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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" beautifully illustrates the mix of uses and resulting social vibrancy at Paris' now-demolished Gare Montparnasse / Photo: Paramount Pictures

When you’re watching a movie, how much attention do you pay to the setting? While the best way to learn about what makes a great place is often to get out and observe how public spaces work first-hand, there are films that illustrate Placemaking principles quite beautifully. We’ve collected ten of our favorites here, with explanations of why we think they tell great stories about place. Take a look, and let us know if you have a favorite Placemaking-related movie or two (or three!) that we should add to our Netflix queues!

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Ikiru (1962; director, Akira Kurosawa)
A bureaucrat who learns he is dying of stomach cancer unexpectedly finds a sense of purpose in his life by cutting through red tape to get a park built for neighborhood children.

Thieves’ Highway (1949; director Jules Dassin)
A feud among corrupt produce dealers at the San Francisco market comes alive because of the location footage. A wonderfully pulpy film noir thoroughly grounded in a very specific place.

Mon Oncle (1958; director, Jacques Tati)
An eccentric uncle comes to visit family in an absurdly well-ordered and well-groomed suburb. Accustomed to the joy and texture of city life, he is utterly unable to adapt. Tati is a brilliant physical comedian who once said, “”Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables” (“geometrical lines do not produce likeable people”). Watch him be hilariously confounded by a kitchen full of “convenient” modern appliances.

Play Time (1967; director, Jacques Tati)
Tati’s signature character, M. Hulot, is trapped in the linear, slick, modernist environment of 1960s Paris. There is almost no dialogue. It is all about sight and sound gags. You will have to watch this four times to get them all. And you will want to watch it four times.

La Bête Humaine (1938; director, Jean Renoir)
About trains and train conductors and cheating wives. The most beautiful footage of trains and rail yards ever filmed.

Brazil (1985; director, Terry Gilliam)
Wonderful to watch for its humorous takedown of bureaucracy and top-down institutions, and its praise for zealous nuts.

Hugo (2011; director, Martin Scorsese)
The balletic interplay of people in Hugo’s grand train station – travelers, shopkeepers, musicians, lovers – is a thrill to watch. Scorsese has created a place so vibrant, and so real, that you long to step into the screen and inhabit it yourself.

The Sandlot (1993; director, David M. Evans)
This film about a neighborhood baseball field recalls a time when a kid could walk (or as was often shown in the film, run) to the neighborhood ballfield, and stay there all day, every day, unsupervised. The only time he was expected at home was for dinner.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946; director Frank Capra)
Perhaps the ultimate American love song to community wisdom, with a walkable downtown to beat the band.

High Noon (1952; director, Fred Zinnemann)
Talk about a sense of place. All the drama in the world is contained on High Noon’s Main Street.