“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

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It’s hard for me to [...]]]>

A guest post by Dr. Katherine Loflin

Today, as the inaugural meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council kicks off in Detroit, Michigan, we are thrilled to bring you this special guest post by Dr. Katherine Loflin, a powerful advocate for the importance of place to local economies, and one of the event’s keynote speakers.

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It’s hard for me to believe that, just six years ago, I had never even heard the word “Placemaking.” I’ve been a community practitioner all of my life, trained as a macro-practitioner with a Masters and Ph.D. in Social Work and a dissertation on civic engagement and social capital. I believed there were certain characteristics that inherently enabled places to identify and solve their own problems, and I believed that some of the answers related to civic engagement and social capital. Still, I was haunted by the thought that there was more to it: pieces of the puzzle that hadn’t been placed yet.

Then, in 2007, I found myself the Lead Consultant on Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. Soul was created by Knight and the Gallup organization to study communities in a new way. It is important to note that, from the outset, Soul was very open in terms of outcomes. The study was not attempt to justify the field of Placemaking. We had no preconceived notions about what we would discover. Today, I think that fact contributes to the power of the findings, insofar as they support this burgeoning field. The basic research questions were simple yet profound, yet they’d never been asked before: What makes people love where they live? And why does it matter?

We were in for a shock…and a steep learning curve. The Knight Soul of the Community study investigated community attachment—a multidimensional construct that went beyond measuring just satisfaction to also look at community pride, community optimism, and other emotional feelings about place. Attachment is not the traditional idea of engagement that is usually studied in places, but a separate construct. Understanding residents’ emotional bonds to place represented by attachment took our examination beyond the outward behaviors of traditional engagement and gave new insights into the dynamics of how place affects people. That, alone, was a significant contribution to understanding place success that had basically gone unmeasured.

The shock came as the results poured in: from 2008-2010, we received responses from 43,000 people in 26 communities across the US, in cities large and small. What we saw were findings, year after year, that for many seemed counter-intuitive—even radical at times. We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

Knight Soul of the Community found out that the “softer sides” of place matter to economic development / Photo: Lafayette College via Flickr

These findings seemed like a messaging nightmare at first, because they were so groundbreaking and surprising—but as I considered how to use this new information to spread the word, make the case, and translate the findings into on-the-ground action, the nightmare became great opportunity. The Soul findings forced me to reexamine what I thought I knew about what made places tick. Eventually, I realized that this was the missing piece of the puzzle that I had been searching for.

Here are the primary findings of Soul of the Community, from 2008-2010:

• There is an important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth. What this means is that the more people love their town, the more economically vital that place will be. In an economy still deep in recession, that got some attention and raised some eyebrows. How is this possible? It seems that, when people love where they live, they spend more time there and invite others to do the same. They may choose to stay-cation versus travel. They are also more productive at work and more satisfied in their jobs. They are more likely to buy a house. There are so many little ways in which a love of place can translate to economic impacts, and these all add up.
• What most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place. It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way. Little did we still know, at first, that Soul had just empirically justified some of the core principles long advocated for by Placemaking advocates.

It was in looking for some framework that could help to organize the findings in a useable way that I stumbled across the Project for Public Spaces’ website. Serendipitously, this happened right around the time they were catching wind of Soul’s first-year findings. They gave me an organizing framework, and Soul gave them empirical justification for things that they had learned and known intuitively for years.

Of course, we’re only just getting started. The Soul findings have had significant implications for the Placemaking field, and in so doing have opened up whole new avenues for research, learning, and practice. Below are nine of the key lessons learned so far, which also represent some of the most interesting topics for future examination and discussion:

1.) Optimizing place. The thing about Soul of the Community is that it allows places to be who they are—just optimized—and that was incredibly welcomed by civic leaders. Instead of changing who your community is, it’s about being the best version of yourself that you can be. This means that no place is left behind. All cities can take advantage of this information. Places have to know their narratives: what constitutes their unique identity? If that is unknown, Soul can help places to discover that. The important point of this is: communities don’t have to try to be something that they’re not, but each must capitalize on its own distinct identity.

2.) Lead with strengths. Places often know chapter and verse what they are not good at. And that deficit-based start can be an immobilizing when talking about the future. The Soul findings allowed me to walk into any of the 26 communities that we were studying and lead off the conversation by talking about their strengths. The most powerful path to change for people and places is to leverage strengths to address challenges. Any community intervention should lead with strengths, and Placemaking leads by example.

