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

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

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

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

And now, without further ado:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hundreds gathered in Detroit for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council / Photo: Ara Howrani for PPS

In 1970, I had the opportunity to coordinate New York City’s first Earth Day demonstration. It was an experience that changed my life, and one that continues to impact the work that I do, and the way I see the world, today. The environmental movement has become a very top-down affair in the ensuing years, but the first Earth Day actually was billed as a “national teach-in.” Every community across the country was encouraged to create its own event tackling local issues and concerns under the larger umbrella of environmentalism.

It was that openness that was the day’s greatest strength; the event’s leaders came to New York once to check in, but they let us–the people on the ground, working for change in the city–lead our own initiative. Earth Day came at a unique moment in time, when various forces were converging around the idea of environmentalism. Its distributed, empowering approach was critical to its success in bringing many different interest groups and constituencies together, and still serves as a model for mass organizing.

Today, after decades of wrongheaded development, people are coming to realize that their communities are not set up to support health, happiness, peace, and prosperity. They are seeing, once again, the need for a convergence, a coming-together of myriad interests and constituencies. The Placemaking Leadership Council was created as a direct response to that growing sense of opportunity for transformative change, and after our inaugural meeting on April 11-13 in Detroit [full program here], I can tell you that things are headed in the right direction. I believe that we are at a moment when the Placemaking movement is ready for its Earth Day.

The 300+ Placemakers who gathered in Detroit came from all walks of life, and from all across the world: more than a dozen different countries, and 25 states. The group was made up of government employees, teachers, artists, journalists, developers, community organizers, architects, authors, and activists. Some came from communities of privilege, while others came from neighborhoods where struggle is a daily fact of life. What they all shared was an understanding of the power of place to serve as a connector of people (both to each other and to their environment), and a facilitator for revitalization and renewal.

We are living at a time when people are more disconnected from participating in the shaping of their world than ever before. What the members of the Placemaking Leadership Council have realized–each in their own way–is that this time is also brimming with possibility. It used to be that, when I would go somewhere and talk about ‘turning everything upside down to get it right side up,’ people would respond with trepidation. Today, that same phrase often puts people at ease. They nod in agreement, because they understand that we can only go up from here. The world is ready to change, and it will do so not in one great shift, but in a billion little actions. The pot is boiling over.

Break-out groups focused on “transformative agendas” ranging from Place Capital to Building Multi-Use Destinations / Photo: Ara Howrani for PPS

While we have only just begun sifting through the wealth of ideas generated at the Council’s meeting, there are clear themes that are already emerging. There is no doubt in my mind that a group as dynamic and diverse as the one that gathered in Detroit will continue to evolve, but I wanted to share some of the core beliefs that the Council identified together, as well as several functions that this new group will likely serve:

1.) Everyone has the right to live in a great place. Discussions about the importance of Placemaking came back, time and again, to the need to empower individuals to take charge of their public spaces. Council members are keen to utilize Placemaking to inspire people from many different backgrounds to become “Place Champions” and maximize the potential of public space to connect people and build community.

2.) There is a pressing need for better resources. Multiple break-out groups identified the Council as a potential body for developing and disseminating better data and flexible tools that help make the Placemaking process more accessible, and its benefits more readily understandable, for a broad audience. Visual communication was identified as a priority.

3.) Re-orient policymaking through a place-based approach. Or, as one break-out put it during a report back to the larger group on the meeting’s second day, “we need to decode place so policymakers understand it, and decode policy so Placemakers understand it.” Places are idiosyncratic, and people often get caught up in the particular details of a particular location when discussing Placemaking. We need to re-focus attention on the benefits of the process overall in order to create a common shared language and present a united front when dealing with the bureaucratic systems that currently exist at many levels.

The Placemaking Leadership Council will serve to create a stronger framework for the important efforts already underway in cities all over the world. There is a clear and present need for the movement to find ways to bring more people on-board, and communicate more effectively about why this work is so critical. We need to be able to illustrate, clearly and quickly, how place connects many different disciplines, helping communities to develop more holistic solutions. Personally, I cannot wait to work with this fantastic, energetic group of people to take this on.

More than four decades after the first Earth Day, our planet still faces grave challenges. We are social creatures, and we all need to work together to find solutions to those challenges, working from the neighborhood up. Placemaking, the collaborative re-shaping of public spaces, is a tangible, accessible way for people to participate in that process, and we must all do what we can to push this critical agenda forward. Everyone has the right to live in a great place. More importantly, everyone has the right to contribute to making the place where they already live great.

The Four Freedoms of the 21st Century / Image: Noel Hidalgo

“Today we will talk about the future that we make,” said #CivicTech activist Noel Hidalgo in his opening remarks at We Built This City: The State of Civic Technology, a panel organized last week as part of Social Media Week in New York City. Hidalgo went on to outline what he calls the Four Freedoms of the 21st Century (detailed above), which build upon the historic goals outlined by FDR in 1941.

In Hidalgo’s update, each new goal shifts from a focus on individual human rights to more social, communal aims. To speak and worship, to live free from fear or want—these are things that we do as individuals. To connect, learn, innovate, and fight tyranny—these are things that we do together. These freedoms don’t replace FDR’s original four, but build upon them, offering a thoughtful set of next steps for anyone thinking about how new social technology can be used to create more equitable communities.

Democratic governance, after all, is a social process, and new tech is only making it moreso. At that same panel, PPS’s Daniel Latorre noted that “Beacuse of all the technology that’s sprouted up, there’s a greater potential for how ‘informal’ citizens can work with the ‘formal,’ staffed citizens who run the city’s departments.” But, he and the other panelists asserted frequently, it is critical to remember that all citizens, whether they work formally for City Hall or not, are just that: citizens, neighbors, equals.

A city is the physical point at which thousands or millions of individual social networks overlap. It is the interconnectedness of our many varied webs that creates a unique sense of place within each neighborhood. The interaction between people is what flavors public spaces, and makes one place feel distinct from the next. As SeeClickFix founder Ben Berkowitz put it at another SMW event, It’s My City: Civic Participation in Urban Development, “Every individual carries their neighborhood…and your personal neighborhood evolves as your life changes.”

Technology is making it easier for people to connect to the places that they inhabit by leveling the social playing field. The tools that are being created are not ends in and of themselves; much like the Placemaking process, they are the means for bringing people together: to connect, to learn, to innovate, and to feel welcome to do so. Below are thoughts from the two aforementioned SMW events that highlight technology’s role in strengthening local human networks in-place, in relation to each of Hidalgo’s 21st Century Four Freedoms.

On the freedom to connect: “Technology,” said Latorre, “is only 10% of the problem. 90% of it is about the organizing & research to find out who you’re trying to connect with.” Wherever you are in a city (or town), there are dozens of potential partners and collaborators within spitting distance. We need better digital tools for finding local people and organizations to connect with in order to get things done.

On the freedom to learn: “The creators of new ideas don’t have to be within your organization to be helpful,”  noted Betsy Scherzer, the project manager for the NYC BigApps competition, at We Built This City. But once an organization has decided that it’s ready and willing to learn from people outside its normal circles, the question (according to Scherzer) becomes, “How do you incentivize outsiders to contribute to what you want to solve? Then, how do you curate the response?” In other words: how can tech help us find the right teachers?

On the freedom from tyranny: “If citizens don’t start cooperating city-to-city, there will be no checks and balances for something like the IBM Smart City control center that was ‘gifted’ to Rio,” cautioned Meu Rio co-founder Alessandra Orofino during the It’s My City panel. “Whoever designs the interface holds a whole lot of influence.” If you plan for people and places, you get people and places; if you plan for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. More and more, tech is a vital planning tool, so make sure that the tools your city uses are focused on people and places.

On the freedom to innovate: Collaboration, and the cross-pollination of ideas by people with many different backgrounds, is what creates bursts of human creativity and innovation. “We now have tech so completely embedded into whatever we’re doing,” argued Hidalgo at It’s My City, “so when we talk about technology, we forget that when we build communities of practice, that’s also a technology that we’re applying to ourselves to strengthen our communities.” Tools that bust down silo walls and create more connectivity between the tangential networks that exist in a given place are key to innovation.

Technology can be hugely helpful in strengthening communities. It can also be a huge distraction. The key is to make sure that new tools serve people first. That’s a self-reinforcing process. The more people there are paying attention and making their voices heard in the discussion about how technology can strengthen offline networks, economies, and places, the more likely it will be that new tools will be designed to make the dialog even more inclusive. In order to change the way that cities are run, the #CivicTech movement should lean more toward civics, and less toward tech.

