: Houston Public Library

Madison and Nikitin agree that the project has benefited enormously from the fact that Houston has been a forward-thinking city in terms of combining institutions and city services with the aim of creating great places. Strong early partners included the Houston Arts Alliance and Green Houston, and the City of Houston’s sustainability department in charge of the farmers’ market. As the plaza’s transformation has begun, additional partners like the Houston Public Library Foundation, Friends of the Houston Public Library, and a mix of local cultural organizations have helped to generate public and political interest. Collaboration has, from day one, been a critical component of the plaza’s success.

By positioning the plaza as an open and flexible platform, the library is now able to mingle with and integrate itself into the daily rhythm of its corner of downtown. In the long term, this will help to build support for more capital-intensive plans for the plaza, including a resurfacing and the construction of a water wall, an amenity at the top of locals’ list to provide relief from Houston’s hot, muggy summers. And although the new activities taking in plaza have necessarily been focused on the audience of the central branch, the seeds for change have been planted across the city’s network of libraries. It is hoped in the near future that more branches will start building out their own “front porches.”

In the information age, it is important to remember that we gain knowledge not just from the page (digital or print), but also from our interactions with other people. By taking the lead in Houston, the staff of the central library has proven themselves to be indispensable advocates of community life. Their example is one that other libraries would be wise to follow!

What Makes a Great Public Destination? Is it Possible to Build One Where You Live?

Project for Public Spaces — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 07:55:50 +0000

How do you create a magnetic public destination like Luxembourg Gardens? Read on! / Photo: PPS

In a recent blog post, entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster wrote about the necessary ingredients for a city trying o develop a successful start-up community. His advice seemed applicable to any community that’s trying to create a strong local sense of place, so we’ve retrofitted his recommendations to speak broadly to people who are working to transform their public spaces into magnetic destinations that are reflective of the diverse communities that surround them.

[✓] A Strong Pool of Zealous Nuts – If you’re reading this, chances are you’re either a zealous nut, or you have the potential to be one. You’re passionate about place, about your neighborhood, your streets, your favorite park. Zealous nuts are the local leaders who have a vision of how great their community can be, and who want to get all of their neighbors involved in making it happen. They also have the tenacity and patience to stick with that vision, even when fighting an uphill battle. They understand that half of the fun of Placemaking is getting to know their neighbors through discussion, debate, and collaboration. As we’ve seen time and again, great Placemaking projects can almost always be traced back to one or two driven, dedicated people who are “nuts” about their community.

[✓] Place Capital – Great places generate more value for the communities in which they are located than they actually cost to create. These places draw people into the daily life of their communities, encouraging local investment–both financial (through shopping at local stores and markets) and social. Individual actions toward the improvement of and participation in public spaces are like little investments in Place Capital. If people have opportunities to take part in shaping their public spaces, they will feel more connected to their community, and will be more likely to go the extra mile to keep those spaces attractive and welcoming. This has a magnetic effect, creating a distinctive local character and turning a location into a destination.

[✓] Killer Events – Suster’s explanation of the importance of events is spot-on for much more than just the tech community: events bring people together, and get them talking. This builds social capital, and does so in a way that is specifically connected to place. Great events often celebrate unique aspects of a local community, and throw them into high relief–the example of SXSW in Austin is perfect, as it highlights the creative and tech-focused community of people that already exists in Austin, and does so out in the streets. The informal and entertaining vibe puts people at ease, and strengthens the local sense of identity as people mix and mingle.

Austin’s Sixth Street bustles during the SXSW festival / Photo: John Rogers via Flickr

[✓] Access to Great Advocates – Chatter about Placemaking is on the rise, but not everyone who uses the term is talking about really engaging local communities to facilitate the creation of places that truly reflect the people that they serve. To create a great public destination, it’s helpful for a community to have access to advocacy organizations that really “get it,” and are proactive in working with locals to help them articulate their needs and claim their place. Look at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago, or (thinking regionally) the Michigan Municipal League. These groups are on a mission to make sure that Placemaking stays an inclusive process, rather than becoming an empty buzzword that is attached to projects that reflect top-down planning and design visions rather than local culture.

[✓] Motivated Champions – 90% of the success of a public space is in its management. For public spaces and districts with access to a large pool of resources, the involvement of a dedicated community development org or business improvement district can be extremely helpful in making sure that the buzz around a space stays strong. New York has dozens of BIDs that manage major squares and shopping districts. As downtowns around the country have surged in recent decades, groups like the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership and Downtown Houston have helped to guide growth, manage important hubs of public life, and spread the word about what’s going on in the heart of town.

Neighbors work together to brighten their Portland neighborhood through City Repair’s Intersection Repair project / Photo: City Repair via Flickr

But your champions don’t necessarily need a lot of money if they’ve got a lot of heart. Many spaces are managed by volunteer organizations made up of community members who help to keep a space clean, and “program” it with a steady mix of informal activity. Often times, smaller groups can build capacity over time and scale up; Portland’s well-regarded City Repair started out as a group of concerned neighbors who just wanted a safer street corner, and today they’ve revolutionized community planning across their city!

[✓] Local Press / Websites / Organizational Tools – Great public spaces are stages for public life. In addition to major events like parades, festivals, and other public gatherings, they’re perfect places for local media organizations to tap into public opinion on the key issues of the day. Public space managers, whether professional or volunteer, should work hard to build a strong relationship with local media outlets that cover what’s going on in the city or region. People attract people, so the more often folks see and hear reminders of how vibrant and exciting a given place is, the more likely they are to travel out of their way to check out the action. In the long term, building strong media partnerships also creates an active local culture that gets more people off the couch.

[✓] Alumni Outreach – Here’s an intriguing item on Suster’s list that isn’t necessarily obvious when you think generally about creating public destinations. If you live in a neighborhood with some history and are trying to turn a place around, it might be helpful to do a bit of research to learn whether there are some famous past residents who might have fond memories of that space when they were growing up in the neighborhood. Great places inspire the kind of visceral memories that spur people to action. Find out who your neighborhood’s “alumni” are, and you might find some powerful allies in your effort to restore a down-at-heel site to its former glory.

[✓] Wins – “At the end of the day,” writes Suster, “no amount of ‘planning’ can build a community that is seen as a success – it can just be a contributor.” This is the idea at the heart of the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper approach to public space management. You can plan and plan, but doing is absolutely essential. If you don’t have the funds for a new playground, get local organizations to donate odds and ends and have kids from the neighborhood build their own temporary adventure playground. If there’s a blank wall that you’re not quite ready to cover with a permanent mural, host a chalk party to get up some temporary, community-sourced public art. Small wins today build momentum that can be critical to achieving bigger wins tomorrow.

[✓] Recycled Place Capital / Repeat Placemakers – When people participate in a Placemaking process and see firsthand how powerful an effect it has, both on their public spaces and on their own lives, they often get hooked! This has a spillover effect, meaning that one great public destination can wind up influencing an entire city, or even a whole region. The Power of Ten concept posits that you need at least ten things to do in a public space for it to be a lively, multi-use destination. To have a great neighborhood you, need at least ten of these public destinations. For a great city, you need at least ten great neighborhoods.

Making a great place requires lots of participation from lots of people. That creates lots of new Placemakers, and inspires a whole new group of zealous nuts. Placemaking can change the way that people think about their role within their community, and inspire them to be more intentional about investing in Place Capital not just in their own back yard, but all over town.

Photos like Jackson Square in New Orleans set the bar high / Photo: PPS

[✓] Flagship Public Spaces – Barcelona has Parc Guell, Vancouver has Granville Island, and New Orleans has Jackson Square. These iconic spaces set the bar high, and give neighborhoods in their respective cities something to shoot for. If your city has a flagship space (or, if you’re very lucky, a few of them), tap into the public enthusiasm for the sense of place that exists around that location, and remind people that any site can become a beloved destination if it is responsive to the community in which it is located.

Creating Common Ground in a City Divided

Project for Public Spaces — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:17:16 +0000

Locals mill about Silanga Field, which will soon become the Silanga Community Centre / Photo: PPS

In Nairobi, Kenya, the contrast between rich and poor neighborhoods is beyond stark. And even though half of the city’s population lives on a mere 1.5% of the total land area, in Nairobi, public space is scarce. Since the creation, by Colonial powers in 1948, of the master plan that led to the formation of the city we now know today, little to no provision has been made for well structured common spaces for much-needed programming, activity, and services. In that same period, the city’s population has ballooned from 120,000 to more than 3.1 million people–and that’s just the official number! Nairobi is home to many informal settlements, where it’s very difficult to take an exact head count.

One of the most well-known of these settlements is Kibera, a massive slum comprised of 13 separate villages where most residents get by on less than a dollar a day. It is here where PPS has joined forces with UN-Habitat, the City Council of Nairobi, and local partners including the Kilimanjaro Initiative, KENSUP (the National Housing branch of the Kenyan Government), Chief of SOWETO (South West Township) in Kibera, and the Undugu Foundation, for one of two pilot projects in the city’s effort to create 60 great public spaces over the next several years.

