As citizen-driven urban action becomes increasingly potent and well-disseminated, the tension between spontaneous, bottom-up improvements and top-down planning and policy is thrown into higher and higher relief. As often as that tension might manifest through loud, messy confrontations, a great deal of it simply takes the form of confusion. The bottom-ups and the [...]]]>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s Placemaking, not Placemade. It’s a process. You are never finished.”
—Place Governance working group

“Placemaking requires a marathon mindset.”
—Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Goldman Properties

“We work at the invitation of residents, [...]]]>

Placemakers explore Detroit’s iconic Heidelberg Project on a tour of the city during the inaugural meeting of the PLC / Photo: PPS

“Placemaking is community organizing. It’s a campaign.”
—Fred Kent, President of PPS

“It’s Placemaking, not Placemade. It’s a process. You are never finished.”
—Place Governance working group

“Placemaking requires a marathon mindset.”
—Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Goldman Properties

“We work at the invitation of residents, with the understanding that they have a deep understanding not only of the problems facing their community, but of the best solutions.”
—Nupur Chaudhury, Brownsville Partnership

“Don’t think ‘build it and they will come’; find the local leaders and help them build ‘it’ where they already are.”
—Healthy Communities working group

“Government’s role: Be the host, don’t try to be the life of the party.”
—Place Governance working group

“Placemaking is more of a circular, iterative process than just something that happens from the bottom-up.”
—Multi-Use Destinations working group

“We can build systems to engage people, but until we figure out why they aren’t engaged and using the public spaces that they already have today, nothing will change.”
—Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on low-income communities & public space

“We want to transform our sidewalks not only into places where you can walk, but where you can live.”
—Jeniffer Heeman, Curativos Urbanos

“Serendipity is not an accident.”
—Neil McInroy, Center for Local Economic Strategies (CLES)

And a bonus from Saturday’s bus tour of the host city’s public space, with special thanks to Jeanette, our tour amazing guide:

“Why Detroit? Because it’s big enough to matter in the world, but small enough that you can matter in it.”
—Jeanette Pierce, D:hive

A break-out group discusses Placemaking in low-income communities at the inaugural PLC meeting in Detroit / Photo: PPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make it Public: Bringing Existing Activity Out Into the Streets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is [...]]]> This is the second of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part three, click here.

“If vibrancy is people, then the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them.” / Photo: PPS

A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them. Today, in the first of a two-part follow up, we will explore how Placemaking, by positioning public spaces at the heart of action-oriented community dialog, makes room both physically and philosophically by re-framing citizenship as an on-going, creative collaboration between neighbors. The result is not merely vibrancy, but equity.

In equitable places, individual citizens feel (first) that they are welcome, and (second) that it is within their power to change those places through their own actions. “The huge problem with citizenship today is that people don’t take it very seriously,” says Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College. “The two dominant frameworks for citizenship in political theory,” he explains, “are the liberal framework, where citizens are voters and consumers of goods, and the communitarian framework, where citizens are volunteers and members of communities. In other words, for most people, citizenship is doing good deeds, or it’s voting and getting things. We need to develop the idea of civic agency, where citizens are co-creators of democracy and the democratic way of life.”

It is bewildering, when you take a step back, to realize how far we’ve gotten away from that last statement. We have completely divorced governance from citizenship, and built thick silo walls around government by creating an opaque, discipline-driven approach to problem-solving. Busting those silo walls is imperative to creating more equitable communities. Rather than trying, haplessly, to solve transportation, housing, or health problems separately, as if they exist within a vacuum, government should be focused on building stronger place.

a new citizen-centered model has also begun to emerge, that we’ve come to call Place Governance.” / Photo: Andy Castro via Flickr

Revitalizing citizenship through Place Governance: Why we need a Copernican revolution

As the link between bustling public spaces and economic development has grown stronger, some government officials have started advocating for change in this arena. After so many decades of top-down thinking, the learning curve is steep, and many officials are trying to solve human problems with design solutions. But a new citizen-centered model has also begun to emerge, that we’ve come to call Place Governance.