Every citizen has a seat at the table, and technology’s job right now is to help people understand how they can have an impact on their communities. In Latorre’s words: “The cities that are more open, that are early adopters, are the ones where the citizens are more in charge than the technocrats. The next time you find yourself in a conversation about technology, stop—and start talking about outcomes and goals. Get out of the tiny little box of technology.”

Industrial Rd & Millard Ave in Omaha, America’s worst intersection for pedestrians according to Streetsblog / Photo: Google

The Pedestrian Pandemic
In 2010, the last year the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHSTA) published such figures, a startling 4,280 pedestrians were hit and killed in traffic and 70,000 were injured. For many states, this past year was one of the most deadly in a decade, ending a general decline in pedestrian fatalities. Even still, there is a disturbing cultural willingness to accept these deaths as a necessary evil. The public increasingly blames the victims. The police rarely prosecute, and if they do, the courts are often lenient. In 2012, 136 pedestrians were killed and another 11,621 were injured in New York City alone—and in all that time, only one sober, unacquainted driver was charged.

The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) just released their annual Urban Mobility Report resulting in the usual public outcry to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to address congestion, because of what time stuck in traffic costs the American economy.  According to AAA, pedestrian deaths and injuries cost American society $300 billion in 2010, that is nearly three times the national cost of congestion as estimated by the Urban Mobility Report.  Where is the public outcry to improve safety?

In the US, Common Law tradition has a clear provision for the right of access. Given that all forms of transportation begin and end with walking, this is essentially a right to be a pedestrian—a right severely restricted by expensive and counterproductive high-speed roads that we’ve built. A key problem in defending this right is that very few laws motivate law enforcement to consider killing a pedestrian as a crime. Involuntary Vehicular Manslaughter is a potential charge, but it’s hard to prove constructive manslaughter since a little speeding is rarely seen as a crime, and the threshold for recklessness is hard to meet. Anecdotally, drivers who kill a pedestrian are better off waiting for the police to arrive, because hit and runs really are about the only time the police reliably pursue these drivers with any prejudice. New laws specifically dealing with pedestrian-vehicle crashes are needed.

Blaming the Victim
In my opinion, our local media outlets are exacerbating the problem. Their stories discount the human loss and reinforce widely held misconceptions. First and foremost, underlying all of the poor media coverage is what I call the “Accident Axiom.” This is the widely-held (but almost never-question) belief that accidents are an unavoidable and innocent consequence of modern motorized society. The assumption here is that crashes not involving excessive speed, alcohol, or gross negligence are presumably the fault of no one, but an unfortunate systemic fluke.

This axiom has two corollaries: the Inherent Risk Corollary and the Reckless Driver Corollary. The former states that in this world of unavoidable accidents, pedestrians and cyclists are senselessly putting themselves in harm’s way by traversing concrete and asphalt. If they get hit, it is a deserved consequence of their poor decision making. And the latter states that those rare instances when a driver is at fault, it is the result of that driver being a reckless and careless individual, a deviant member of society. All blame is attributed to the individuals involved. The road network and driving culture are given immunity.

Recently the focus has been on the bad behaviors of pedestrians: texting, wearing earphones, jaywalking, drunk walking, etc. While there is clearly a personal responsibility to remain aware of your environment, we should not rush to judgement. Freakonomics ran a particularly illogical analysis of drunk walking back in 2011, claiming that it was eight-times safer to drive under the influence. Safer for whom?

As the mounting death toll makes the issue of pedestrian safety harder to ignore, the Reckless Driver Corollary has expanded to include distracted driving, a legitimate problem just like drunk driving. But in the age of TV screens, internet radio, and GPS navigation systems in dashboards, can we really claim distracted driving to be the isolated acts of a few negligent operators? Driving at high speeds with all of these modern additions is a pervasive indiscretion, a transgression a plurality of society idly commits on a daily basis.

I’m from Nebraska, one of the “safest” states for pedestrians, though that statistic is largely a function of our rural population and lack of pedestrians in cities.  Even in the Cornhusker State, 2012 was a 250% increase in pedestrian fatalities over 2011 as reported by AAA. The Omaha World Herald, is particularly fond of stating pedestrians “were not in a crosswalk” when they were hit. But this is often not even true! Victims were often not in a marked crosswalk. By law, crosswalks do not have to be marked; in a city where road salt strips the paint every year, few crosswalks even are. In September, when the World Herald reported on the increase in fatalities, I decided that enough was enough, and I responded by challenging the misconceptions so flagrantly repeated in their reporting. It took mere minutes of research to refute their presumptions.

The state’s traffic laws, Chapter 60 of the Nebraska Revised Statutes, lays out that a crosswalk exists whenever sidewalks are present on both sides of an intersection, regardless of whether there are white lines painted or not.  It goes on to explain a pedestrian can step into an unmarked crosswalk even if an approaching car is in view, so long as the driver has time to stop and there isn’t a Don’t Walk signal.  And most importantly if references a case Vanek v. Prohaska that states, “Violation of a statute is not negligence per se, but is merely evidence of negligence.”  In other words, just because a pedestrian violated these laws, doesn’t mean they should be considered the party at fault.  Given the inadequacy of the infrastructure, it might have been perfectly reasonable to cross in such a way.  Though the original post has since been deleted, you can read the full text of my comment here.

In the early 1900s, cars and their drivers were depicted in editorials, cartoons and accident reports as reckless murderers / Photo: via Peter Norton

The Rise of Motordom—and the Future of the Message
This wasn’t always the media’s modus operandi. In the early 1900s, cars and their drivers were depicted in editorials, cartoons and accident reports as reckless murderers, as grim reapers spreading death across cities and as pagan gods appeased by the sacrificing of children. What changed, mid-century, was that the highway lobby essentially took over the reporting of pedestrian and cyclists harmed by drivers; unsurprisingly, they changed the voice of coverage to presume the innocence of drivers.

Fortunately, there are signs that the narrative might be starting to change. While stories highlighting the injustice inherent in the way we treat pedestrian fatalities are usually the purview of urbanism-friendly publications (think Streetsblog, The Atlantic Cities, et. al.) NPR ran a story last month profiling the impossible task that police face in tracking down hit-and-run drivers involved in vehicle-pedestrian crashes. Brian Williams also covered the topic recently on NBC’s Rock Center, and the segment starts off promisingly enough. Unfortunately, about twenty minutes in, it becomes clear that the story is being framed using the Reckless Driver Corollary, focusing on the fact that drivers involved in the crashes being discussed were on their phones, rather than the fact that pedestrians died.

Solutions
There are many things that can be done to keep pushing the message back to a place that values human life first, and speed and efficient movement of automobiles second. On the policy side, get a Vulnerable Users Law introduced into your state legislature. Vulnerable Users Laws shift the burden of evidence onto the more dangerous individual. Drivers are responsible for cyclists, cyclists for pedestrians. I’m a huge fan of these laws, because pedestrians are put on a pedestal. They’ve been popular in Europe and are catching on in the United States.

You can also pursue other policies like Vision Zero, famously applied in Sweden and currently being campaigned for by Transportation Alternatives in NYC. Essentially, Vision Zero is a directive to eliminate all pedestrian and cyclists fatalities in quick order. The central premise being, “that no loss of life is acceptable.” Concerning law and order, you can find local lawyers to represent and advocate for justice on the behalf of pedestrians and cyclists injured or killed by drivers.

You can work to lower the speed of traffic. More specifically, advocate to decrease the range of speeds driven over a segment of road.  A fundamental belief in traffic engineering is that differences in operating speed causes higher risks of crashes. Spread can be reduced by lowering speed limits and using roundabouts instead of signalized intersections. The end result is travel times remain the same but maximum operating speed and the range of speeds are significantly lowered. Other geometric changes include narrower lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, neck-downs and Rightsizing.

However, only so much will be accomplished until our local papers and the nightly news starts putting pressure on state DOTs and public works departments to keep our citizens safe on foot. So, first and foremost, pay closer attention to the way that pedestrian deaths are portrayed by the local media in your area, and don’t be afraid to put pressure your local news outlets when you see improper coverage that blames the victim. It is easy to find language in your State Statutes that debunk published misconceptions about crosswalks and jaywalking. We all have the right to walk—and like most rights, it’s one that must be defended.