Earlier this year in Kibera’s Silanga village neighborhood, PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin and Board Member Vanessa September met with community members to conduct a Placemaking workshop to generate ideas and support for the next phase of improvements to a soccer field that serves as an important recreation facility for this long-underserved community. Today residents continue to work toward the transformation of Silanga Field (which contains school facilities, a meeting room, a pottery studio, and other important resources) into what they have agreed, collectively, to re-name the Silanga Community Centre. “I have taken great delight in the confidence that is being displayed by the team in how they have taken ownership of the projects,” wrote PPS board member Vanessa September (who continues to work on the ground with partners) in a recent email. “If they have 58 more spaces to do, then the sooner they take ownership, the better!”

We have written previously on the Placemaking Blog about how dangerous social conditions produce alienating public spaces in developing world cities, especially for women. In Kibera, the desire for a safe and welcoming space for the community very clearly influences recommendations for everything from comfort to accessibility. A variety of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper improvements are included in an as-yet-unpublished report detailing recommendations generated through the Placemaking process, with many of them focused specifically on creating a safe space for people to gather. From using fences to define the perimeter of the site (and designate entrance and exit points), to programming the space, very intentionally, with local security meetings and social programs focused on youth and good parenting, the focus on safety plays a critical role.

“The best way to make a public space safe,” the report suggests, “is by creating positive activities in and enhancing wider citizen ownership of the space.”

We often say that public spaces reflect the communities that surround them; this can be both a good thing, and a bad thing. In Nairobi, the lack of adequate public spaces reflects the stark social divisions across the city and, worse yet, reinforces them. Since Nairobians rarely come into contact with people from different socioeconomic groups, there is little upward mobility for people in places like Kibera—diminishing one of the chief benefits of urban agglomeration. The lack of space communicates to these people that their presence is undesirable. This contributes directly to the sense of isolation and desperation that makes for more dangerous neighborhoods.

In wealthy areas, meanwhile, fear of the violence created by this tension leads to more fortress-like compounds and walled golf courses when what the city really needs are great public spaces, and shared destinations where people from different neighborhoods and backgrounds can take part in the formation of a shared civic identity. Spaces like the Silanga Community Centre are steps toward a stronger Nairobi.

Presently, the UN-Habitat is working with local partners to accurately survey the site, and prepare for the RFP process in order to push forward on Silanga Field’s reconstruction. The newly appointed City Planning Director, Mrs. Rose Muema, recently presented on progress at the site both at the World Urban Forum in Naples Italy and more recently to major donors from Norway, Sweden, and Spain, “[stressing] the importance of participatory approaches to development.”

For Great Public Art, Bring in the Public

Patra Jongjitirat — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:47:47 +0000

A dance troupe performs in the Andrew Freedman Home during No Longer Empty's "This Side of Paradise" / Photo: NLE

Since ceasing operations as a grand retirement home in the 1980s, the Andrew Freedman Home had been standing quietly inconspicuous on its spacious lot off the Bronx’s famed Grand Concourse. Just a handful of activities had been taking place on-site, mostly in the basement: a Head Start preschool program, a food bank, a thrift shop. The property owner, the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC), began thinking about how to more fully utilize the multi-storied mansion to bring this unique space into active community use. That was the impetus for the phone call that MBSCC and Holly Block of the Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) made to No Longer Empty (NLE), a Brooklyn-based arts organization that organizes site-specific public art installations to revitalize fallow spaces.

For NLE, “site-specific” means including both the physical place and the people who live and work in the surrounding community. By using art to interpret physical space and its historical context, NLE uses its installations to re-frame vacant, forgotten spaces as places that are open for interpretation. As Executive Director Naomi Hersson-Ringskog explains, “What we do well is listening to the initiatives, challenges, and caveats the community expresses.”

No Longer Empty’s exhibition “This Side of Paradise,” served as the impetus for community groups to engage with the space and link this resource with their own plans and needs. Getting conversations flowing among existing cultural organizations, including members of the nascent Bronx Arts Alliance, inspired visions of the events and programs that the mansion could host and also led to new creative collaborations.

In addition to opening up avenues of dialogue, Naomi also says, in terms of the physical site, “The first thing we do is open the gates. It’s a sign of welcome and a way of getting the community to start associating with the site and what the site should be.” One of the groups that took advantage of the space was the Bronx Children’s Museum (BCM). With its gates open, the mansion turned into fertile ground for Museum programming, especially with the BCM’s new home still under construction.

Rolling out the red carpet to welcome the community--literally! / Photo: NLE

NLE’s Director of Programming and Outreach, Jodie Dinapoli, recalls talking with the BCM’s Executive Director, Carla Precht, who wished to develop an early childhood program that would explore the question “What is art?” The mansion, filled with the works of more than 20 artists through NLE’s exhibition, became an ideal site for realizing interactive tours and workshops. The BCM, working with three teaching artists, paired-up with local children’s organizations, two of which were literally under the mansion’s nose: Head Start, which was operating from the basement floor, and BronxWorks, which was across the street. It was an outstanding example of how people began to re-connect with a long-ignored space that was already along the route they followed in their daily routines.

The mansion became recognized as an asset in a variety of ways. For Inspirit, a Bronx-based dance company, rehearsal space is always a necessary resource. The re-activated mansion was able to provide not only physical space but inspiration and a unique performance context. Another performer, Diana Crum, expressed a “[craving for] more spaces in between: performance settings where artists and pedestrians gather to experience time-based work and in the process forge a temporary community, ripe for reflection and re-imagining.”

Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory used the mansion’s unique setting to film and document their work. For Boogie Down Rides and the Bronx Arts Alliance, the space became a convenient gathering spot for meetings. BronxNet, which produced the film of featured artist Mel Chin, began using the space to offer media courses throughout the run of the exhibition and possibly on into the future. Reflecting on the process of these successful collaborations, Jodie emphasizes, “Collaboration is beautiful, but requires diligence. To be a true success, each group must define their objectives, goals, and needs.”

The care taken to interact and engage with people throughout the programs and events helped this private space achieve the warmth and vibrancy of a true public destination. As the hosts of the space, NLE staff and volunteers remained active and engaged with the site once programs were underway. They observed that many visitors, especially non-habitual art-goers, will hesitate at the doorway to the exhibition or the event. One of the simplest methods for putting a visitor at ease and imparting a sense of belonging was to have a friendly greeter at the front desk. A smile and a hello goes a long way in cultivating a welcoming environment. “Our tone is about engagement,” Naomi says. “We want to engage people in conversation, which is the way to share knowledge and inspire more curiosity.”

Children search for Easter eggs on the Freedman Home lawn / Photo: NLE

As with bringing vibrancy to a place, the aspect of a warm human presence cannot be overestimated in creating vibrant exhibitions and programs. On the day of NLE’s Easter Egg Hunt at the mansion, volunteers were present to walk people up and down the street between multiple events also being orchestrated by the BCM and the BMA. It turned into a huge day out on the Grand Concourse for close to 800 children with the feel of festive neighborhood block party.

On the other hand, not every activity that occurred in the space was planned. With the gates unlocked, local workers would spontaneously use the front lawn and garden as a lunch spot. “This was an example of how the community began using this private space in a public manner,” Naomi says, reflecting.

Creating an open testing ground for ideas both spontaneous and planned is a great value of NLE’s Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper approach to public art. Although NLE only temporarily occupies any site, the spirit of nimble mobility is ideal for sparking communities into new awareness and playful experimentation with their everyday surroundings. The ability of any community to recognize the potential of its hidden assets is is the first step to turning a place around.

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To learn about one of PPS’s favorite projects up in the Bronx, visit our project page for the Bronx River Arts Center (BRAC) renovation and expansion!

Learning About Placemaking: You Can’t Do it Alone!

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:54:35 +0000

PPS President Fred Kent leads a tour of Times Square during a Placemaking training / Photo: PPS

Every spring and summer, we welcome people from all over the world—architects, planners, developers, academics, city officials, advocates, activists, engaged citizens—to our offices in Manhattan for our Placemaking Training programs. While we offer several different training programs that can be tailored to different types of public spaces, our core curriculum is made up of four courses that have become mainstays in our efforts to spread the tools of Placemaking to an ever-broadening constituency: How to Turn a Place Around, Placemaking: Making it Happen, Streets as Places, and How to Create Successful Markets. So how, you may ask, do these workshops really work? What am I going to get out of attending? What types of people actually attend?

How to Turn a Place Around (HTTAPA) is, put simply, “Placemaking 101.” The course is designed to introduce the core principles and fundamental tools at the heart of the Placemaking process. These tools will help anyone working on a public space project—whether you’re the architect designing a new plaza or a stay-at-home mom trying to rally neighbors to improve a local playground—to not only evaluate current uses of a site effectively and brainstorm for the future, but how to build community support and explain the mechanics of how great places work as well. As past HTTAPA participant Adele Gravitz (who works as the Sustainability Coordinator for Lenox, Mass., and Community Transformation Grant Program Coordinator for Tri-Town Health Department in Lee, Mass.) explains it, “The people running the training are remarkably precise about something that you’d think of as not just hard to explain, but to quantify! Everything you get is pure meat; there’s no fluff, no filler, no wasted time. I took away so many nuggets of tangible knowledge, as well as site-specific examples.”