In Place Governance, officials endeavor to draw more people into the civic decision-making process. When dealing with a dysfunctional street, for instance, answers aren’t only sought from transportation engineers—they’re sought from merchants who own businesses along the street, non-profit organizations working in the surrounding community, teachers and administrators at the school where buses queue, etc. The fundamental actors in a Place Governance structure are not official agencies that deal with specific slices of the pie, but the people who use the area in question and are most intimately acquainted with its challenges. Officials who strive to implement this type of governance structure do so because they understand that the best solutions don’t come from within narrow disciplines, but from the points where people of different backgrounds come together.

One of the key strengths of Place Governance is that it meets people where they are, and makes it easier for them to engage in shaping their communities. We have seen the willingness to collaborate more and more frequently in our work with local government agencies. Speaking about a recent workshop in Pasadena, CA, PPS President Fred Kent noted that “The Mayor and City Manager there fully realize and support the idea that if the people, lead they [the government] will follow. They recognize that they need leadership coming from their citizens to create the change that will sustain and build the special qualities that give Pasadena a sense of place.”

Finding ways to help citizens lead is critical to the future of community development and Placemaking, which is exactly why we have been working to form cross-disciplinary coalitions like Livability Solutions, Community Matters, and, most recently, the Placemaking Leadership Council. “Democracy is not a government, it’s a society,” argues Boyte. “We have to develop an idea that democracy is the work of the people. It’s citizen-centered democracy, not state- or government-centered democracy. That doesn’t mean government doesn’t play an important role, but if you think about government as the center of the universe, we need something like a Copernican revolution.”

“We have to develop an idea that democracy is the work of the people. It’s citizen-centered democracy, not state- or government-centered democracy.” / Photo: PPS

Attachment then engagement: Co-creating a culture of citizenship

The engagement of citizens from all walks of life is central to Place Governance, and while a great deal of Placemaking work comes from grassroots activity, we need more change agents working within existing frameworks to pull people in. As the Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community Study has shown for several years running, “soft” aspects like social offerings, openness, and aesthetics are key to creating the attachment to place that leads to economic development and community cohesion. But counter-intuitively, civic engagement and social capital are actually the two least important factors in creating a sense of attachment.

As it turns out, that’s actually not bad news. It’s all in how to read the data. When the SOTC results came out, Katherine Loflin, who served as the lead consultant for Knight on the study, recalls there being a great deal of consternation at the foundation around this surprising result. But SOTC does not measure the factors that are most important to place generally; it measures the factors that are most important in regard to peoples’ attachment to place. Working off of the specificity of that premise, Loflin dug deeper into the data to see if she could find an explanation for the curious lack of correlation between engagement and attachment.

“By the third year of Soul,” Loflin says, “we decided to start testing different variables to see whether civic engagement has to work with something else to inspire attachment. We found that one thing that does seem to matter is one’s feeling of self-efficacy. You need civic engagement plus the belief that you can make a difference in order for it to create greater attachment. We can’t just provide civic engagement opportunities, we also have to create a culture of success around engagement if we want it to translate to feelings of greater attachment to a place.”

Matt Leighninger, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (a Community Matters partner) echoes this need when talking about his own work in engaging communities. “The shortcoming of [a lot of community dialog] work,” he says, “is that it is too often set up to address a particular issue, and then once it’s over, it’s over. You would think that people having an experience like that would lead them to seek out opportunities to do it again on other issues, but that often doesn’t happen. Unless there’s a social circle or ecosystem that encourages them and honors their contributions, it’s not likely that they’re going to stay involved.”

“In equitable places, individual citizens feel (first) that they are welcome, and (second) that it is within their power to change those places through their own actions.” / Photo: Jennifer Conley via Flickr

How Placemaking helps citizens see what they can build together

Creating that support system is what Place Governance is all about. In addition to their capacity for creating a sense of attachment to place, great public destinations, through the interactive way in which they are developed and managed, challenge people to think more broadly about what it means to be a citizen. Place Governance relies on the Placemaking process to structure the discussion about how shared spaces should be used in a way that helps people to understand how their own specific knowledge can benefit their community more broadly. “We can set up the conversation, and help move things along,” Kent says, “but once the community’s got it, they’re golden. Just setting the process up for them to perform—that’s what Placemaking is.”