Helpful Resources

• Peter Norton’s excellent presentation on the history of media depictions and societal opinions on pedestrian-vehcile crashes
• AAA report on the societal costs of pedestrian-vehicle crashes
• World Health Organization pamphlet on the risk of pedestrian fatality as a function of traffic speed
• AAA report on the risk of pedestrian fatality as a function of traffic speed
• Transportation for America’s Dangerous by Design, interactive pedestrian-vehicle crash data
• National Highway Transportation Safety Administration pedestrian data
• America Walks, the best starting point for resources, tools and links

Via our Rightsizing Streets Guide, Project for Public Spaces promotes rightsizing as a means of improving streets for all users and creating a sense of place.  Rightsizing improves safety and accessibility for walkers, bikers, and drivers by reconfiguring the street’s space to match the needs of the street’s community. Rightsizing is often critical to the cultivation of streets as places, in which streets provide for safe and enjoyable human experiences and foster inclusive, healthy, and economically viable communities.

The Porch in Philadelphia before and after rightsizing / Photo: University City District

These case studies illustrate that rightsizing can help activate a corner by creating a plaza, transform a corridor for blocks or miles by encouraging pedestrians and bicyclists, and improve access to local businesses, neighbors, and other attractions.

• The Porch at 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia and Broadway Boulevard in New York City transformed poorly utilized road space into active pedestrian plazas.
• When University Place wanted to create a main street in their newly incorporated municipality, their rightsizing effort included installing sidewalks where there had been only road shoulders, improving the ability of pedestrians to cross the street, and beautifying the formerly overwhelmingly car-oriented Bridgeport Way.
• East Boulevard in Charlotte was also rightsized in response to the community’s desire for a safer and more vibrant pedestrian environment with increased opportunities for outdoor dining. They brought the ‘Boulevard’ back to East Boulevard with slower car speeds making for a safer, quieter street, and infrastructure to make that street navigable on foot and by bike. Edgewater Drive has a similar story.
• In Poughkeepsie, rightsizing Raymond Avenue included streetscape improvements that encouraged pedestrian access to local retail and dining establishments.
• Main Street/US 395 in tiny Bridgeport, California was rightsized to increase parking and support pedestrians’ access to local businesses.
• Prospect Park West in Brooklyn was transformed by the inclusion of a traffic-separated two way bike lane and pedestrian refuge islands. The result was a safer street for all users, and much easier access to Prospect Park.
• Rightsizing Nebraska Avenue in Tampa and Stone Way in Seattle reduced traffic crashes, and improved the experience of the street for pedestrians and bicyclists.

East Boulevard Overview / Photo: City of Charlotte

East Boulevard Crossing / Photo: City of Charlotte

Each rightsized street was improved for pedestrians, and most created bike lanes as well, with minimal adverse—and often positive—impacts on vehicle operations. While vehicular transportation is important, our streets should welcome people using many different modes. Youth, some elderly, and many in between are unable to drive, but happy to walk and bike when it’s safe and pleasant. Further, many may prefer to walk or bike for their health, convenience, environmental concerns, or social reasons. By allowing a child to bike to school, a bike lane provides autonomy for the child (and the parent), and improves the atmosphere of that corridor. By calming the traffic next to that bike lane, the street is made safer for all. Of course, street design is not all there is to Placemaking, and not every rightsizing effort is perfectly aligned with its neighborhood’s desires or needs. However, rightsizing is often a critical component of a community’s Placemaking strategy.

East Boulevard Outdoor Dining / Photo: City of Charlotte

Rightsizing projects tend to use before and after measurements of success that come from traditional traffic engineering priorities like reducing injuries, the number of speeding cars, or travel delay. Rightsizing succeeds by these measures, but they only hint at the fundamental place-centered outcomes of such projects: enabling thriving communities. Safety and mobility offer support to, but are different than, our more basic and fulfilling daily activities: shopping, socializing, eating, learning, recreating, game-playing, bench-sitting, people-watching, and all of the many other experiences that are more frequent and better in successful public spaces. We would be well served by more documentation of these activities in addition to the standard safety and mobility metrics. Streets and sidewalks are our most common public spaces. Rightsizing is a major way to activate these spaces and build communities.

Click here to visit our new Rightsizing Streets Guide to learn more about how rightsizing can help a street near you!

A glove washed up on Natalia’s doorstep in Gowanus after Hurricane Sandy flooded the neighborhood / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

Yet, unlike many others, I have been able to return home. In other parts of New York City, such as The Rockaways, Staten Island, Coney Island and Red Hook, some homes are still without power and basic services, with emergency relief needs and the demand for medical and legal services escalating. The crisis has also been met by rapid community mobilization, from Occupy emerging as a leading support, to myriad fundraising activities across the city, and even internationally.

As our daily lives are becoming increasingly destabilized by financial recession, climate change and perhaps political marginalization, self-organizing communities are also becoming a steady presence, from co-ops and community gardens to large-scale political movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring. Our streets and public spaces have become sites that weather (literally, in the case of Sandy) these various challenges, but they are also the sites of protest, green markets, and social interaction. In this way, these spaces are revealing how we might re-imagine the way we live in our cities for a more just and equitable future.

This perspective formed the basis of a recent conference, Urban Uprising: Re-Imagining the City, jointly organized by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY, The Right to the City Alliance, The New School Design and Urban Ecologies Program, and Growing Roots on November 30 – December 1, 2012. The first day featured perspectives from scholars and community organizers, speaking on the theme: ‘In History, In Process, In the Future’. Surveying the legacy of social movements in Detroit, the first panel was an apt reminder that our histories are conduits for learning about our present and future. As noted by Francis Fox Piven (Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, CUNY), “These movements are still with us, they are a part of our genetic heritage.”

Speaking from her own deep wisdom as a long-time civil rights activist, Marian Kramer, (Founder and President, National Welfare Rights Union), added that although “It’s good to always know history… [it’s important] to always understand what you’re up against right now because the strategies and tactics are different from the 1960s. And then you’re gonna get a damn good revolutionary.”

Marian Kramer (third from left): “It’s good to always know history…” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The next panel’s international perspective brought the universality of many urban issues to light, from the way that urban design can deepen existing inequities through spatial segregation in Lebanon and Egypt, to homelessness and migration flow progressively marginalizing displaced populations in Hungary and South Africa.

Hiba Bou Akar, (Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Urban Planning, School of Social Inquiry, Hampshire College), speaking about the ‘War Yet to Come’ in Lebanon / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

As discussion after the presentations turned towards the nuances of culture and context, it became apparent that, although a broad comparison allows us to see problems as global and relating to common human rights, to work equitably we must also think carefully about specific urban characteristics; as Eva-Tessza Udvarhelyi, (Co-founder, The City is for All; Doctoral candidate CUNY Graduate Center) pointedly asked, “How do we define the city, and integrate different kinds of urbanization?”

Tessza Udvarhelyi asks: “How do we define the city, and integrate different kinds of urbanization?” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The day closed with an open plenary, ‘How to Organize a Whole City,’ in which a range of community organizers spoke about the inspiration and hard work of movement mobilization.

Rob Robinson, Special Advisor, Human Right to Housing Program, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative; Co-founder, Take Back the Land Movement (click for link) / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The poetic words of Kazembe Balagun, (Outreach Coordinator, Brecht Forum), perhaps best illustrate that a course of activism and community-organizing requires the sharing of common passions, if to mobilize to any success: “In order to achieve our country, we need to come together as lovers.”

Kazembe Balagun: “In order to achieve our country, we need to come together as lovers.” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The second day, entitled ‘Transforming Demands, Demanding Creativity,’ sought to move the conference’s focus from discussion to action, specifically aiming to create a transformative vision for organizing in New York City, and to commence movement-building by connecting issues to organizations. The day’s aims were simply-stated, but nonetheless ambitious:

“With participation from community organizations across the city, we aim to:

1. Explore a holistic vision for the city we wish to live in,
2. Assess community work currently being done
3. Begin a conversation on the role of transformative demands and alternative institutions in realizing our vision.”

Accomplished organizers and commentators kicked off the day in an open plenary about a grassroots re-imagination of the city. Peter Marcuse (Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, Columbia University), offered a range of friendly provocations about ‘reorganizing, rather than redesigning’ the city, suggesting that a volunteer economy should replace market relations, and that we could re-imagine our cities as places to live, rather than places to work. Matthew Birkhold (Co-founder, Growing Roots) spoke about communities in Detroit having successfully re-imagined the use of vacant lots to combat police brutality. By activating the lots as public spaces for in-community conflict resolution, they became valued as important community assets, and have now also been transformed into markets, urban gardens and community hubs.