Placemaking: Making it Happen (MIH) builds on the knowledge set up in HTTAPA and digs into the complicated and fascinating process of place management. At PPS, we’re fond of saying that the success of a public space is about 80-90% reliant on its management, so MIH offers critical insights for people who spend a good deal of their time working on spaces over the long term. “Most planners finish their plan and go on to another place,” says MIH alum Zvika Mintz, an urban planner from Kfar- Saba, Israel. “They don’t often stay and work on the maintenance of the place. Making it Happen shows the importance of maintaining the space. You’re never finished with a project.”

“I think the Making it Happen training is really helpful for anybody who is in need of outside-of-the-box concepts to help motivate them or drive a new process,” says Cara Salci, a Development Project Manager with the National Capital Commission in Ottawa, Canada, who participated in MIH last spring. Salci, whose job was to manage the implementation of a series of projects along the Rideau Canal this past summer, utilized the principles of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. She noted that her experience with the Making it Happen training was especially helpful in giving her tools and a framework for approaching a project that was based upon ideas from the public: “Consulting the public isn’t a big, bad, scary thing. The public has a lot of positive input to offer and, when you empower them to do things, it can work out in a good way.”

Over the past few years, we’ve been listening, learning, and iterating to improve our Placemaking training programs by getting participants out into public spaces around New York City for hands-on evaluation exercises like the “Place Evaluation.” If it’s true that the best way to learn about a place is to manage it (and it is!), it follows that the best way to learn about the Placemaking process is to interact with other people around a real site. Mee Kam Ng, a professor of Geography & Resource Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, explains the benefits of this social approach thusly: “As an academic, participating in such a hands-on workshop was very useful for me to ground some of the theoretical discussions in my field in practical, real-life situations. We can all contribute our own experience and perspective in producing a better city; that’s my fundamental belief. That coincides with how PPS does this work. We can all learn from one another. Placemaking is also a learning process in itself, that’s really more about tapping into one another’s perspectives. It’s about figuring out how to make a shared place better, but also making ourselves better along the way.”

Norman Mintz speaks to training participants last spring in Manhattan’s Bryant Park / Photo: PPS

Truly, one of the great strengths of the Placemaking trainings is the diversity of the participants. In addition to representing a wide variety of professional backgrounds and perspectives, attendees tend to gather from all corners of the globe. “As much as we bring our own expertise,” notes Norman Mintz, one of the PPS training leaders (and no relation to Zvika), “we find that when people have more time to get to know each other, it’s made the course even better. It’s more than just sitting down and taking notes, it’s sharing experiences. We’ve noticed that the caliber of people is very high; by and large these are people who are very knowledgeable. Being able to share their knowledge, with PPS and each other, is a big strength. To be able to do it with people from across the world is wonderful.”

From the participant side, Gravitz echoes this: “I was so impressed by the people who participated in the workshop; they really had something to offer. Everybody had such clarity and was so sharp about why they were there, what they wanted to get out of it, and what they could contribute. It was one of the few workshops I’ve attended where I really did get something out of listening to the other participants. The conversations were quite elevated.”

More often than not, one of the most interesting results of this cross-cultural exchange is the realization amongst participants that people all over the world are dealing with many of the same issues they are. There are unique challenges at every site, but the common problems that the people working to create great places share offer the greatest opportunities for participants to jump in and start applying the Placemaking principles that they’re learning. Everyone gets to know each other through exchanging their own tips, tricks, and lessons learned. The trainings provide the tools and framework to facilitate these kinds of place-based discussions by illustrating simple but hard-to-pin-down principles in ways that just make sense.

“One of the key takeaways that I brought home and have used in my work since the trainings,” says Salci, “is to always keep an open mind. You have to give your projects the flexibility to breathe a little bit. If someone throws out an idea, take the time to really consider it. It may not be the right solution, but it might lead you to the right one. Sometimes we’re so quick to judge whether something is a good idea or a bad idea, but within the Placemaking process, there’s more of a spectrum. With a project like the one I was working on—we hadn’t done something like it before, so it was great to have these tools and concepts to back up the decisions we were making.”

“I went to grad school already passionate about Holly Whyte’s work,” says Gravitz, “and that was years ago. But I found that going through the exercises we did at PPS’s workshop really armed me with an understanding—and the vocabulary—to explain with a clear certainty things that I always knew in my head, in a sort of fuzzy way, to someone who knew nothing about Placemaking.”

Zvika breaks it down in even more straightforward terms. “People like to watch people,” he says. “It’s very simple, but the way that Fred and the other instructors at PPS show and talk about ideas like this helps you to truly understand the importance of simple things.”

Interested in seeing for yourself how valuable PPS’s training workshops can be to your advocacy efforts and/or professional practice? Our next round of Placemaking training workshops is never too far away! Click here to visit the trainings page of our site to learn more about upcoming programs.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in New York!

Citizen Placemaker: Lars Sillen on Letting a Place Grow Organically

Patra Jongjitirat — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:12:22 +0000

Meet Lars!

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.

Rosenhill farm, located in rural Ekerö, Sweden, is a place that combines food, culture, and community. Located about nine miles west of central Stockholm on the city’s rural fringe, the farm is a calm but bustling destination for people in the surrounding area. It’s relaxed atmosphere and focus on organic food and connection to the land offer a refreshing retreat just a half an hour’s drive from the city. The farm’s proprieters, Lars and Emilia, exemplify the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper philosophy in their approach to creating a great place that draws people back again & again. I spoke with Lars recently about his experience with growing a place through an iterative process as organic as the vegetables in its fields.

How did Rosenhill begin? What inspires you to continue running the farm and garden, and how do you hope it will change and grow in coming years?

Oh, that´s about 100 years ago when Emilia’s grandfather built the barn. For us it has been 20 wonderful and quite intense years of mistakes, learning, disappointments, and miracles. One reason to continue is of course the fact that it is a way to get an income. The other reasons, though, are to do things that other people seem to like, to live in and with nature with its seasons, and to witness all people coming and going. In terms of the future of the farm, it´s hard to say. I’m quite happy with it as it is, but to be able to keep it as a nice playground for me and Emilia (as long as we stay healthy) and others would be perfect. Then to see some others gradually taking more responsibility would also be great. Generally, the biggest visions I’ve had have been along the lines of “It would be nice to have a new weed-wacker,” or “Maybe we should plant some trees there” and so on.

Who comes to Rosenhill? What attracts them to this place?

All kinds of people come, mostly from the Stockholm area but there are also quite a lot of tourists. Hopefully, they find it beautiful and easy-going. We hope to spread an idea of simplicity and playfulness. We serve some good food, and in the autumn the main activity here is to help the Stockholmers make apple juice. I think the rather simple way we solve things, mixing styles, and using whatever we’ve got to make the rooms and garden nice—that inspires a lot of people. It also scares some off completely! We truly have the “everything goes” attitude at Rosenhill, with both people and things. I often hear that our guests and customers feel completely relaxed here.

Visitors to Rosenhill gather for a meal at a picnic table by the wood shed. / Photo: Patra Jongjitirat

What is it that makes Rosenhill a community gathering place? For you, what is most unique about Rosenhill?

The people who come here to live with us through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program—we call them WWOOFers—have the possibility to try different skills and learn that most mistakes are not catastrophes. Another draw is that there is quite a big variety of people from all over.

From May to October every year, we have some smaller and bigger parties of different kinds, with live music, food and beer; that is always popular. On Sundays, we arrange car boot sales. When the weather is nice and sunny, lots of people gather for those. On ordinary days, people just come to have food and chill out on the veranda or in the garden, look at the animals, pick their own vegetables and fruit, and discover small strange pieces of art and craft. Kids usually have no problems roaming around for a few hours finding stuff everywhere.

Are there characteristics of the space that encourage people and strangers to interact with each another?

There are plenty of small strange items around to start a conversation over; it is a good place to explore. Mainly, though, I think it is the relaxed atmosphere that lets people feel comfortable enough to start up talking with other visitors they don’t know. I think that maybe, in a time of expected perfection, we try to show that things can be great in other ways. For instance, that a weed can be beautiful if looked upon from a different perspective. That doesn’t mean we don´t try to get rid of weeds in the cultivation beds, of course! But we appreciate things for what they are.

Simple, colorful hammocks transform the edge of the woods into a relaxing hangout spot. / Photo: Patra Jongjitirat

Can you expand on your idea of not expecting perfection? How did this idea give you more freedom to build the farm?