If the dominant framework for understanding citizenship today is passive, with citizens ‘receiving’ government services and being ‘given’ rights, then we need to develop affirmative cultures around citizen action. We should also recognize that elected representatives are citizens, just as surely as we are ourselves. We need officials to focus on creating great places with their communities rather than solving isolated problems for distant constituents. Equitable places are not given, they are made, collaboratively. Everyone has a part to play, from the top down, and from the bottom up. “The default of consumer culture,” Boyte says of this much-needed shift in thinking about citizenship, “is that people ask what they can get, rather than thinking about what they could build, in terms of common resources.”

Governance is social, and citizenship is creative. The only things standing between where we are and where we want to be are those big, thick silo walls.

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

Growing up in Omaha wasn’t necessarily glamorous. In 1980s, Omaha [...]]]>

Connie Spellman

PPS Transportation Associate David M. Nelson is our resident expert on all things Omaha. When he heard that we were interviewing Omaha By Design director Connie  Spellman for the Placemaking Blog, he was not at a loss for words! David had this to say:

Growing up in Omaha wasn’t necessarily glamorous. In 1980s, Omaha was opening a new freeway on one side of downtown and tearing out a million square feet of gorgeous warehouses—the single largest loss to the National Register of Historic Places—on the other. The egregious acts of the 80s became the built environs of the 90s. And Omaha, simply put, was a place you left, not a place you lingered.

Then came 2001, when everything began to change. An organization called Lively Omaha was formed, which would go on to catalyze an incredible urban renaissance within Nebraska’s largest city. In fact, Omaha By Design, as it is now known, inspired me to pursue my career in planning and design. Through their tireless environmental and urban design work, Omaha By Design has restored the elegance of the prairie landscape, implemented a form based code, and empowered neighborhood after neighborhood to realize their own visions. Today, Omaha is one of the most liveable communities in the US—a distinction for which Connie Spellman and everyone else behind Omaha By Design deserve much of the credit.

Omaha by Design has been something of a pioneer in working with Placemaking at a citywide level. Can you tell us a bit about how your work in this field got started?

The Omaha Community Foundation (OCF) was first introduced to Placemaking when PPS came to town as a consultant for the National Park Service (NPS). The NPS was interested in building its new regional facility on Omaha’s riverfront, which was beginning to experience a revitalization. As part of that process, Fred Kent suggested hosting a Place Game Workshop, so the city partnered with the OCF to help organize the event and get the right people to participate.

At about the same time, OCF had commissioned a report, Above All Others on a Stream. The consultant summed up the comments from over 75 donors interviews with the five words they wanted Omaha to be: smart, significant, sparkling, connected and fun. That threw everybody for a curve, because, in the late ‘90s, those weren’t terms you’d use to describe Omaha! That led the OCF to create an initiative called Lively Omaha [which became Omaha by Design in 2003] to begin working toward making those descriptors a reality.

I was hired to lead the initiative. The original idea was to transform Omaha into the “City of Fountains,” even though Kansas City had already become known for its fountains. I guess the idea was that Omaha was going to do them one better; but I didn’t really think that fountains would get us the outcomes we were shooting for. I started looking back over the process that led to the initiative’s creation, and that’s how I personally discovered PPS’s work. The rest, as they say, is history.

How did Placemaking help you to re-orient the work you were tackling? It sounds like it helped to crystallize something for you.

I wasn’t familiar with the term “Placemaking,” at least not at first. The parts that captured my attention were the ideas about public space. Public space, to me, was a park, or a road; I had a very limited understanding about what the term “public space” meant. Realizing that public space is basically everything except your home or business was a very eye-opening experience for me. And because some of the people at the OCF had gone through the Placemaking workshop, I started asking them about what they did and how it was organized.

I remember the president of the foundation taking me over to a window in his office when we were talking about this; we looked out over the Civic Center, and there was a very blank porch along the entryway, the plaza was empty, and there was a faded bench on the corner—it’s a very vivid memory, because it was the first time I looked at my city with fresh eyes. I had lived in Omaha for probably 30 years at the time, and I loved it, but I’d never really looked at it. I got hooked very quickly. I thought, “I get it; we can be better.”

Omaha by Design’s 2012 PARK(ing) Day installation, at at 13th and Howard Streets in downtown Omaha / Photo: Omaha by Design

And that eventually led to your organization conducting Place Game Workshops all over Omaha; several a year?