Clearly, re-imagining the city is about systemic change. Nancy Romer (General Co-ordinator, Brooklyn Food Coalition), described how America had become “starved and stuffed” by unjust agreements between the food industry and government. Asking “how do we create a democracy, keep control in the hands of the people, and out of the hands of corporations?” she emphasized that any movement, be it urban gardening, green markets, or co-ops, must consider itself a whole justice movement to have broader political, economic, environmental and cultural impact.

Matthew Birkhold: “Demands aren’t enough.” / Photo: Natalia Radywyl

The working groups that formed for the remainder of the day dedicated themselves to exploring discrete areas of system intervention: food, jobs and economics, transportation, public space, health care, education, criminal justice, just communities, housing, art, media and communications, environment, and democracy/governance. For this diverse but passionate body of change-makers, finding a common language was often a challenge, although a common vision far less so. Undoubtedly, the coming days, months and years will reveal how this discussion and the early seeds of community mobilization sown over the two days of the conference may grow into a thriving community of practice. And there is cause for optimism. As Marcuse noted, “The experience of Occupy Sandy shows what people will do, voluntarily, [and] what the best in people is [all about].”

I know that, for me, experiences of volunteering in the Rockaways absolutely revealed this fact. Practices of mutual aid feed the common cohesion and transformation that our neighborhoods desperately need, especially in the aftermath of crises. Following Sandy, there is already talk of not ‘if’ but ‘when’ the next climate disaster will hit New York. Social disparities reign, and are being reinforced by consistently volatile economic markets. While these problems are with us every day, so are their solutions, if to follow Birkhold’s galvanizing words: “Demands aren’t enough. We’ve got to begin rebuilding the world we want to replace the current one with.”

Volunteers use bikes to transport donated goods to hard-hit areas like Red Hook and the Rockaways after Superstorm Sandy / Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh via Flickr

On Thursday following Superstorm Sandy, when much of New York City was still without power, the number of bike riders on the East River bridges rose more than 130 percent. The substantial increase in ridership, according to a study by NYU’s Rudin Center, showed that walking and biking commuters were, on average, the least frustrated commuters compared to those who drove, or used the bus or subway. While non-bikers experienced double or triple their pre-Sandy commute time depending on where they lived, walkers and bikers added only nine minutes to their commute time on average!

The volume of biking commuters was observed and counted by volunteers from Transportation Alternatives. They stationed themselves in four locations around the city to record the swelling number of cyclists and by their estimates, there were approximately 100,000 people commuting to work by bike between Wednesday, November 7^th, Friday, November 9^th, and the following Monday and Tuesday. Observers covered a lot of ground during morning, afternoon, and evening shifts from 2^nd Avenue, to Times Square, and up on 138^th Street in the Bronx.

Although strained (perhaps beyond capacity) by Sandy, New York’s bike infrastructure provided a much-needed transportation alternative when subways were down and the automobile network was stymied by traffic light shutdown. Even with approximately 300 miles of protected bicycle paths, exclusive bicycle lanes, and shared bicycle lanes available in all five boroughs, riders still experienced frustrations when traveling during the storm’s long aftermath. Brooklyn resident David Pimentelli, told The New York Times, “I’m scared to be going back to Brooklyn right now,” traveling the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. “People are running red lights, very agitated, they don’t care.”

Many PPSers are cyclists who bike to and from our HQ in Manhattan’s East Village. In the office, I’ve heard several colleagues comment on how difficult it was to pass slower moving cyclists, with traffic slowing and compressing at points. “I couldn’t believe the congestion,” said Transportation Associate David Nelson. “It was a Level-of-Service D equivalent. If [the East River Crossings] had been a highway, engineers would argue you’d have to add more capacity.”

PPS Associate Casey Wang, a resident of Brooklyn, did not travel into Manhattan during the week after the storm, but as a regular bike commuter, she knows and understands the world of cycling in NYC. Her experience that week was one of relief in owning a bicycle. Had she not, she says she would have felt “trapped.” Although cycling didn’t mean commuting during that week, she was thankful to be able to carry out her day-to-day activities in Brooklyn even though her trusted trains were down, including the L, which only resumed service the week of the 12^th.

Commuting aside, the bicycle’s role during Hurricane Sandy proved to be truly life saving. Many residents in the Rockaways and Red Hook suffered the loss of their homes, and had to rely on crowded, inadequate shelters and the generosity of friends and family—many without electricity or heat, themselves—and attending to basic needs quickly became an issue. Volunteers at Bicycle Habitat in Park Slope and Affinity Cycles in Williamsburg loaded their bicycles with panniers full of donations, including flashlights, diapers, blankets, and coats, and headed for the Rockaways. Using bicycle power allowed volunteers to bypass gridlocked traffic, nimbly move around donation centers and churches to make their drop-offs, and survey damage.

Occupy Sandy organizers demonstrated democracy in action by making use of bicycles as well. Rev. Michael Sniffen of St. Luke and St. Matthew on Clinton Avenue, an experienced Occupy Wall Street advocate, opened the church to Occupy Sandy, allowingmore than 2,500 volunteers to participate in relief efforts, including moving donated goods via bike and car. Rev. Sniffen told The Local: Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, “We’re neighbors helping neighbors, on a fleet of bicycles. It’s an image of community at its best.”

The number of NYC residents who cycle has risen considerably in the past few years. According to NYC DOT, bicycle commuting doubled between 2007 and 2011 from an average of 27,000 riders to 48,300 entering and leaving the Manhattan core each day and it aims to triple that number by 2017. Sandy has highlighted the resilience of NYC’s residents, the bicycling infrastructure’s ability to support that population, and the need to expand that infrastructure to accommodate the level of ridership seen during the storm on a permanent basis. Indicators recorded from Sandy present a strong case for the DOT to meet its 2017 goal.

To see photos of residents, commuters, and volunteers weathering the storm, visit Transportation Alternative’s Flickr page here.

For a New York City Cycling Map and information about NYC DOT’s cycling plans and initiatives click here.

Our team rode out into the city to document the social life of some not-so-small urban spaces: Times and Herald Squares. So, a rare treat, up close and personal: one recent sunny day’s research here in Manhattan, along with some DIY tips for using contemporary timelapse tech to evaluate public spaces in your own town.

1.) Seen here at the TKTS booth overlooking Times Square, our timelapse tech set-up: the Gorillamobile monkey tripod and iPhone, a 21st century public space researcher’s best friends…

2.) Ethan and Elena go low-tech, multi-tasking on the ground with cameras & notepads, as captured here for the world on a Times Square interactive jumbotron…

3.) …while I fend off tourists’ inquiries nearby. A word to the wise: while clipboards are a handy form of lo-fi research tech, the air of authority they convey can make it hard to get a day’s work in, especially when surrounded by lost visitors and curious on-lookers!

4.) A little teamwork and some creative bike re-purposing  go a long way when rigging cameras…

5.) …and recent yoga classes seem to come in handy too..

6.) Success!

7.) Always at the cutting edge of tech innovation at PPS, we found this solution to battery shortage when shooting day-long timelapse. We call it: “the rubber band.”

8.) Although down on the ground, we still do some things the Holly Whyte way: pain-staking behavior mapping on the hour, observation and note-taking.

9.) As the day drew to a close, it was time for a pit stop in the Control Room.

10.) With slices of Manhattan in our pockets, time to scoot back to Headquarters where the real work begins: evaluation.

As Holly Whyte reminds us, “…time lapse does not save time; it stores it,” meaning that the true value of field work comes out of the many hours of image scrutiny, discussion, analysis, and communication of findings. So, while digital technology, new generation tripods, and New York’s bike infrastructure make capturing footage of public spaces a little easier than in Holly’s day, the richness of research lies in the hands of intrepid public space researchers.

In Washington Square Park, light writers make the most of the dark / Photo: Alex Fortney

On the eve of Halloween, I ventured across the East River to cycle through the eerily dark and silent streets of lower Manhattan. With Sandy’s storm surge freshly receded and my sister a refugee on my futon in Bed Stuy, we hopped on bikes and rode into the Financial District to gather clothes and valuables from her apartment one block from the South Street Seaport.