Probably it is less of an idea than just stinginess. I don´t like to spend money if I can avoid it, and particularly try to avoid taking out loans and spending money I don’t already have. As a result, we’ve always tried to reuse old stuff when building and furnishing. This has certainly made it possible to build more for less money, and people seem to like this style, of doing more with less in creative ways.

We had some tougher years in the beginning when we couldn’t really live only from this place, so we let it grow slowly and didn’t really have a plan that this or that should be achieved within a few years. Day by day, year by year, things came to be out of necessity or joy. When we got to know about WWOOF and started to receive volunteers, things really changed. Things have worked out, even if not always in the way we thought.

Your City is a Cultural Center: A Review of the ‘Spacing Out’ Forum

Natalia Radywyl — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:18:37 +0000

“Place matters, and the first place is your body. We are whole people. We bring that whole-ness to our communities.” –Maria Bauman, leading a “Physio-Expresso” exercise / Photo: @keith5chweitzer via Twitter

What do the Lower East Side’s finest scaffolding, North Brooklyn churches, a chocolate factory, and the Staten Island Ferry have in common with something called Physio-expresso? All were on the roster when artists, art administrators, community leaders, urbanists, researchers and policy makers gathered last week in Fort Greene’s South Oxford Space for the cheerfully dynamic Spacing Out: A Forum On Innovative Cultural Uses of Urban Space. The event was coordinated by the Arts & Democracy Project, Urban Bush Women, and the Naturally Occurring Cultural District Working Group (NOCD-NY), an alliance of community-based cultural networks and leaders that aim to ‘revitalize NYC from the neighborhood up’.

The aim of the forum was to share best practices (and war stories), to help activate and enhance Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts in New York City. Councilmember Letitia James started things off by explaining why building support for NOCDs is a pressing issue right now, in light of real estate development trends where neighborhood boundaries are hastily redrawn and renamed (DUMBO, Bedford Hill, BoCoCa, anyone?) without appreciating that the community’s cultural workers will likely be priced out, victims of their own ‘success.’ As the morning’s speakers revealed, many communities lack the expertise for navigating arts and cultural resources, and are thus unable to develop the capacity to advocate for themselves and their work.

The morning’s presenters (representing each of New York City’s boroughs) described their own experience spearheading creative re-use of existing urban spaces, and how they routinely navigate issues such as partnership-building, programming and managing spaces.

“Saints of the Lower East Side” is on view through September 5, 2012 / Photo: Fourth Arts Block

Tamara Greenfield of the Fourth Arts Block on Manhattan’s Lower East Side described how art could find an unlikely but happy home within temporary, and typically unsightly structures like the scaffolding at vacant lots and construction sites. While street artists, especially those who are lesser known, relish the opportunity to create work for a new urban platform, the generally brief public life of temporary infrastructure creates huge challenges in terms of rapid project planning, having time to secure adequate funding, and brokering relationships with building owners and the ragtag team of necessary city partners like the DOT and NYPD.

Up next was Sheila Lewandowski, director of Long Island City’s The Chocolate Factory, a theater housed in a formerly-industrial home of delicious things. Sheila spoke about adaptive reuse, and her search for an experimental performance and art space which would help preserve the natural character of the neighborhood. “Space matters,” she proclaimed, explaining that many artists want to respond to old buildings in their existing state. In addition to re-use of a physical structure, the Chocolate Factory has also shown how the community surrounding a venue can inform how it adapts to new cultural tenants by partnering with 200 local businesses in an average year. “It’s very important that the community sees that you’re a part of it,” Sheila said. “You don’t do anything alone.”

Monica Salazar’s presentation about cultural use of religious spaces turned an eye toward the economics of re-use. In 2009, inspired by a New York Times article about local North Brooklyn churches renting out space for rehearsals (and with her own band needing a music-making place), Monica contacted Most Holy Trinity-St. Mary’s in East Williamsburg/Bushwick, Brooklyn with a similar suggestion. Her initiative rapidly developed into The Trinity Project, a bartering program with a membership structure that allows artists to teach classes in exchange for space, while also offering the church a ready army of caretakers. Said Monica: “I was amazed to see how valuable trade is…once the dollar is removed from the equation.’

Visitors explore The Point’s Bronx facility during the “Key to the City” project / Photo: Shelley Bernstein via Flickr

Carey Clark of The Point in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood illustrated that while some neighborhoods may not have high levels of cultural traffic or city investment, they nonetheless house communities craving the same opportunities and advantages. The Point is an organization which formed in 1994 to strengthen the South Bronx in partnership with local residents through programming, facilities, and resources, including the wildly successful Hunts Point Riverside Campus for Arts and the Environment, a permanent open public space for the arts and environment. “You need to have a vision,” she explained, “but be prepared to be flexible.”

Sometimes strategic flexibility means saying “no,” as highlighted by Prerana Reddy, Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art, who spoke about the QMA’s current work supporting the Heart of Corona. The QMA has a well-deserved reputation for working with the local community by seeing ‘the museum is a production partner’ in a community ‘full of cultural workers.’ The museum declined the DOTs invitation to take on full management responsibilities for a re-designed Corona Plaza, arguing successfully that maintenance and upkeep should be handled by another organization while the QMA focuses on what they do best: programming. “We have broad cultural networks,” she explained. “How do we use these to co-produce with the neighborhood?” The QMA is now working with several partners on a series of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper activations of the space.

COAHSI’s “Culture Lounge” will encourage visitors to Staten Island to linger in the ferry terminal / Photo: COAHSI

Turning challenges into opportunities was a necessary philosophy, if not working method, for Melanie Cohn, director of the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island. COAHSI received a Rockefeller grant to create a new cultural space at New York City’s third most visited site – the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, where 75,000 people pass through every day. For this new space, COAHSI had to balance the needs of local artists, who are feeling the squeeze of a growing lack of cultural space as the borough booms, with the DOT and Homeland Security, organizations that prioritize moving people through the terminal as quickly as possible. The solution? “You talk a lot,” according to Melanie, and invest in outreach about how to engage with influx of population coming into the space.

With presentations over, the room broke into a series of rapid-fire discussion groups to delve further into the topic areas, share our own experiences, and explore common challenges. The room rejoined to share key take-outs. Here, a few of the questions most pertinent for Placemakers looking to bring cultural activity out into streets & public spaces:

How can cultural workers arm themselves with ‘the right questions’ to ask?

What is the process for acquiring space, and where can we access the technical expertise to manage and use it?

How can cultural workers develop effective relationships with host organizations such as museums and libraries?

How can cultural workers help expedite the sharing of a common vision with project partners?

How can projects be made more sustainable in the short and long term?

Ideas, tactics, experiences, strategies and indeed, the entire morning, passing by with blistering speed and spirited enthusiasm. Many thanks to the organizers and The South Oxford Space for their initiative and planning, and creating the opportunity to develop some new practitioner working methods.

Creativity & Placemaking: Building Inspiring Centers of Culture

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:46:00 +0000

The Perth Cultural Centre is seen here in full bloom during CHOGM 2011 / Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

As much as we prize creativity in cities today, the cultural centers that we’ve built to celebrate it rarely hit the mark. Culture is born out of human interaction; it therefore cannot exist without people around to enjoy, evaluate, remix, and participate in it. So why do our cultural centers so often turn inward, away from the street, onto an internal space that is only nominally for gathering, and is mainly used for passing through? Why do these cultural centers physically remove culture from the public realm and plop it on a curated, often “visionary” pedestal instead of providing a venue for promoting more interaction among the people who create it? “Big Cultural Centers–think of Lincoln Center in Manhattan–they need to turn themselves inside-out and become about culture for all instead of culture for a few,” says PPS President Fred Kent. “Elitism is a big part of what’s going on in some of these places. They exude a subtle sense of who ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be there.’”

Perth’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority had a different vision. Their vision was to connect the 23 institutions within the Perth Cultural Centre (PCC) to each other by improving the public spaces that surrounded and connected them, and to extend the precinct past its formal edges, with cultural activity reaching out into the surrounding area like an octopus. The PCC is a cluster of institutions located at the hinge point between the city’s central business district and one of its burgeoning nightlife districts, Northbridge. The centre features a mix of historic buildings from the 1800s and Brutalist structures built in the 1960s and 70s, and includes art museums, theaters, a history museum, a major library, and a compact college campus.

The MRA got involved in 2008 by buying and renovating a number of storefronts along William Street, a major shopping corridor on the edge of the PCC precinct, and then carefully managing the selection of tenants. When PPS’s Kathy Madden, Alessandra Galletti, and Josh Kent were brought in back in 2009, the MRA’s understanding of the importance of careful management and cohesive vision proved to be key to developing a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC) plan that’s completely changed the public’s perception of the space in a very short period of time. “Compare something like Lincoln Center with the center of culture and diversity they have created in Perth,” says Fred, and you’ll find that the latter is “all about engagement, people, social interaction, a hundred different things to do–maybe nobody wins a design award for it, but that diversification of uses is a really big deal for the people who use that Place, and for their local culture.”