Optimism about a place’s future plays a big part in local resilience. / Photo: Daniel Horacio Agostini via Flickr

3.) Place optimism matters. Optimism is empirically linked to attachment. That means that the more optimistic people feel about the future of their city, the more likely they are going to be attached to it today. We have seen places in the Soul findings where attachment increased even when the local economy worsened. Optimism about the place’s future seems to be a big part of that resilience. In 2008, Biloxi, MS, was the second-most attached place that we studied, even though they were still in the throes of Katrina recovery. In 2009, there was a meaningful increase in optimism in Detroit. Why does this matter? Because it is with this spirit, commitment and dedication that community turnarounds begin. This speaks to the importance of public messages and leadership to cultivate optimism and then follow through with sound leadership to realize that optimism.

4.) Young talent is leading the place renaissance. According to the Soul findings, young talent is consistently perceived as the least welcomed group in a place. Yet in other polls, Gallup was finding increasingly that young talent was choosing a place to live first, and then finding a job. The fact that people are now prioritizing place before deciding what jobs to pursue has to change the way communities are imagined if places are to succeed. Optimizing place has to be moved to the front burner as an economic imperative, immediately. Place has clearly earned a seat at the economic development table.

5.) The corporate world gets this. They may have not had an empirical model to use until now, but many corporations had already noticed that, to attract and retain the best talent, they had to be able to successfully sell the place where the job is located. As a result, they want to be in places that sell themselves. This was all reinforced by the Soul finding that there’s an empirical relationship between job satisfaction and community attachment. Not surprisingly, the business community is now interested in applying Placemaking not only to their corporate giving, but also to their business models.

6.) A solution on the “growth” tug of war that immobilizes many places. Placemaking often allows residents to finally put their finger on what had kept them stuck. For many, this was the fact that, while the ‘growth’ people are saying if we don’t stay modern and provide the place people want to live we are economically in trouble, the ‘anti-growth’ residents are really worried that growth for growth’s sake would cause them to lose who they were as a place—that they’d become generic. The Placemaking framework enables these folks to re-frame the issue by saying: We will cherish our unique narrative as a place as we continue to grow in a smart and sustainable way.

7.) You’ll see impact sooner. Because Soul of the Community found a relationship between social offerings, openness, and aesthetics, and resident attachment, if you change public perception of one of those things you can see same-year differences in attachment. We saw this happen in places like Detroit and St. Paul…and I have to say: Wow. This makes Placemaking a very attractive framework, especially in places that need quick wins to restore some optimism and fuel additional social change efforts. This core strength of the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” approach to places is one that few other models can claim.

The core strength of the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” approach is that it can change minds & turn things around faster than anyone expects / Photo: troistoques via Flickr

8.) It’s totally scalable. One of my favorite things about Placemaking is that it’s totally scalable. You can truly start anywhere and see impact, sooner than you might think. I’ve seen everything from places starting to turn around because they mobilized to get a strip of sidewalk installed where it was missing, to places coming together around crafting and decorating their town’s trees with lit balls of fashioned chicken wire. Sometimes, it’s all about reminding people of the greatness of their place by helping them to rediscover what’s already there. The best ideas often come from the residents themselves, who are really the true keepers of the soul of their community.

9.) The power of place. Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply. Everyone has a personal relationship with their place and people can see themselves and their communities in the Soul findings.

Because of this journey, today I am forever changed. And we’re all on this journey together. That our disparate disciplines have brought us together around the cause of Placemaking is also one of the unique strengths of our practice: a key advantage that we must leverage in this critical time. We have an economic, social and human responsibility to do so—and now, we have a much-needed piece of the puzzle in place.

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.

Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached [...]]]> This is the first of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part two, click here. To read part three, click here.

You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. / Photo: PPS

Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved and build shared wealth in their communities. “Placemaking, applied correctly, can show us new ways to help cultures emerge where openness is not so scary,” notes Dr. Katherine Loflin, the lead project consultant for the Knight Foundation’s groundbreaking Soul of the Community study, which showed a significant correlation between community attachment and economic growth. “We could find with consistency over time that it was the softer side of place—social offerings, openness, and aesthetics—that really seem to drive peoples’ attachment to their place. It wasn’t necessarily basic services: how well potholes got paved over. It wasn’t even necessarily for peoples’ personal economic circumstances.”