This week, the internet has been abuzz with articles on the relief efforts, the role of climate and ecology in the storm’s severity, and the stark illustration of how a NYC that commutes by car is a NYC in constant gridlock.

While I’ve been very conscious of all of that, what I noticed most on the ground was how social behavior has adapted to this nearly disparate nighttime landscape of the city below 34th Street.  There are no traffic lights, no street lights; there just aren’t any lights at all. For the most part, streets signs and traffic control devices are simply meaningless or invisible. Save for the few with traffic cops, intersections play host to a bizarre dance between cross and opposing traffic. Intuition prevails: minor streets stop for major streets; cars stop for bikes; everyone is stopping for pedestrians. The natural order of transport, untamed.

With no moon and with the light pollution uptown blocked out by the midrises and highrises inbetween, electric light has become an important part of human interaction. Stirring in the shadows of one’s peripheral vision is at once routine and unsettling. We quickly fell in step with the apparent norm when approaching others: each party shines a light at the other, makes an immediate judgement that the strangers are twilight wanders like themselves, and passes by, cordially cautious. It all feels rehearsed and official, as if we all did it in elementary school libraries right after practicing stop-drop-and-roll.

After crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, the incredible darkness was all consuming. Then suddenly, the awe and anxiety terminated by the tower of City Hall, lit like the surface of a star, as though we were astronauts reaching the point of orbit where the sun suddenly bursts forth from Earth’s horizon. Our ride up Broadway was quiet. It is only when we reached the rear entrance to my sister’s building that we began our interactions, talking with the staff loading a truck with the piles of garbage bags filled with 32 floors’ worth of rotting refrigerator contents, and squeezing past other tenants in the fire stairs, meagerly lit by a single glow stick. Out of necessity or fear, everyone simply deferred to trust, assuming others had legitimate reasons to be there, and that no one was up to mischief or criminality.

The NYSE building, presumably lit by generator / Photo: David Nelson

The Financial District was the darkest of all, perhaps reflecting it mostly daytime population. The reds and blues of cop cars and the Stock Exchange’s up-lit columns cut through the darkness. Those columns had attracted a few handfuls of twenty-somethings and I wondered if they had anything to do with Occupy.

Once I had my sister were safely back in Brooklyn, my girlfriend and I rode back into the city, this time to venture uptown. Chinatown, Little Italy, and NoHo were perhaps where the de facto traffic pattern was most pronounced, when crossing the big streets of Canal, Delancey, and Houston.

We were now taking the familiar route of my afternoon commute. In the hard-hit East Village, we passed by a few resilient restaurants and bars operating by candlelight. Glow sticks and LEDs were accessories with purpose here, a part of individuals’ advertised identities. My favorite example was a flamboyant individual who wore a large medallion blinking with orange, green and purple lights. On Saint Mark’s Place between 1st and Avenue A, we found ourselves in the midst of a crowd. As soon as we were about twenty feet away, someone off in the shadows pressed play. We were comically startled. A dozen people started dancing to the harmonies of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel.  There vehemence of the lyrics seemed particularly apropos, given the situation: “Ain’t no river wide enough,” the radio blared.  We headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge. It was nearly 2am; time to go home.

Reflecting on the sights and sounds of the evening on the chilly climb up the bridge, I was struck by adaptability and endurance of the urban experience. People were defining new norms for social interaction, on the fly. Behavior toward key aspects of city life–individuality, mobility–were adapting to extreme conditions. And, as it turns out, even in the dark, people are still fundamentally attracted to people.

Looking north from a darkened Lower Manhattan / Photo: NY Daily News

During and after a natural disaster, we truly see the value of community, up close and personal. Neighbors band together to help each other, providing shelter, supplies, and comfort to those who are less-prepared. The bravery shown by first responders drives the point home; seeing so many public servants risking their lives to help those in harm’s way is an inspiring reminder of the importance of cooperation and collaboration, as well as a reminder of how much impact each of us, as individuals, can have.

Hurricane Sandy has wreaked havoc from the Caribbean, up the Atlantic coastline of the US, and straight through heavily populated areas like the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia, and New York City, where PPS HQ is located. As those of us on the coast begin to assess the damage today, the superstorm is still dumping water on Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and is expected to barge into Canada some time tomorrow.

This morning, we received an email from Richard McCarthy, director of MarketUmbrella.org, with the title Solidarity from Sea Level. “There will be a month of very tired, mentally disoriented people,” our New Orleanian friend wrote. “Maybe longer with physical dislocation…From a public space standpoint, the markets and the parks and the pop-ups will be worth visiting to gauge mood, meaning, etc.”

The strength of our communities will be on display in the coming days and weeks. Much of this will play out in our streets, and our public spaces. As horrific as the damage is in many places, and as staggering as the news reports of damage will undoubtedly be, there will be many inspiring stories to share as people work together to rebuild the places that they love. Stories like this are already showing up, and we’ve seen many of you coordinating on Facebook and Twitter to help as your cities and towns begin their recovery efforts.

If you live or are staying in a community affected by Sandy, and you experience an example of community resilience first-hand, please share it here. These stories must not be lost in the din.

Meet Hatuey and Elizabeth! / Photo: Patrick Wall

Elizabeth Hamby and Hatuey Ramos Fermín are people connectors. As artists, activists, and Bronxites, their creative collaborations are all about gathering information from neighbors and presenting it in ways that allow communities to better understand themselves and the urban spaces they create. The two have worked in all kinds of public spaces, from major thoroughfares and street corners to laundromats, grocery stores, and vacant waterfronts.

Recently, they organized Boogie Down Rides: Bicycling is Art. The artists used the social act of biking as a springboard for talking with people about the creation of healthy, active urban environments. Throughout the month of May 2012, they set up many different formats for engaging the public: a temporary bike shop that simultaneously served as an education hub, group rides across the Bronx, and visioning workshops about biking and greenway initiatives in the city.

The project was organized as part of the public art exhibition, This Side of Paradise, by No Longer Empty at the Andrew Freedman Home. I recently sat down with Hatuey and Elizabeth to talk about Boogie Down Rides and the other urban projects they have in the works.

What was it about your community that inspired Boogie Down Rides? Was there a particular need that you were responding to or wanted to address?

Hatuey: Boogie Down Rides grew out of another project of mine, Transmit-Transit. It explored the idea of taxi drivers as a mode of transport in the the Bronx, and the need for cabs to move around. Public transit in the north-south direction works well but east-west not so much. No Longer Empty first approached me about that transportation project, which became a video installation at the Andrew Freedman Home that connected the gallery space to the outside world. Then we began thinking about how to physically and conceptually expand transportation within the community. Transportation was a major theme extending back to Mr. Freedman’s time, with Mr. Freedman being a major backer of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), New York City’s original underground subway. The IRT addressed the linking of open space from Central Park to Van Cortlandt Park. Extending the idea of Transmit-Transit beyond cabs, we wanted to look at bikes as another viable option to address mobility in the Bronx.

One of the great things about Boogie Down Rides is how it brings together many activities that people may not normally associate but which all contribute to healthy places. Your tagline, for example, is Bicycling is Art. Can you explain how biking, public art, and urban spaces are linked in your project?

Elizabeth: Instead of representing reality as a painting, we live it on a bike. The bike embodied action for this issue of transportation in the Bronx, where biking is a social act and a political act. Instead of designing a solution to a problem, we tried to figure out the questions that exist in real life through the experience of biking. We both live in the Bronx. It’s part of our day-to-day reality, and because we’re artists, we have a compulsion to make what we see public.

The project also involved community visioning sessions for the Bronx’s longer-term development. What came out of these sessions?

Elizabeth: The visioning sessions were really spearheaded by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which was just launching an interactive toolkit to gather data and address threats to active transportation and public space. They were key in leading some of the concrete visioning work happening around the Sheridan Expressway, where dangerous connections make it unsafe to bike between the parks. Rather than focusing on cause and effect, the visioning sessions were about figuring out opportunities for improvement. Safety—specifically, feeling safe in public—was an ongoing theme in the conversations we had with our neighbors.

Bronxites show some love for their bikes at a Boogie Down Rides event / Photo: Boogie Down Rides

Throughout your various interactions with the public, did you come across questions or reactions that particularly surprised you?

Elizabeth: One of the most surprising things that we learned from Boogie Down Rides was the number of adults—particularly women—who had never learned how to ride a bike, and who were very excited to find out about opportunities for biking in the Bronx. In the instance of another project, Mind the Gap/La Brecha, we talked a lot with folks in our neighborhood about their ideas for the waterfront. One of the critical components to the waterfront that came up over and over again was the basic need for clean public restrooms!