“One of the big things for us was to take the focus off the buildings and put it on the things that happen in the spaces between them,” MRA Executive Director of Place Management Veronica Jeffery explains. “That’s why what we call the ‘quick wins’ strategy was so important: it basically went from planning straight to implementation, and was really powerful. It didn’t leave time for contemplation, which meant that people could see their ideas transform into action.”

Volunteers work on the PCC's amazing "urban orchard" built atop a parking deck / Photo: CPSU/CSA via Flickr

The LQC plan included a working orchard on top of a parking deck, a wetland and play space focused on nature-based discovery, a large screen for projecting movies and digital art, seating, food vendors, etc. Major events like the Perth International Arts Festival and Fringe World Festival relocated to the center’s grounds, which also had the honor of hosting CHOGM 2011.

The culture of risk-taking and experimentation encouraged by the LQC plan has allowed for the MRA team to try some things that failed, learn from them, and move on. This has been greatly aided by the fact that, as part of the Placemaking process, the many once-isolated institutions located within the PCC have come to see their participation in the way that the site is managed as an opportunity to collaborate and enhance their own missions and events. As Alec Coles, Chief Executive Officer of the Western Australian Museum, explains it:

“The recent redevelopment of the Perth Cultural Centre as a ‘people space’ has helped us create the permeability around the Museum that we have long desired. The softening of the edges, not least with the popular sound garden, is making our historic ‘edifice’ a much more welcoming proposition…Too often, cultural centres become cultural ghettos; we are determined that by working with MRA and our many partners that this will not be the case in Perth.”

The good news, today, is that shifting attitudes are chipping away at the austere walls of yesterday’s “culture ghettos,” with people demanding more inspiring, interactive gathering places. Creativity is becoming one of the most coveted social assets for post-industrial cities with increasingly knowledge-based economies–and this is good news for culture vultures and average Joes, alike. “This idea of the ‘Creative Class,’” says PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin, an expert on cultural centers, “is about culturally-based industries, and creatively-engaged people. They could be making clothing, they could be in web or media design. The public’s definition of creativity is really changing to be about celebrating the creativity in all of us, and creating a public environment that supports and encourages that.”

According to Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class, pressure is mounting on traditional Cultural Centers–what he calls SOBs for ‘symphony, opera and ballet’–forcing more and more of them to adapt to meet the needs of an ever-broadening audience that is looking for ways to engage creatively with each other, and actually participate in culture instead of merely consuming it. “The real challenge for the ‘Big C’ centers,” he explains, “is how to reposition for this shift…these institutions are in trouble. Many teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. They have to get with it, like universities and all the old school organizations. They have to become more fluid, more open, more accepting. Less imposing. Think of it sort of like the difference between haute cuisine and great food trucks.”

The MRA's focus on becoming a place for people has created a destination where people can connect and learn from each other / Photo: Fred Kent

Put another way, great, engaging centers of culture are the product of great Placemaking. In Perth, various activities and institutions had co-located, but they hadn’t come out of their respective buildings to interact and make use of their shared space. The Placemaking process allowed the various stakeholders to come together and develop a collaborative vision for their shared site. “We think it’s important to debunk the myth around Culture with a Capital C and make the place inclusive and welcoming to different kinds of people,” Jeffery explains.

That inclusiveness–of organizations, of individuals, of businesses–is the lynchpin in the process of creating great places. Florida notes that Gallup & Knight’s Soul of the Community survey found that the quality of a place’s social offerings was the #1 factor that people said creates emotional attachment to their community. Openness to all sorts of people was #2. “I say the two go together,” he argues. “Our public spaces are perhaps the last vestige of democratic space in our cities.”

Today, we need those kinds of comfortable social environments more than ever. Encouraging creative exploration and experimentation is a great way to develop local talent. As studies (popularized by the writing of Ken Robinson) have shown, while the vast majority of children will answer enthusiastically in the affirmative when asked if they are creative, by the time most people reach high school just as great a majority will say that they are not. For our cities to thrive, we must develop participatory public spaces to re-spark latent creative spirits.

The PCC's openness and flexibility make the precinct ideal for everything from meeting a friend for coffee to meeting a few thousand friends for a concert. / Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

“When a cultural institution does programming out in public space,” says Nina Simon, an expert who consulted at museums around the world before taking the helm of the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz last year, “there’s a really powerful shift in the context.” Still, she cautions, it’s important that institutions remember that the shift is as important for them as it is for neighbors who attend an event or activity. “If you’re going to be out in public space, you have to have the attitude that this is about connecting to the community that you’re in, rather than just trying to figure out how to plug what you do inside the museum in somewhere else. When TV was invented, people didn’t just say ‘let’s put radio on the television.’ They had to re-think the way programming that was made in order to be successful.”

Over the years, PPS has seen how pulling cultural programming out into streets and squares has transformed not just those public spaces, but the cultural institutions that participated in their renewal as well: from Wade Oval in Cleveland, to Tucson’s Congress Street, to the Bronx River Arts Center in New York. And, of course, there’s the Perth Cultural Centre, where the MRA’s pioneering approach to transforming its precinct lights a new way forward for the formal, inward-focused capital-C Cultural Centers of yore.

“It’s been a challenging process, but the results have exceeded all of our expectations,” Jeffery says. “Ultimately, the centre is a public space, and we want everybody to feel comfortable here. They should be able to come in and feel like it’s theirs. If they happen to have a cultural experience in the process, that’s even better!”

Setting the Table, Making a Place: How Food Can Help Create a Multi-Use Destination

Patra Jongjitirat — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:58:45 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: Helsinki Beyond Dreams

Brendan Crain — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:44:15 +0000

If anything is often lost in translation about the concept of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper Placemaking strategies, it is the idea that they are meant to be part of long-term efforts to create dynamic public spaces. The real value of a parklet or a pop-up is in its ability to get people talking, and to change perceptions about how a space can be used. To those who would argue that LQC interventions “aren’t enough,” the answer is “Exactly.” They’re merely paving the way by building new constituencies for transformative change in public spaces.

Hella Hernberg captures this nicely in her new book, Helsinki Beyond Dreams. In presenting a wide variety of projects and events that reflect the LQC ethos of citizens of the Finnish capital, the editor firmly underlines the idea that each of these pieces is part of a larger awakening around the idea that each citizen should have the opportunity to help shape their city. “People are motivated by doing concrete things that have an impact–however temporary–on their environment,” Hernberg writes. “Soft criticism of the city’s bureaucracy is being channeled into urban gardens and street parties.”

A city cannot meet every need of every person, but the LQC approach allows more people to make their desires known, so that officials and designers can be more responsive when making permanent changes to public spaces. This approach also has a way of bubbling over from one project, and changing the way that people think about public spaces far across town. Early on, Helsinki Beyond Dreams traces the title city’s contemporary fondness for LQC interventions back to the formation of Elmu, a live music association that took over an abandoned warehouse in 1979 and created an alternative cultural hub. One of the founders of the group, Teemu Lehto, explains the project’s origins frankly: “There were lots of enthusiastic bands and audiences, but simply no places to meet, so Elmu was born.”

The point made here seems central to the book’s message: we earn our public spaces. The most important aspect of successful Placemaking is that the people who are intended to use a space be engaged in the process of shaping it. If the people in charge of a city’s public spaces don’t adequately meet citizens’ needs, those citizens will go out and make their own great places, wherever they can find room. “We should endeavor to make our city a paradise,” Lehto says in the book. “Otherwise, it may turn into an empire of greed. It’s entirely up to us to decide what kind of city we want to live in.”

A map of several of the major sites in transition around central Helsinki; Kalasatama is site #2.

Many people these days feel disconnected from the processes that shape their neighborhoods and their public spaces. LQC projects are a way of grabbing the “low-hanging fruit,” so to speak, by showing people who are already looking for ways to get engaged in their cities but are unsure or tentative about how to start that they don’t need millions of dollars to start driving real change. In a chapter on the Kalasatama Temporary site, Hernberg writes that the idea behind this LQC cultural center “was based on a hunch that there were active people in Helsinki who would organize inspiring things–if they were given a little push to do so.”

The results, as chronicled in Helsinki Beyond Dreams, are truly remarkable. The site has transformed an abandoned industrial site into a place for experimentation; its organizers acknowledge that it’s been a learning process for citizens and city officials, and that there is value in that process. “The first years,” Hernberg writes, “have given hints as to what kind of methods and tools are needed to make the interaction between the city and its residents run more smoothly.”

At PPS, we have a term for places like Kalasatama Temporary: we call them “bureaucracy-free zones.” At their heart, many Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper projects are zones of this type, to varying degrees. While Kalasatama itself is exceptional for its flexibility and its inclusiveness, every community garden and painted piazza is an attempt to strip away some layers of the old way of doing things, and try something new. Helsinki Beyond Dreams illustrates how LQC interventions add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts by generating a more robust public discussion around public space. For that alone–never mind the crisp writing and beautiful illustrations–the book is well worth a read.