The study’s other key finding was that there is an empirical relationship between higher levels of attachment and cities’ GDP growth. This is important because, in Loflin’s words, “We have not recognized, as a society, the importance of [place]. Studies like Soul of the Community are helping to give us all permission to spend some time working on this stuff—and not in a kumbaya way, but an economic way.”

Placemaking, in other words, is a vital part of economic development. And yet, there has long been criticism that calls into question whether or not this process is actually helping communities to develop their local economies, or merely accelerating the process of gentrification in formerly-maligned urban core neighborhoods. We believe that this is largely due to confusion over what Placemaking is, and who “gets” to be involved. If Placemaking is project-led, development-led, design-led or artist-led, then it does likely lead to gentrification and a more limited set of community outcomes.

Who is the community, and what is their role?

The key question right now seems to be about ownership and belonging, in regard to who  has a right to participate when a Placemaking process is underway. In an article for Next City last fall, Neeraj Mehta started a great deal of chatter after raising this very issue when he asked:

“Which people do we want to gather, visit and live in vibrant places? Is it just some people? Is it already well-off people? It is traditionally excluded people? Is it poor people? New people? People of color?”

This builds on a common frustration among people who work in community development and related fields: oversimplification of what we mean when we talk about “the community.” Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community, but the intersection and overlapping of multiple or many diverse groups. “The community” often includes people who never speak to each other, or may not even notice each other, depending on the quality and availability of welcoming public spaces in which to connect.

Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community / Photo: PPS

This is the very problem that Placemaking aims to address. The most important tenet is that the process must be open and welcoming to all who want to participate. This is not to say that everyone will get what they want out of Placemaking. The point is that there will be an opportunity for people not just to share what they want, but also to listen to their neighbors’ ideas, and to be part of the process of shaping the public spaces that they share with those neighbors. The end result should be a space that’s flexible enough to make room for many different communities, and encourage connections between them.

What role do artists play?

Perhaps one of the most significant changes that has taken place in the public dialog around Placemaking, over the past several years, has been the rise of the “creative” modifier. Creative Placemaking’s proponents (including the Knight Foundation-supported ArtPlace) have contributed substantially to the public awareness of the importance of public space, and the role of public art in creating great places, by positioning artists at the center of the Placemaking process. Unfortunately, this privileging of one type of activity over others also seems to be the source of many of the recent questions around who benefits, and who is allowed at the table.

Whether we like it or not, “creativity” has come to mean something quite specific over the past decade or so. Dr. Richard Florida’s movement-sparking book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was boiled down into sound bites so frequently and consistently after its publication, that the idea of “creativity” became the purview of a specific group of people. Suddenly everyone was talking about “creative types,” and scheming to build more coffee shops and bike trails in order to lure young people with liberal arts degrees to their city to create design blogs and tech start-ups. The idea, perversely, and in contradiction of what Florida was actually arguing, became that a certain kind of person with a certain kind of creativity was most valuable to local economic development, and cities should try to be more like the places that were already attracting that kind of person in order to steal them away—rather than fostering the creativity of people who were already living in a given place.

The sidewalk cafes so often cited as indicators of gentrification can be a great way to enliven some public spaces–but only in response to an existing need within the neighborhood / Photo: PPS

Roberto Bedoya hits the nail on the head in a provocative post originally published shortly before Mehta’s:

“What I’ve witnessed in the discussions and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment, e.g., artists live-work spaces, cultural districts, spatial landscapes. And this meaning, which operates inside the policy frame of urban planning and economic development, is ok but that is not the complete picture. Its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong. Before there is the vibrant street one needs an understanding of the social dynamics on that street – the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.”

In other words, while the intentions of Creative Placemaking’s proponents are undoubtedly good, and their work very frequently wonderful, the fact that a lot of people just don’t consider themselves to be “creative types” limits the potential outcomes. No doubt, part of the drive is to expand creativity and the arts to impact community development and open the arts up to more people, but to start off by limiting the Placemaking process to a certain set of outcomes from the get-go is not the way to go about it.

Every place can be vibrant. Vibrancy is people.