I went to one of the Placemaking trainings in New York right after I got hooked, and then we worked with PPS to create our first website, which we had for six years. Then we invited PPS to Omaha to train local residents to become Place Game facilitators so we could start doing more of these games around Omaha. It was a great way to start helping other people open their eyes and see the city in a new light.

We’ve done more than 70 Place Games during the past 11 years. The amazing thing is that quite a few of the facilitators who attended that first training session with Fred are still volunteering with us today. We’ve had new ones join us as well, so we’ve got a half dozen that still love to lead Place Games.

How has the organization’s work and scope changed over time? And what role has Placemaking played in that evolution, if any?

The catalyst for us to start looking at our role was the local development of two Walmart stores back in 2001. The architects were coming in with a very generic design for the stores, right about the time we were beginning to introduce this new vocabulary and encourage interest in how our city looks and feels. You could sense the beginning of this heightened awareness when the attorney for Walmart was asked by a planning board member (who had just come back from Fort Collins, Colorado), ‘Why are you building this plain, bland box in an area that is one of the most beautifully-maintained and landscaped places in the city?’

The attorney’s response was essentially, ‘Fort Collins has design standards, and we build to design standards and local politics.’ That led to Lively Omaha conducting a lot of research about design standards. We talked with City of Omaha officials, and while there were components of urban design in the master plan, it was not a major element.

Fortunately—and this is another influence of PPS—I had created an advisory committee to guide what our organization was doing. At the Placemaking training I attended, I learned that you need to engage leadership in public space work, and that includes city government department heads, the development community, designers, neighborhoods, public art folks—people from all corners of the city. When this idea of creating design standards for Omaha came up, it was great to have that advisory committee available to kick around ideas and to ask, “Why aren’t we—why isn’t Omaha—asking for more?”

So with the support of our advisory committee and the leadership of our founding donors, we decided to begin broadening our focus by working on an urban design plan for the city. Our donors helped raise about $750,000 to hire Jonathan Barnett with WRT in Philadelphia and Brian Blaesser with Robinson Cole in Boston to create a comprehensive urban design plan for the city. That was passed unanimously by our city council in 2004. Of course, we all recognized that just because it’s in the master plan doesn’t give the urban design plan the effect of law, so our donors agreed that we needed to work to get the new design standards codified. That took us two years, and we were able to get major changes to the existing city codes passed—unanimously, if you can believe that—by the planning board and city council, with developers at the table.

The Urban Design Handbook for Omaha illustrates the high standard of design that Omahans consider appropriate for protecting their city’s unique character, for everything from parking garages (shown here) to pubic spaces / Photo: City of Omaha

What is Omaha by Design working on now?

Right now we’re transitioning to becoming an independent nonprofit organization. 2011 was our 10-year anniversary, and that was when the OCF (which originally thought this was going to be a three-year pilot project!) and our original donors suggested that we were ready to start thinking about striking out on our own. After we reached out and determined that the community wanted us to continue on as an independent organization, we spent about six months going through the process of figuring out what that means and creating a vision statement, mission statement and business plan. If there was any organization pursuing something we were doing, we eliminated it. But there wasn’t much overlap; we’d always been focused on something very different from what other nonprofits were doing for the city. I think that’s why we continue to be supported.

Our mission today is simple: we’re dedicated to improving the way Omaha looks, functions and feels. We facilitate partnerships among our public, private and philanthropic sectors to carry out projects that will improve the quality of our city’s built and natural environments. All of our projects stem from recommendations outlined in the urban design and environmental components of Omaha’s master plan, which we helped develop during the past decade. We also monitor the local environment for adherence to policy changes resulting from these visioning documents and stand ready to act on activities that threaten to undermine their validity.

Ultimately, we’re successful for two reasons. First, we have the incredible support of our community leadership. That allows us access to the resources to make this work, and it’s been the direct result of a lot of coalition building we’ve done over the years. The second reason is the people who do the work; 99% are volunteers. They give willingly of their time, talent and resources. Some of the people who attended our very first meetings have kept with it all the way. Without them, we would have been a three-year pilot project that came and went. Omaha by Design is lucky to work in such a generous community; it makes great things possible.