One of Helsinki Beyond Dreams' charming illustrations by Sac Magique

You Are Where You Eat: Re-Focusing Communities Around Markets

Project for Public Spaces — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:00:57 +0000

The breathtaking central hall of Cleveland's West Side Market, a major hub in the host city for this year's International Public Markets Conference (Sept. 21-23) / Photo: PBS NewsHour via Flickr

Picture yourself at the supermarket, awash in fluorescent light. You’re trying to stock up for the next couple of weeks, since it’s a busy time of year. You grab some granola bars (and maybe even a box of pop tarts), some frozen dinners, a box of macaroni with one of those little packets of powdered cheese stuff. And oh, they’re running one of those promotions where you can get ten cans of soup for, like, a dollar each. Perfect! Dinner for the next two weeks. On the way to the register, you swing by the produce aisle to grab a bunch of bananas. Like many people these days, you’re trying to eat healthy, and breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Now imagine that your neighborhood had a public market–the kind of place that’s easy to pop by on the way home from work to grab fresh food every couple of days. Before you reach the open-air shed, you’re surrounded by produce of every shape and color; you can smell oranges and basil from half a block away. As you follow your appetite through the maze of bins and barrels, you bump into your neighbors, and make plans to head downtown to the central market over the weekend to take a cooking class and pick up some less common ingredients. You may even make a day of it and check out the new weekly craft fair that takes place the next block over.

A boy and his mother examine produce at a farmers market in East New York / Photo: PPS

The contrast is stark. In most places today, at least in many Western countries, shopping is a chore; our food system has stopped being about food, and has become entirely about convenience. Food spoils, meaning that we used to have to shop at markets every few days; freezers and preservatives have freed us from those constraints, but in the process food has become disconnected from the natural cycle of daily life–and, thus, the communities of people that we shared our markets with. “There’s a lot of talk about food deserts today, but what many neighborhoods really have are place deserts,” says PPS’s Steve Davies. “As a result, we’re seeing a movement back to this idea of the Market City, with markets acting as catalysts for creating centers in neighborhoods that have lost their sense of place.”

Market Cities (and Market Towns) are places with strong networks for the distribution of healthy, locally-produced food. They have large central markets that act as hubs for the region and function as great multi-use destinations, with many activities clustering nearby; moving out into the neighborhoods, these cities contain many smaller (but still substantial) neighborhood markets that sell all the necessities for daily cooking needs; in between, you’ll find small corner grocers, weekly farmers markets, produce carts, and other small-scale distribution points. Market Cities are, in essence, places where food is one of the fundamental building blocks of urban life–not just fuel that you use to get through the day.

Today, Barcelona is often held up as one of the truest examples of a Market City system in action. “They have an incredibly thriving network of around 45 permanent public markets,” notes PPS’s Kelly Verel, “because when they planned out the city in the late 19th century, they considered markets the same way that you consider all utilities–like, where does the water go, the power, the garbage, etc.”

A map showing the locations of public markets around Barcelona, and the areas they serve.

Barcelona’s markets, many of which now incorporate modern grocery stores, prove that contemporary urban food systems do not necessarily need to use the big box supermarket as their base unit, and that markets are more than just nice extras or luxuries. In fact, with people growing increasingly suspicious of modern agricultural practices, the idea that the paradigm could flip is looking less and less far-fetched. “Markets are viable,” argues PPS’s David O’Neil. “They’ve always been viable, but their viability is especially apt today because the global economy has skewered our sense of being able to support ourselves. Markets are very reassuring places, because they give you a sense of responsibility for your own health. People are experimenting, and reinventing what it means to have a good life.”

According to O’Neil, there is Market City ‘DNA’ still hidden around most cities. Our cities grew up around markets and, while many of the old buildings have been dismantled, inexpensive and lightweight farmers markets have been making a comeback. By 1946, there were just 499 markets left in the US; that number rose to 2,863 by 2000, and then shot up to 7,175 by 2011. Many of the great public markets we know today started out as nothing more than roadside exchanges, so there is reason to believe that some of these new markets could very well put down more permanent roots if they become reintegrated into the life of their surrounding neighborhoods.

Up in Nova Scotia, where Davies and O’Neil have been working with the Halifax Seaport Farmers’ Market, Operations Manager Ewen Wallace notes the importance of his market (which does have its own permanent building) in the local community. “Throughout my involvement in this project and spending so much time face-to-face with the community at large” he says, “the thing that’s really hit home is that the people of Halifax really do consider this their market.”

Shoppers peruse the booths at the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market / Photo: Nicole Bratt via Flickr

And while the market is truly a stalwart (they’ve never missed a Saturday in 262 years!), the role that it plays in the regional economy contributes greatly to the sense of community ownership, since most residents of Atlantic Canada are just a generation away from a farmer or fisherman. “At the end of World War II,” Wallace explains, “we had around 35,000 independent farms in Nova Scotia. Now we have around 3,800. This market is intended to serve as a hub from which money in the urban core is being channeled back into rural areas around the province. This is all tied to food security.”

In Portland, Oregon, Director Trudy Toliver’s Portland Farmers Market benefits greatly from a strong local food culture. “In Portland, for the most part, we really care a lot about food,” Toliver says. “It’s just important to us; the population has strong values about eating healthy food. We also don’t have many commodity farmers in Oregon–we grow food here. In a way, we’ve hit on the perfect storm.”

When food and agriculture play an important role in local culture, a market becomes an easier sell. But with many cities disconnected from the greater food systems that serve them, ancillary uses become important for longevity. This bodes well for places; as Davies explains: “Great markets are created through the clustering of activity. They require the intentional aggregation of local food production, but also of other services and functions. The food is the central reason for why people gather, and that gathering creates a hub for community life.”

Since markets are centered on the sale of nutrient-rich, natural foods, one smart way to add value to these locations is to focus on creating “healthy food hubs,” which cluster health-related activities around markets to encourage visitors not just to eat more fruits and vegetables, but to take a more proactive approach to their own well-being. Some markets include things like health clinics, fitness classes, nutrition information, or classes that teach healthy living principles. Healthy food hubs are especially useful in low-income areas where the need is more acute because of the high cost of regular preventative medical care.

Markets can also serve to amplify cherished aspects of local culture. Says Verel, “The idea of a marketplace is pretty open to what the talents and interests are in a given region. Food will always be the core, but how you build off of that depends on local needs. What if one of Detroit’s markets was for classic cars? Every Saturday you could set up the food stands in a parking lot, and line classic cars for sale up along the edges. If you’re open to it, a market can be anything.”

Relaxing with a view of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene / Photo: Eli Duke via Flickr

For a success story of a market not only building off of, but strengthening local identity, Verel taps the Brooklyn Flea, which has served as a major driver behind Brooklyn’s well-documented boom in artisanal food and craft goods. “The Flea gave all of these people who had ideas for a product a market, when they couldn’t have gotten it into a store because they were too small. There are so many permanent businesses here that started out of the Flea, and together they give Brooklyn this interesting character.”

This hits on one of the major strengths of the Market City in today’s economy, especially in down-at-heel cities where the things that they used to be famous for making are no longer made. Along with industry, many cities have lost their sense of identity. Markets offer a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper way to start rebuilding some of that identity and economic activity (as some of our recent work in Detroit has shown). Food is something that every city and town has the resources to produce locally–if a place as densely-built as New York can become an urban agriculture leader, any city can.

In Halifax, Wallace can rattle off a long list of activities that the Seaport Farmers Market has added to its programming, from a library book-drop to serve far-flung farmers, to student art exhibits, to community org booths. These efforts are all aimed at turning the market into a “modern agora,” in his words. Most exciting are the partnerships with businesses in the surrounding area that highlight the market’s vendors, hinting at the potential for markets to serve as economic anchors.

“In the community,” he explains, ” our landlord has put together a committee to get neighbors involved to promote the area as a district. In August of 2011, the market partnered with the Westin Hotel across the street, and they built the concept for their restaurant around the idea of a 100-mile diet–now they’ve got it down to a 50-mile diet. They are sourcing as many ingredients from the market as possible. They’re listing all of the producers from around Nova Scotia on their menus.”

Seattle's Pike Place Market is the hub of a model market district / Photo: PPS

In a Market City, the most vibrant places are these types of market districts: places where market activity spills out into the surrounding streets and businesses. Using the Power of 10 framework, we can identify market districts as neighborhoods with at least ten market-related activities all within close proximity to each other. Zooming out, a great Market City or Market Town needs at least ten market districts, where local activity spreads out from the neighborhood marketplace.

If you want to see a Market City in action, you may want to consider attending the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland this September. Chosen as the host city because of the role that food is playing in its remarkable turnaround, Cleveland illustrates many of the aspects of a Market City, according to O’Neil.