Also problematic is the fact that so much debate has centered on a flawed definition of “vibrancy” that further limits the Placemaking process’ capacity for transforming communities. Ann Markusen, who co-authored the original paper on Creative Placemaking for the NEA, highlights this problem in an essay that she wrote for arts management hub Create Equity, questioning the movement’s early evolution. Markusen asks:

“Just what does vibrancy mean? Let’s try to unpack the term. ArtPlace’s definition: ‘we define vibrancy as places with an unusual scale and intensity of specific kinds of human interaction.’ Pretty vague and…vibrancy are places?  Unusual scale? Scale meaning extensive, intensive? Of specific kinds? What kinds?”

This definition is not just vague, it’s unnecessarily limiting. If vibrancy is defined explicitly as an “unusual” condition, it furthers the idea that Placemaking is geared toward the production of specific kinds of spaces and amenities, rather than toward the enabling of citizens to use their public spaces to highlight their neighborhood’s unique strengths, and effectively address distinct challenges. We may have come to think of vibrancy as a finite quality after seeing our cities stripped of their dense social networks through decades of freeway-building and suburbanization, but that is a misconception.

Vibrancy does not need to be limited to a few ‘unusual’ areas; vibrancy is people / Photo: PPS

Every neighborhood—every plaza, square, park, waterfront, market, and street—can be vibrant, but if people don’t feel like they can contribute to shaping their places, vibrancy can’t exist. Period. Gentrification, which is often blamed on honest attempts to create more vibrant, livable places, is what happens when we forget that vibrancy is people; that it cannot be built or installed, but must be inspired and cultivated. Says DC-based community organizer Sylvia Robinson: “I consider gentrification an attitude. It’s the idea that you are coming in as a planner, developer, or city agency and looking at a neighborhood as if it’s a blank slate. You impose development and different economic models and say that in order for this neighborhood to thrive you need to build this much housing, this much retail.”

Cities’ “soft” sides matter—and so does how we talk about them.

When Placemaking is perceived to be geared toward a specific set of outcomes, it undermines the work that everyone in the field is doing, and leads to the kind of criticism that we saw from Thomas Frank, whose blistering takedown of Placemaking in The Baffler should make even the most seasoned Placemaking advocate wince. Frank writes:

“Let us propose a working hypothesis of what makes up the vibrant. Putting aside such outliers as the foundation that thinks vibrancy equals poverty-remediation and the car rental company that believes it means having lots of parks, it’s easy to figure out what the foundations believe the vibrant to be. Vibrant is a quality you find in cities or neighborhoods where there is an arts or music ‘scene,’ lots of restaurants and food markets of a certain highbrow type, trophy architecture to memorialize the scene’s otherwise transient life, and an audience of prosperous people who are interested in all these things.”

And then, toward the end of the article, the clincher:

“Let’s say that the foundations successfully persuade Akron to enter into a vibrancy arms race with Indianapolis. Let’s say both cities blow millions on building cool neighborhoods and encouraging private art galleries. But let’s say Akron wins…What then? Is the nation better served now that those businesses are located in Akron rather than in Indianapolis? Or would it have been more productive to spend those millions on bridges, railroads, highways—hell, on lobbyists to demand better oversight for banks?”

This is a straw man argument that many of us are tired of hearing: that focusing on the ‘soft’ side of cities, the very things the Soul of the Community study found most important, is a waste of money when cities should be focusing on hard infrastructure. But if we allow Placemaking to be framed (or even worse, practiced) in a way that leaves people feeling unwelcome or excluded, we’re setting ourselves up for exactly that sort of criticism.

Better communication between the people who share rapidly-changing neighborhoods is vital to the future success of our cities—and, considering the fact that 70% of the world’s population will be urban by 2050, to the future of global society. That is what we advocate for when we advocate for Placemaking. We do not work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and eat gelato; we do it so that they will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors. Whether or not that conversation is about art (or politics, or food, or education, or sports…) is beside the point.

You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. When people feel encouraged to participate in shaping the life of a space, it creates the kind of open atmosphere that attracts more and more people. In their inclusiveness, our greatest places mirror the dynamics of a truly democratic society. As we put it in our introduction to the Guide to Neighborhood Placemaking in Chicago (written for the Metropolitan Planning Council), “Placemaking allows communities to see how their insight and knowledge fits into the broader process of making change. It allows them to become proactive vs. reactive, and positive vs. negative. Simply put, Placemaking allows regular people to make extraordinary improvements, big or small, in their communities.”