Collaboration seems integral to your work. What other community partners were vested in Boogie Down Rides?

Hatuey: Conversations and collaborations were important from the start; we worked with Transportation Alternatives, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bronx River Alliance, Bike the Bronx, Bronx Health REACH, Partnership for Parks, Velo City…

Elizabeth: We also had a meeting with City Planning and the Mayor’s Office where we were able to show our recommendations. It was perhaps an unusual case in that the Mayor’s Office and City Planning came to us. Our collaborations really grew organically, and our project was timely in terms of how they related to conversations already happening in New York about biking, complete streets, and the South Bronx Greenway Plan.

And did people express any misconceptions that you were able to address through these collaborations?

Elizabeth: I think that artists working in public the way that we do are often confused with non-profit or other community-based organizations. We often talk to people about the role that artists play as citizens and neighbors in our communities—and the ways that we hope that our work can help make our neighborhoods more safe, lively, and liveable.

Any advice you would give to communities who are trying to build healthier places?

Elizabeth: You have to remember the factor of critical mass. If you notice a problem, someone else probably has too, so it becomes about working together in a long-term way.

Hatuey: It’s realizing there are already resources within the community, and that becomes the main point of departure. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You want to create space to bring stakeholders together.

Elizabeth: Also humility and willingness to listen and genuinely collaborate—those are really important, in regard to attitude. There’s a lot of work that goes into working together.

Hatuey: Listening is the biggest thing, listening with a big ear.

A map of the area under observation.

William “Holly” Whyte’s studies have helped us understand how people interact in public spaces. The studies, however, were performed during the 1970s, before there was such a strong presence of electronic media as there is right now. Inspired by Holly’s methods and curious to determine how speakers affect the use of public space, I recently spent two weeks observing one of the spaces that Whyte studied. I was particularly interested in determining if music and sound changed the nature of pedestrian interactions.

The South Street Seaport district is made up of a series of pedestrian streets located on the southeastern edge of Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. The area is located close to important tourist destinations like City Hall, Battery Park and the Brooklyn Bridge. It is, in many ways, an outdoor shopping mall. Vehicular traffic is cut off from the street, and–instead of cars–one can find permanent and semi-permanent commercial kiosks scattered all around. Restaurant terraces also spread onto the streets, taking up more pedestrian space that is normally allowed on commercial thoroughfares in Manhattan.

I performed my observational research at the intersection of the Seaport’s dock and the FDR freeway. This space, physically set apart from the rest of the Seaport’s streets by the massive, six-lane, elevated highway, is a place with great acoustics. It is a strategic place from which to bounce sound.

The FDR freeway makes the area a strategic place from which to bounce sound / Photos: Alan Grabinsky

I visited the place three times over the course of two weeks: on a sunny Saturday afternoon (4-6pm), a rainy Monday at mid-day (12-2pm) and a rainy Friday morning (10-12am). As one might expect, Saturday afternoon was when the space was the most crowded. On Monday and Friday, a smaller crowd was still milling about. Yet even if the number of people using the space changed drastically, the uses of the space did not. As mentioned earlier, the space is mainly a destination for tourists, with companies like the Circle Line Ferry and Blazing Saddles Rental Bikes capitalizing on the constant flow of national and international tourists that move about the district.

The area where I performed my research was particularly noisy, with sound coming from the river and colliding with noises coming from inland. I heard the occasional squawking and flapping of seagulls and the periodical sound of a boat horn (coming from the New York Water Taxi). Added to these noises were the constant whooshing of cars on the FDR, the squealing, hissing brakes of tourist buses as they stop to pick up visitors, and the shouts and chatter of tourists and tour guides. In such an acoustically charged environment, any sound that is planned and specifically targeted to someone immediately stands out. This is the case with speakers, and their function to attract attention from customers.

Mapping the South Street Seaport’s soundscape / Photo: Alan Grabinsky

The interesting thing about how and where the speakers were placed was that the sonic territory claimed by each one of them did not overlap with the others (see map above). Apparently, the only sound that drowned the other ones was the sound NYC Water Taxi horn, due to its particular strength. It is as if the noise within the space was being self regulated by the users (or a third party) to keep the sound levels comfortable for the pedestrians: it seemed to be an example of the subtle, equilibrating nature of public behavior that seemed to fascinate Whyte.

Most speakers were set up inconspicuously throughout the area, all of them facing towards the main pedestrian path. I did not see any outdoor speakers set up for internal enjoyment within a business. Restaurants like TGI Fridays have speakers facing the pedestrian pathways under the FDR. The NYC Water Taxi station has speaker that call the person in the line. There are also speakers blasting music from a stand of t-shirts. Individuals were also using portable speakers, especially tour guides, who used attached them to their belts in order to talk to the crowd.

Amongst the most distinct sounds heard in the port was of Middle Eastern music, coming out of a Hot Dog/Hallal Food stand. The cart had an old speaker set up on the roof, carefully protected by an umbrella (picture below). This speaker was especially loud on Saturday and was quieter during the weekdays.

This vendor strategically uses sound to attract hungry tourists craving an “exotic” lunch / Photos: Alan Grabinsky

The ironic thing about this particular set up was that the vendor was actually listening to private music on his iPhone while the music played out loud. This allowed me to deduce that the speaker played music that was relevant for the customers, not for him. This music was used to make the hungry tourist crave an “exotic” platter—and it worked. Situated as it was under the FDR Drive, the noise that came out of this speaker would bounce from the highway into the dock, attracting hungry tourists that had just gotten off one of the boats.

As visitors move through space, they enter certain sonic atmospheres and are drawn to—or repelled by—the sounds and noises that they encounter.  The South Street Seaport is an example of a highly charged sonic environment where sound-making machines are used to influence pedestrian activity. Aware of the many ways in which sound works, businesses have strategically set up their sound equipment in order to draw attention to their merchandise. Making sound in this space thus becomes a way of claiming territory; it is a way of asserting one’s presence in the public realm. By making sound, one is actually transforming the uses of the built environment. In this case, the freeway structure becomes an amphitheater, making the public space a stage from which to call out to the passing crowd.

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.

—————————-

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!

Aphrodite interviews a New Yorker on Love TV in front of the city's iconic Flatiron Building / Photo: Love TV

Love was recently high in the air at PPS, as we were regaled with tales of a heartfelt summertime voyage around New York City’s five boroughs, where deeply-held secrets, innermost dreams, and impassioned desires were divulged by locals in the bright glare of broad daylight across public parks, plazas, streets and ferry terminals. Inside a giant pink television…to a golden-haired vixen called Aphrodite…with an Australian accent…

Nope, we’re not losing our grip on reality here in the office. In fact, we had the good fortune to be visited by artist Rebecca Macintosh and creative producer Victoria Johnstone, two Australians who had been touring their urban installation, “Love TV,” around New York City as a part of the DOT’s Summer Streets and Weekend Walks Urban Arts Program.

Describing Love TV as a “bold, fun and innovative public art adventure,” Rebecca and Victoria had been busy sharing the love across nine sites with 19 performances in some of NYC’s most diverse and far-flung neighborhoods. Through an outreach process organized jointly by Love TV and local community partners, people went online to either nominate themselves or their neighbors for an interview with Rebecca—aka the illustrious Goddess of Love, Aphrodite—in her public studio, a cheerfully fuchsia mobile theater shaped like a giant TV set. As local personalities revealed all, the interviews were aired on a screen before an inflatable lounge, allowing for prime public viewing with all of the fluffy comforts of home. Interviews were rapidly uploaded onto the Love TV website and posted to social networks, growing “a lively online Love TV community” across the world.

As happy a spectacle as Love TV is, its aim is far from superficial. As Rebecca explained, the project endeavors to activate public spaces and strengthen community spirit by creating a place for “their stories, by their people, [so that communities can share their] personal love affair with their respective neighborhood or city.” Indeed, Love TV’s five-borough journey collated interviews from a passionate public, from boy wonder drummer Marakai at the Jamaican Music and Arts Festival in Queens, who dreams of “a big pool in the park,” to soon-to-be MTV Superstar singer Ray 6 at the TAMA Summerfest in Brooklyn, who was brimming with pride in Bed-Stuy’s music-filled streets: “Tompkins is it! Brooklyn is the place to be.”