The West Side Market tower, seen from the nearby Ohio City Farm / Photo: PPS

“From agricultural production areas, to smaller markets, to bigger markets, you can really see things changing in Cleveland,” he says. “For a long time, Cleveland was a Market Town, and now institutions like the West Side Market are leading its post-industrial revival. The WSM isn’t a suburban market, but it’s not right downtown–it was always a neighborhood market. It’s a good lab for seeing the power that a market can have on its town or district. The Ohio City district has become an attractive place to open up a business because of the market. The effect is becoming so positive that it’s affecting the larger city of Cleveland, itself. The market is becoming a sun, and the city is leaning toward it for oxygen, light, and life.”

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Don’t forget — early bird registration for the 8th International Markets Conference ends on July 31st. Act now to lock in the lowest rates!

Gazelles & the Art of Placemaking

Charlie Gandy — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 19:55:13 +0000

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).

7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:24:10 +0000

Great places like Vancouver's Granville Island come from focusing on people and place, not design. / Photo: PPS

Last week, Fast Company posted a list, adapted from the book Smart Customers, Stupid Companies, of 7 Ways to Disrupt Your Industry. Reading through the list, we were struck by how applicable the recommendations that the authors put forth are to our own principles for good Placemaking. But it makes sense, when you think about it: by directly involving communities in shaping their public spaces–leading with people, not design–Placemaking is in fact a highly disruptive approach.

Placemaking tosses out the idea that an architect or planner is more of an expert about how a place should be used than the people who are going to use it. By bringing people together around a shared physical place, it’s also a powerful tool for disrupting local complacency. Great public spaces give people a tangible way to connect with their neighborhoods, building a stronger local constituency–aka sense of community–over the long term.

With that in mind, we’ve taken Fast Company‘s list and tweaked it slightly to create a roster of 7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space for anyone who’s looking to use a local spot to build social capital in their neighborhood. Without further ado:

1) Identify and eliminate your place’s persistent visitor pain points.
If there’s a place in your neighborhood that seems forlorn or forgotten, there are probably just a few key things about it that don’t work for the people who live nearby. In the words of Yogi Berra, you can see a lot just by observing–so watch how people use the space when are there, and try to figure out what the most glaring impediments are: maybe it’s an unnecessarily obtrusive fence, or a lack of shade. There are plenty of reasons for people to stay home (TV, video games, the internet, et al), so public spaces have to be fun and easily accessible to be successful at drawing them out. Find your space’s ‘pain points,’ and wipe them out first.

2) Dramatically reduce complexity
When a public space is over-programmed, people can feel it, and it tells them to look elsewhere when they just want to find a place to relax. Good management is critical to the success of a public space, and that means striking the right balance between programmed activities and open, flexible space. Modern life is hyper-scheduled–communities need places for people to come together and experience the unique pleasures of just sharing some space with their neighbors.

3) Cut costs 90 percent or more: think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper.
You don’t need to make major capital improvements to a place to make it feel radically different when it’s already underused. In fact, Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper improvements are often much more productive when you’re starting out. It’s easier to get people using a space by hosting play days, planting petunias, and setting out movable folding chairs and tables than it is to raise funds for a new design. Ask yourself: “How might this community want to use this space, and what’s the most efficient, immediate way to make that possible?” LQC allows you to try many different things before sinking big money into permanent improvements.

4) Make stupid places smart.
The same digital toys that keep people on couches when a space isn’t functioning well enough to offer a compelling alternative can also be used to get them plugged into their public spaces now. Using Digital Placemaking tools is a great way to reach people on their smartphones and computers (where they are) and engage them in a discussion of how they want to use a nearby public space. Once they see LQC changes happening that reflect their input, they’ll be much more invested in the long-term process of turning a forgotten space into a great gathering place.

5) Teach your stakeholders to talk.
Silo-busting is critical to the success of public spaces. To create places that are responsive to the needs of people, you need to make sure that people are communicating with each other. When mapping out your revitalization strategy, consider every local organization and business as a potential partner. See if they’re willing to help you generate ideas for your space by reaching out to their customers. No one organization or individual can create a strong sense of place for a neighborhood; either people work together do what’s best for the community, or you lose any sense of civic life.

6) Be utterly inclusive.
Fast Company recommends utter transparency, but when it comes to public spaces, it’s probably better to think of this pointer in terms of inclusiveness. People need to be directly involved with changes being made to their public spaces, so if you are leading a local charge to revamp a space, it’s crucial that you remember that the community is always the expert when you’re developing a vision for the future of a place. An inclusive process is inherently transparent.

7) Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.
When it comes time to kick back and relax, people often have plenty of choices–many of them across town. Placemaking is as much about the process as it is about the product, since you can only create a great community gathering place by working directly with the community that you want to gather. When people can meet their needs for socialization and relaxation right in their own neighborhood, they keep coming back, engendering a deeper sense of community as social ties grow stronger through the small change of casual interaction.

How “Small Change” Leads to Big Change: Social Capital and Healthy Places

Project for Public Spaces — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 15:03:36 +0000

Families peruse stands offering a variety of fresh foods at a farmers market in downtown Milwaukee / Photo: Ethan Kent

According to Dr. Richard Jackson, a pioneering public health advocate and former CDC official now serving as the Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA, the idea that buildings, streets, and public spaces play a key role in the serious public health issues that we face in the US “has undergone a profound sea change in the past few years. It’s gone from sort of a marginal, nutty thing to becoming something that’s common sense for a lot of people.”

That’s good news, but as a profile of Dr. Jackson in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, today’s click-driven media climate means that the message of public health advocates like Jackson is “often pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-catching headline: ‘Suburbia Makes You Fat.’” And while these pithily-titled articles may do some good in alerting more people to the problems inherent in the way that we’ve been designing our cities and towns for the past half-century, they oversimplify the message and strip out one of the most important factors in any effort to change the way that we shape the places where we live and work: social capital.

Highways, parking lots, cars, big box stores–these are merely symptoms of a larger problem: many people have become so used to their surroundings looking more like a suburban arterial road than a compact, multi-use destination that they’ve become completely disconnected from Place. Real life is lived amongst gas stations and golden arches; we have to visit Disneyland to see a thriving, compact Main Street. To question a condition that’s so pervasive, as individuals, seems futile.

Bikers and walkers chat at a market in Portland, OR / Photo: npGREENWAY via Flickr

That’s why, if we want to see people challenging the way that their places are made on a larger scale, we need to focus first on developing the loose social networks that are so vital to urban resilience. This is the stuff Jane Jacobs was talking about when she wrote, in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, that “lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.” When people are connected enough to feel comfortable talking about what they want for their neighborhood with their neighbors, it’s much easier to muster political will to stop, say, a highway from cutting through Greenwich Village–or, in contemporary terms, to tear down a highway that was actually built.

In Dr. Jackson’s words: “The key thing is to get the social engagement. Community-building has to happen first; people need to articulate what’s broke, and then what they want.” Serendipitously, gathering to discuss a vision for a healthier future is an ideal way to build the social capital needed to turn the understanding that our built environment is hurting us into action to change the existing paradigm. At PPS, we have seen first-hand how the Placemaking process has brought people together in hundreds of cities around the world with the goal of improving shared public spaces; it’s a process that strengthens existing ties, creates new ones, and invigorates communities with the knowledge of how they can make things happen.

The Healthy Places Program (HPP), which began last year as a collaboration between staff members working in PPS’s Public Markets and Transportation programs. “There are many different elements that make up a healthy community,” says Aurash Khawarzad, an Associate in PPS’s Transportation division, and a key player in getting HPP off the ground. “There are social factors, environmental factors, etc–and what we at PPS can do is take these people in our offices who are focusing on their own areas and bring them together.”

Aurash Khawarzad leads a Healthy Places workshop in upstate New York / Photo: PPS

With that collaborative mission in mind, Khawarzad and Kelly Verel, a Senior Associate in PPS’s Public Markets division, set out on a trip across New York last fall to facilitate a series of day-long Healthy Places workshops with local, regional, and state public health officials and a host of community partners. In partnership with the New York Academy of Medicine’s DASH-NY, the PPS team visited a range of communities, from rural towns, to suburban stretches, to major and mid-sized cities. The workshops were designed to help participants understand how multi-modal transportation systems can be better designed to create a network that links a series of destinations, including healthy food hubs and markets, to create a built environment that promotes well-being by making healthy lifestyle choices (like walking, biking, and eating fresh food) more convenient and fun. They focused not just on what wasn’t working, but on brainstorming ways that participants’ communities could become truly healthy places.

Any expert worth their salt will tell you that maintaining good health is not just about exercise or diet, but both together. In much the same way, addressing the problem of bad community design and its impacts on Public Health requires that we not just promote better transportation or better food access alone, but that we focus on both simultaneously. “The reaction we got from the the Healthy Places training attendees was really good,” notes Verel. “I think people have been really siloed in their efforts. We would ask people what they were doing and they would say ‘access to food in schools,’ or ‘rails to trails,’ and that they focus exclusively on that area.”