Over the next few weeks, as we prepare for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council in Detroit on April 11th and 12th, we will be exploring the relationship between individuals and the Placemaking process in further detail. More to come soon.

We work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors / Photo: PPS

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

Almost four decades ago, we created the Project for Public Spaces to expand the work of the great urbanologist and observer of public spaces, Holly Whyte. The way that public spaces were being conceived and designed then was disconnected from the reality of how people used them, yet there was surprisingly little [...]]]>

Click to view a larger version of our 2012 Holiday Card, featuring a stunning image of Detroit’s Campus Martius (courtsey of the Downtown Detroit Partnership)

Dear Placemakers;

Almost four decades ago, we created the Project for Public Spaces to expand the work of the great urbanologist and observer of public spaces, Holly Whyte. The way that public spaces were being conceived and designed then was disconnected from the reality of how people used them, yet there was surprisingly little resistance. Today, in contrast, we are witnessing a convergence of advocates, activists, fathers, mothers, citizens, neighbors, friends — those we call the “zealous nuts” — all coming together around the idea of place.

I have seen this happening in so many ways in 2012. In my conversations with attendees at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place and at the 8^th International Public Markets Conference, I heard advocates for local food, public health, and active transportation speak repeatedly of the desire to work with more broad-based, multi-faceted coalitions. They realized during their respective conferences that deeper, transformative change can be brought about across movements through a renewed focus on the idea of place.

This is not just a trend in the United States, but a global movement for our rapidly urbanizing world. We are honored to be joining with UN-Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation in Sweden to launch a series of international forums to plan how public spaces can be a core agenda for Habitat III in 2016. There is ever more evidence of a growing consciousness around the process of Placemaking. Grassroots advocates have been demanding a larger role in shaping their cities, with increasing success. This resulted in a number of exciting new developments in 2012:

• We’ve had the opportunity to work on the reclamation of iconic public spaces like the New Haven Green, the campus of Harvard University, the Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, and the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit.

• We partnered with the Orton Family Foundation, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Grassroots Grantmakers, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, New America Foundation, and Strong Towns to launch the CommunityMatters partnership.

• We’ve worked with major cultural and civic organizations to bring culture and art out into the streets, in places like the Houston Public Library’s central downtown plaza and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

• And speaking of art, we were selected to lead the National Endowment for the Arts’ Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design.

• Our focus on public markets has continued to expand through work on the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market, ByWard Market in Ottawa, and San Antonio’s Pearl Brewery district. Meanwhile, the NewBo City Market, a brand new indoor market we helped plan, opened in Cedar Rapids this October, helping to revitalize this Iowan city after a devastating flood.

• The PPS Transportation department has continued with its stewardship of the Context Sensitive Solutions program, and launched a series of wildly popular webinars in partnership with the Federal Highway Association.

While we used to fight for each small win, the importance of re-focusing our communities on place is being realized at higher and higher levels every day. It is at this critical point in the growth of the Placemaking movement that we are preparing for a shift into more proactive advocacy and network-building work. We know that our network of extraordinary people is our greatest asset, and we have spent the past several months preparing for the launch of a Placemaking Leadership Council.

This Council will accelerate the gathering of many voices and, through a series of convocations over the next several years, define a series of actions related to 1) re-centering transportation so that it helps to builds communities, 2) strengthening local economies through dynamic public markets, 3) building neighborhoods with centers that are true multi-use destinations, and 4) advocating for a new architecture of place. Our first meeting will take place in Detroit this coming April. The “transformative agendas” shaped by the Council will play a key role in the discussion that will take place at the forums we’re organizing with Ax:son Johnson and UN-Habitat.

Please email Lauren Masseria if you are interested in participating, or click here if you would like to make a year-end donation in support of this new stage in our evolution.

In the middle of the 20^th century, the power to shape our public spaces—a power that I consider a fundamental human right—was taken away from us. I have watched for years as people have fought to take it back. The Placemaking Leadership Council is a critical next step, filling the need for a central forum for debate and discussion of strategies and tactics for re-establishing a focus on creating better places at a global scale. On behalf of everyone at PPS, I thank you for all that you do to make the places and spaces in your community stronger. 2013 is going to be the year of the Zealous Nut! We’ll see you there!

Sincerely,