In addition to the nominated guests, Love TV also built up its own merry team of followers, from George the Greek, an Astorian poet who serenaded Love TV at multiple locations, to a group of Italian tourists who simply fell in love with the installation and reoriented their NYC itinerary to follow Aphrodite around the boroughs. So why is Love TV so loveable? What’s the secret to its success?

A crowd gathers to watch a performance at Fordham Plaza in the Bronx / Photo: Love TV

As veterans of pop-up public space activation (Love TV has been touring the world’s public places for more than five years), Rebecca and Victoria dropped by PPS HQ to share tips and tricks over a brown bag lunch with Placemaking staff. They described how, when new to a neighborhood, city, or country and working on a tight schedule, on-the-ground partnerships and a spirit of collaboration are the absolute starting point for any pop-up event. Community partners are essential for ensuring that work fits within the local context—especially when needing to tap into neighborhood knowledge to select an appropriate site, since poor site location can make or break a performance.

Yet Love TV’s charm swells from something other than good site location and thorough research. This installation creates a public meeting space (often in very limited supply, especially in poorer neighborhoods) charged with a spirit of optimism, and uses a commonly-held human value that spans cultural, social and economic differences—love—to inspire positive community conversations and visions for the future. Every participant was asked what they would do if made mayor for a day and, Rebecca told us, this became a significant moment in each interview. With community organizing so often focused on what people don’t want, it’s rare for communities to have the opportunity to come together to define common values by sharing their hopes and desires in their own local public spaces.

So Love TV’s beauty, on one hand, lies in this curation of shared community experience in public space; but that beauty also, perhaps more strategically, comes from the way the project finds avenues for these aspirations to linger. Rebecca noted that Facebook seems to have become that place where, well beyond Love TV’s departure, participants and communities continue to dwell online to share their urban dreams for the future. Victoria and Rebecca hope that the few hours of rosy fun they bring to neighborhoods will do more than simply bridge off- and online community conversations, but also seeding longer-lasting effects–perhaps as an online archive of community strengths and needs which municipal officials, planners and advocates could use.

Love TV is back home now, resting up with Rebecca and Victoria on Queensland’s Gold Coast. But if the project sparked a little something for you, or if you think your community could use a healthy dose of Australian warmth, community imagination, and/or a whole heap of fun, get in touch with these Placemaking romancers, and see what can come when you “turn on” an intimately good time in your neighborhood.

Audience participation! Dancing in the NYC DOT's Flatiron Plaza / Photo: Love TV

PPS President Fred Kent leads a Placemaking tour of Times Square during the April 2012 How to Turn a Place Around training. / Photo: PPS

It’s almost that time of year again: every fall, we host Placemaking trainings at PPS HQ. These two- and three-day sessions are designed to help anyone working on creating great places learn how to authentically engage with community members and other constituents around the shaping of public space. The How to Turn a Place Around and Making it Happen programs not only give participants hands-on experience with a variety of tools for observation and evaluation of a of different places–they also give you the opportunity to meet and work with other planners, advocates, developers, architects, and local change agents who are facing similar challenges in cities around the world.

This fall, we will be hosting two training sessions at our New York City office: How to Turn a Place Around will take place on November 1-2; and Making it Happen will take place on November 7-9. We are also excited to be able to offer a special West Coast edition of How to Turn a Place Around shortly before that, during the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach, CA, this September 14-15!

• How To Turn a Place Around (New York, NY / Nov. 1-2, 2012)
  This two-day bread-and-butter course offers a comprehensive introduction to the wide world of Placemaking. Through discussions and case studies, participants will learn about strategies for creating extraordinary places out of ordinary urban spaces. HTTAPA is a great opportunity to meet PPS staff–our veteran Placemakers–and to gain insight and inspiration for implementing your own Placemaking efforts, whether for a business project or your own community. The course will be led by Fred Kent, Kathy Madden, Phil Myrick, and other PPS staff.
• Making it Happen (New York, NY / Nov. 7-9, 2012)
  This three-day course picks up where How To Turn a Place Around leaves off. For people eager to jump into action, participants will learn tools and best practices for implementing and sustaining vibrant places through management techniques. This interactive workshop includes site visits to successful places in New York City and teaches participants how to evaluate places using key Placemaking principles. The course also allows time for participants to share and receive feedback on their own projects. MIH will be led by Fred Kent, Kathy Madden, and Norman Mintz, with guest presentations by Eldon Scott, Alan M. Hantman, and Andy Manshel.
• How To Turn a Place Around (Long Beach, CA / Sept. 14-15, 2012)
  Exciting news for West Coast Placemakers: PPS will be teaching its core intro to Placemaking course in Long Beach. In collaboration with the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference, the course will focus particularly on transportation and streets, and will incorporate many elements of both HTTAPA and the Streets as Places training course.

Please note that enrollment in all Placemaking trainings is limited to 35 participants in order to ensure a personalized experience and close-knit environment, and registration is now open for all three of the trainings listed above. We look forward to working with you! Click here to register for one of our upcoming trainings.

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.”

——————-

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

The St. Kilda Adventure Playground just outside of Melbourne, Australia / Photo: Fernando de Sousa via Flickr

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I don’t think I ever once used a “play structure.” I can still vividly remember the playground at my elementary school, with its castles, pirate ships, Amazonian treehouse cities, secret lairs, and rivers of lava. My friends and I never thought of the wooden pavilion, the monkey-bars, or the giant tire off in the corner of the lot as what they actually were. The term “play structure” did not apply–there was nothing structural about the way that we used that place.

Today, of course, that same corner of the school yard is occupied by a brightly-colored construction that is very safely bolted to a rubber pad. Gone are the wood chips (which served as gold doubloons, secret keys, magic gems…), the giant tire, and anything remotely resembling a treehouse. There is a slide, and big plastic blocks with Xs and Os on opposing sides, where children can enjoy hours and hours of unstructured tic-tac-toe. If such a thing exists.

This is an all-too-common story, and one that you probably know well. Over the past few years, we have siloed different types of play within playgrounds, just as we have siloed different types of uses in cities. Pieces of play equipment that might be transformed into fantastical alternate worlds when jumbled together are isolated (a slide here, a tire swing there), underlining that each piece is meant to be used in one specific way. But research and support have been mounting for years to back up what many of us feel on a gut level: these sanitized playscapes are junk.

There has been a recent burst of interest in adventure playgrounds, which “depend on ‘loose parts,’ such as water, sand, balls, and other manipulable materials.” Thoughtful articles from The Guardian‘s Justin McGuirk, Kill Screen‘s Yannick LeJacq, and Cabinet magazine’s James Trainor have each explored the history of this movement within the past couple of months, revisiting everything from Aldo van Eyck’s work in Amsterdam following WWII, to the unique cast of characters (Richard Dattner, M. Paul Friedberg, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, et al) behind the surge of interest in London and New York in the 1960s. To see so much solid new writing on this subject should be encouraging to anyone who hopes to see kids playing amidst wood chips again. Unstructured play is having a moment, and moments are meant to be seized.

Cities are where us “grown-ups” play at leading meaningful and enjoyable lives, so it may be helpful (if anecdotal) to think of playgrounds as the staging areas for the cities of tomorrow. If we want to live in siloed cities, with offices here, houses there, and all quarters safely demarcated by wide arterial roads, we should probably go right on ahead building playgrounds where the slides and plastic tic-tac-toes cower away from each other. But if we want bustling, creative cities full of the surprise and serendipity that makes urban life so enjoyable, we might want to start thinking about playgrounds as microcosmic multi-use destinations.

I think of my favorite public space now, Washington Square Park, and it reminds me, in a way of that schoolyard playground. There are so many different things happening at any given moment: people are playing music, and games, they’re kissing, chatting, taking photos, sunning, jogging, and watching the world pass by. The magic of that park is in its open-endedness, and its mix of these activities. That’s what a great place looks like.

Shouldn’t our playgrounds be great places, too?

Brooklyn's Court Street is often bustling with pedestrian activity. / Photo: PPS

“Walking: It’s What You Do Once You’ve Parked Your Car…”

Or so lamented Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, in his keynote address at last week’s Walking and the Life of the City Symposium, organized by the NYU Wagner School’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Vanderbilt set the morning’s theme by charting the history of walking from its criminalization with the first jaywalking laws in 1915, to its sharp fall from public favor in the 1970s following a spike in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), changes in land use (widened streets, trees removed between roads and sidewalks), and the popularization of our favorite modern conveniences, like drive-throughs and escalators.