Understanding public health within the context of Place is essential, because the problems created and reinforced by our built environment are so broad in scope. HPP takes that case directly to local decision-makers and creates a learning environment where they can build their understanding of how Place effects health together, in a cross-disciplinary setting. This “silo-busting” is absolutely critical; as Dr. Jackson writes in the introduction to his latest book, Designing Healthy Communities (a companion to the four-part PBS special of the same name):

“For too long we have had doctors talking only to doctors, and urban planners, architects, and builders talking only to themselves. The point is that all of us, including those in public health, have got to get out of the silos we have created, and we have got to connect—actually talk to each other before and while we do our work—because there is no other way we can create the environment we want. Public health in particular must be interdisciplinary, for no professional category owns public health or is legitimately excused from it.”

The emphasis, there, is added, as this phrase strike at the heart of the problem we face. To shift the default development model from “low-density, use-segregated, and auto-centric” to one that promotes healthy, active lifestyles and more vibrant communities will take strong leadership from people who aren’t afraid to work across departments, and “turn everything upside-down to get it right side up.” PPS is certainly not the only organization to recognize this, and we’re thrilled to be part of a growing movement. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has its own Healthy Community Design Initiative program. Internationally, Urban Age made designing for public health the subject of a major conference in Hong Kong held late last year (from which a full report is now available).

New bike lanes are just one part of Pro Walk / Pro Bike: "Pro Place" host city Long Beach, CA's strategy to become "Biketown USA" / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

Of course, individual citizens have hardly been waiting around and twiddling their thumbs. Active transportation, healthy food, and community gardening advocates have been working for decades on the ground, pushing for incremental changes to the way our cities and towns operate. Just through the robust conversations taking place online around issues like #completestreets, #biking, and #urbanag, it’s easy to see how well-organized and resonant these movements have become. Mounting public awareness is pushing more public officials toward programs like HPP, to learn about how focusing on Place can facilitate inter-agency collaboration around the common cause of improving public health.

Whether you’re looking at this issue from the top-down or the bottom-up, there will be several opportunities to gather with active transportation and public markets professionals, advocates, and enthusiasts from around the world this fall for debate, discussion, and more of that vital social capital development. As part of the Healthy Places Program, PPS is hosting two conferences, just one week apart: the 17th Pro Walk / Pro Bike: “Pro Place” conference in Long Beach, CA (Sept. 10-13); and the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, OH (Sept. 21-23).

Cleveland, which will host the 8th International Public Markets Conference in September, is home to the historic, bustling West Side Market / Photo: Catherine V via Flickr

If you’re approaching Healthy Places from the transportation world, Pro Walk / Pro Bike (#prowalkprobike) will explore how efforts to advocate for safer and better infrastructure for active transportation modes are being greatly enhanced as more and more people learn about the benefits of getting around on their own two feet (with or without pedals). If you’re more of a “foodie,” the Public Markets conference (#marketsconf8) will highlight the burgeoning local food scene in Cleveland and throughout Northeastern Ohio, and will spotlight the iconic West Side Market, arguably the most architecturally significant market building in the US. Both events will focus on how supporters of active transportation and public markets, respectively, can grow their movements by busting down silos and thinking h0listically about how their chosen cause can be part of the effort to create Healthy Places.

If you can’t make it to Long Beach or Cleveland, there are plenty of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper steps that you can take to get your neighbors together and talking, out in public space, building local connections. “Something like a playstreet or a summer street shows people that, not only do they like this kind of varied activity and flexibility and want more of it in their community’s streets, but that they can actually make it happen,” Verel explains. “It takes more basic manpower–putting up tents, handing out flyers–than actual lobbying or money to get the DOT to shut down a street for one day and focus on social interaction and healthy activity.”

And you can start even smaller than that. PPS mentor Holly Whyte once wrote that “We are not hapless beings caught in the grip of forces we can do little about, and wholesale damnations of our society only lend a further mystique to organization. Organization has been made by man; it can be changed by man.” If our problem is that we have become siloed and isolated, at work and in our neighborhoods, then the most immediate way for us to start re-organizing is to reach out to the people around us, with something as simple as a friendly “hello” on the street. An interaction like this might seem ‘lowly, unpurposeful, and random’–but at the very least, it will make you feel happier and more connected to your community. And guess what? That’s good for you, too.

So, here’s to your health!

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Click here to register for Pro Walk / Pro Bike: “Pro Place”
(Early Summer rate available until June 29)

Click here to register for the 8th International Public Markets Conference
(Early bird rate available until July 31)
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A Playstreet-style fundraiser for cicLAvia in Los Angeles / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

The Power of a Ping Pong Table

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:06:59 +0000

Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper activities can help determine how a space can be best used in the future / Photo: 1hr photo via Flickr

In a post yesterday at Design Observer, Alexandra Lange voiced concern over the growing phenomenon of “Kickstarter urbanism.” Lange contrasts a recent Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource the construction of a prototype skylight, to be used in the proposed “Low Line” underground park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with a campaign to bring a ping pong table to nearby Gulick Park. The Low Line team raised $155,186–103% of its target–from 3,300 individual backers; the Gulick Park ping pong table only pulled in $2,145 from 19 people, meaning that it went completely unfunded since Kickstarter campaigns must hit their target in order for any money to change hands.

That means the Low Line’s campaign was so successful that the extra funds alone could have financed ping pong table outright, with plenty of extra cash left over (which the Friends of Gulick Park promised on their campaign site would “go to maintenance of the table and a supply of extra paddles and balls.”) As Lange points out:

If you are part of the physical community, you would be able to see the fruits of your donation [for the ping pong table] within months. [A donation to the Low Line campaign] is seed money for seed money. If the designers build a better skylight, then they might be able to attract more backers, then they might be able to make a deal with the city, and then they might be able to create whatever it is…The timeline for urban projects, the real-life approvals and the massive construction costs, are ill-suited for the Kickstarter approach.

But the success of major, long-term public space projects and immediate, short-term improvements doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, using Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies to enliven a public space in the short term can be an extraordinarily effective way to build community support for bigger projects. LQC improvements are a great way to test out different uses for a space and get people to see the potential for change. There’s a huge difference between saying “We’re going to build a park on that lot over there,” versus setting out some potted trees, folding chairs and tables, and organizing a few street games for local kids. It’s showing versus telling–and it’s much easier to build a movement by doing the former.

One of the eye-catching renderings that propelled the Low Line's Kickstarter campaign to success / Photo: Delancey Underground

In the case of the Low Line, doing LQC interventions on the site (an abandoned trolley terminal under Delancey Street) would be difficult, if not impossible. Dazzling renderings helped get the prototype funded by the design-savvy Kickstarter crowd, but once that work is complete and it comes time to build on-the-ground community support, locals will start asking serious questions about how they’ll actually be able to use the park. At that point, beautiful images fall back into the role of telling; to show members of the community how the park might improve their lives, the project’s organizers would do well to take a more hands-on approach.

Low Line co-founder Dan Barasch has been quoted as saying that “Some of the best design is to create a beautiful space and then allow the uses to come after it’s built.” While we are big proponents of creating flexible public spaces, we also believe that thinking about how a space will be used before the design process begins is essential to creating a great Place. In addition to getting people excited about a project by inviting them to participate, LQC interventions have the added benefit of allowing designers to see how the local community uses its public spaces in a low-impact way that requires little capital. If something doesn’t work, it’s infinitely easier to revise a design on paper than to go in and try to undo a defunct idea that’s already been cast in concrete.

The proposed site of the Low Line is to the left in blue; Gulick Park is to the right, in pink. The two sites are less than a quarter-mile apart. / Photo: Google Maps

This brings us to the power of the ping pong table. Gulick Park is one of the closest existing public spaces to the Low Line’s proposed site, making it an ideal “staging area” to test out various potential uses to see what residents want to be able to do. While the Friends of Gulick Park’s original Kickstarter campaign was for a permanent table, why not partner with the Low Line team to bring in a few inexpensive, impermanent tables? Test out the use, and see if it gets people excited.

Extending that idea, a series of LQC experiments–a farmer’s market, a pop-up cafe, a tai chi class, an over-sized chess set–would provide the FoGP with a much larger base of potential donors for future crowdsourcing campaigns to fund permanent improvements. Beyond that, these experiments could inform the design of the nearby Low Line and build a broad, engaged base of community support that will be invaluable when it comes time to start navigating the city bureaucracy to turn a trolley terminal into a public space. The end result would be a network of high-quality public spaces for the neighborhood.

“Kickstarter urbanism” is something that can effect change at multiple levels, but it’s important to take the long view, even on smaller projects. This week’s episode of the 99% Invisible radio show looks at how “bigness,” in architecture and urban design, only “pays off when it it uplifts people, gives them a sense of grandeur and purpose.” People want to be a part of big projects that inspire them, and crowdfunding can help them feel like they have ownership in major initiatives in their city. But let’s not forget: sometimes the best way to go big is to start small.

For more examples of crowdfunding sites for urbanists, check out Nate Berg’s response to Lange’s article at The Atlantic Cities blog.