“Walking is like sex” Vanderbilt postulated. “Everyone is doing it, but nobody knows how much.” Quipping that we haven’t yet had “the great Kinsey report of walking,” he proposed that much work needs to be done to define not just the quantitative indicators for walking, but also the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make truly complete streets. Together, the researchers’ presentations started to present a Kinsey-like breadth of information about the role that walking plays in contemporary culture. Full presentations will soon be available online here, and a publication of the day’s proceedings is in the offing. In the meantime, brief summaries of the presentations are coupled below with a big question raised by each researcher’s findings.

• 

  Pedestrian satisfaction is closely linked to motivation; vibrant walking streets like this one in Lisbon can encourage people to get out and enjoy traveling on two feet. / Photo: B G via Flickr

  McGill University’s Kevin Manaugh aims to fill the gap between behavioral psychology and the built environment. Arguing that there’s a difference between choosing to walk (the environmentalists), and having no choice but to walk (poorer populations), his research categorized types of walkers to understand who’s doing the walking and why they’re doing it. Manaugh’s research shows no relationship between the distance walked during a trip and the satisfaction experienced by the walker, illustrating how the enjoyment of walking relies heavily on one’s motivation. How can we motivate more people to start walking by choice?

• Picking up where Manaugh left off, Dick Ettema, of Utrecht University, explored how well-being has been defined by academic researchers. He suggested that urban design could be improved through deeper research into the relationship between sensory experience and behavior change, noting that “Physical experience is much more important when walking [than other modes of travel].” Ettema’s research into understanding optimal arousal for pedestrians raises an interesting question for anyone interested in the idea of re-thinking Streets as Places: What are the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make out streets truly complete?
  

• Columbia University’s David King looked at the relationship between transportation system funding and walkability, making a strong case for “person-oriented development” by highlighting key problem areas, such as fuel taxes driving transit investment decisions, wealthy areas enjoying the majority of bike and pedestrian investment, and a planning preference for increasing speed. With lawsuits against cities for decades of underinvestment in pedestrian infrastructure and non-ADA compliance becoming increasingly common, he asked “Are pedestrian environments something we should be engineering, the same way we engineer road environments?“

• The second panel of the day kicked off with the Rudin Center’s Andrew Mondschein, who discussed his research into how people cognitively map their streets and neighborhoods. Presenting different processes of spatial learning, he explained how we engage in ‘active learning’ when walking, noting that frequent pedestrians tend to have a better understanding of their streets and neighborhoods than transit riders. With this in mind, Mondschein raised the question: Might mobile apps, GPS, and other ICT platforms be chipping away at our ‘walking IQ’ by making us less reliant on our cognitive maps?

• Sarah Kaufman, also of the Rudin Center, also presented research on the impact that digital technology is having on walking. “Right now,” Kauffman explained, “we know that physical & augmented reality are separate; in future, we will feel more transported and immersed by AR apps…especially in areas such as navigation, tourism and translation.” Kauffman’s primary question, regarding the future of this field, is worth repeating verbatim: “Are we aiming to augment reality, or substitute it?“

• 

  Data on mid-block crossings is hard to come by, but important / Photo: Ian Muttoo via Flickr

  UC Berkeley’s Robert Schneider’s work aims to better quantify pedestrian activity by gathering more complete data. Explaining the need for different types of data that are currently lacking (middle-block crossings, trip generation, travel within activity centers and parking lots, and movement within multimodal trips key among them), his talk highlighted innovative forms of data collection which might make this process easier, such as video and GPS tracking using stationary cameras and smart phones. If we’re currently missing a great deal of data on shorter walking trips, how might collecting that data more efficiently change how we design for walking?

So what do you think? How can we get more people walking? Are digital apps the answer–or do they just raise even more troublesome questions? Is contemporary research on walking even asking the right questions, to begin with? Join the discussion commenting below!

An iconic scene from Woody Allen's 1979 classic "Manhattan"

According to the @UrbanismAvenger, interviewed recently by The Atlantic Cities editor Sommer Mathis, “There are ALWAYS urbanist themes in movies, if you look. Cities themselves are often heroes, or at least key characters, in the story. Whether the city is New York or Asgard, cities in movies can inspire us to be better urbanists!”

We agree wholeheartedly, and have been thrilled by the response to our post a few weeks ago about films that demonstrate Placemaking principles. Folks have made a lot of great suggestions, and we’ve culled eight of our favorites below. Keep ‘em coming!

———————————–

Rear Window (1954; director, Alfred Hitchcock)
Cindy FrewenWuellner suggests several Hitchcock films, our favorite of which is this classic featuring Jimmy Stewart as a man with a unique view of the life of his neighborhood. Eyes on the street! (Or the courtyard, as the case may be).

A Thousand Clowns (1965; director, Fred Coe)
According to Rob Sadowsky, the key moment for Placemakers here is a scene featuring Jason Robards giving a tour of NYC by bicycle, “because it’s the best way to see the world.”

Manhattan (1979; director, Woody Allen)
Commenter Dbpankratz nominated Woody Allen’s classic, considered by many (including at least one person here at PPS HQ) to be one of the “greatest love letters to New York” ever made for the silver screen. The film beautifully illustrates the intimate link between place and identity.

Blade Runner (1982; director, Ridley Scott)
Adrian Riley likes the dystopian urbanism of Scott’s sci-fi classic, which contrasts “the world the underclass are forced to inhabit” with wealthy residents cloistered in gleaming towers. The city is “dirty, wet, crumbling and constantly being adapted, but also grittily exciting in a way few science fiction film environments are.”

Lisbon Story (1994; director, Wim Wenders)
Wenders’ film-about-a-filmmaker shows how intoxicating the power of Place can truly be. Tiago Oliveira loves it for its portrayal of “the soul of a City and the wonder of its People and Places.”

Before Sunrise & Before Sunset (1995 & 2004; director, Richard Linklater)
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s decade-long romance starts with a chance encounter on a train, and features the two lovebirds walking the streets of Prague and Paris. Both of these films, suggested by two commenters. Julieta and Todd, highlight the ability of human-scaled cities to create a feeling of comfort that promotes public affection.

Be Kind Rewind (2008; director, Michael Gondry)
Highlighted by Plantanbanda, this flick focuses on two video store clerks who accidentally erase every tape in the store. (Remember tapes?) In their quest to re-shoot the entire cinematic inventory, they enlist the help of the entire neighborhood.

People chatting at a demo bike share station in New York City / Photo: Planetgordon.com via Flickr

With yesterday’s big announcement from the NYC DOT, bike shares are in the news again. Here in New York, we’re getting excited about the possibilities on the horizon as hundreds of bike share stations start popping up all over town. These stations don’t just improve mobility and transportation options–they’re also wonderful tools for activating public spaces. In fact, bike share stations are ideal for engendering what we call Triangulation, which Holly Whyte explained as “the process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other.”

Here are three reasons that bike share stations are ideal triangulators:

1. They’re natural conversation-starters: You can’t participate in bike share without visiting a bike share station. Stations bring people together around a common interest, giving them an opportunity and a reason to communicate with people they might not otherwise meet. Being that they serve as nodes in a transportation system, these stations also have a moderate sense of urgency to them: everyone there is trying to get somewhere else. This lowers the barrier-to-entry for casual social interaction for people on the shyer end of the spectrum, since it’s easy to smile and say “Nice helmet!” or “It’s a great day for a ride!” to someone as you both hop on bikes. Since instances of social interaction lead to a desire for greater contact, bike share stations make for happier, more social public spaces overall.
2. They attract a stream of diverse users at all times of day & night: A truly great place facilitates a mix of uses over time; if there’s nothing to keep a space active at night, it can create uncomfortable or even unsafe conditions for passersby, and detract from the entire community. Bike share stations ensure a steady flow of people through a space even after dark, keeping “eyes on the street” and making other constructive after-hours uses more likely. This extends the usefulness of a place as a social hub for the surrounding community.
3. They act as casual landmarks that concentrate activity: Bike share stations, with their colorful bikes and signage, help to make a place more comfortable and navigable for people who might not be familiar with a neighborhood. Think of the relief you felt the last time you were walking around, lost, and stumbled onto a subway or bus station; transit nodes help to re-orient us when we get turned around, chipping away at the sense of alienation that sometimes accompanies visiting a new place. The visual impact of these stations is also great for surrounding businesses and attractions, as the identifying signage and maps often highlight nearby points of interest.