Residents in Exeter, RI used a “Places of the Heart” map to identify parts of town that they value most as well as areas of concern. / Photo: Orton Family Foundation

Have you ever been at a meeting about a community issue and heard the statement, “We don’t need some outsider coming in and telling us what to do”? I know I have. This phrase points to a common challenge I see when working in rural communities—balancing the value of community input with expert knowledge in community design.

Too often community projects favor one of these approaches over the other; the design team who drops in for a week with the solution to a town’s traffic woes (i.e. roundabout) or the community workshop that recycles the same, old idea for its downtown’s redevelopment (i.e. more parking). So, how do we move off of this dynamic towards a more effective model?  By recognizing the best of what both sides bring to the equation and designing a process that leverages both strengths.

Let’s talk about what community members offer to the design process. Local people know their town best. Their insights will inform a project in many ways from identifying community values to brainstorming and prioritizing possible actions. Research shows us that many minds lead to better results. So, the greater the diversity of people contributing to solving a problem, the more creative and effective are the solutions. This is particularly true for more complex issues that community design addresses like downtown revitalization or growth management. In addition, community members need to own the outcomes of a design process if those outcomes are going to be effectively implemented. There is no better way to ensure ownership than to be part of shaping the solutions.

When citizens are effectively engaged in a design process then designers and planners can be their most effective too; facilitating a process that synthesizes local experience and wisdom with design principles and technical expertise. Designers can help people uncover their common interests and work towards practical, creative solutions that build on local character and assets.

At the Orton Family Foundation we use an approach called Heart & Soul Community Planning, which strives to put community wisdom first in projects and uses design and planning professionals to help make the most of this valuable asset. This balance is also at the heart of CIRD’s approach to rural design, which is why Orton is excited to partner with Project for Public Spaces and the other CommunityMatters organizations on this program.

So, what can you do to help find this balance in your own community’s rural design project? Here are three easy ways to make it happen:

1.) Listen first. Community design projects need to begin with listening to what people value about their town and what concerns they have. This input will help frame the design issue with greater specificity, lead to new insights and ground it in the experience of a particular place.

For instance, if you are looking at how to make a town more walkable, first ask people what they love about their town and how they experience it. This information will provide you with information about walkability and it also may point to some other underlying issues that design could address. We’ve found the use of personal story particularly effective for uncovering what people really care about in their towns.

2.) Ask powerful questions. Spend time crafting the questions you ask of the community so that people can give you thoughtful answers. A powerful question will foster reflective discussion, surface people’s assumptions and prompt creative thinking. As an example, consider the difference between the following two questions:

• What improvements would you like to see downtown to make it more walkable?
  Generates a personal laundry list of ideas
• How might we make downtown more walkable for people of all ages?
  Prompts people to generate ideas that respond to the different needs of community members

3.) Create feedback loops. Make sure to have multiple opportunities for people to review your progress and provide feedback along the way. These loops will inform people of possible solutions to the design challenge, help refine ideas to fit the local context, and ensure a transparent community process.

Feedback loops can be created through in-person meetings like a large community forum or a pop-up open house, online portals such as MindMixer or Engaging Plans, or targeted conversations with key stakeholders or groups in town.

These three strategies bring the best of both sides to the table by allowing the community to define the design issue and the designer to respond to that challenge based on the specifics of a particular place. We look forward to the selection of this year’s CIRD workshop hosts (to be announced in early June) where we’ll work to achieve this balance in four rural communities across the US.

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This update was cross-posted from the CIRD blog at rural-design.org. Click here to see the original post.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to purchase from Powell’s

Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, is worth a read for its acerbic wit, alone. The author fits a remarkable collection of data and anecdotal evidence from his long career in urban design (which included a four-year stint at the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts’ design department) into a mere 260 pages while maintaining a tone that is both punchy and urgent. It’s not often that I’ve found people who can make the discussion of parking minimums entertaining, but Speck has a way with words.

Walkable City begins with Speck’s General Theory of Walkability, before proceeding on to an overview of the challenges facing our built environment today. The author’s deep understanding of the topic at hand thus becomes clear early on, and by the time the book launches into its meatiest section—a detailed breakdown of the Ten Steps of Walkability—the author-reader bond is already established. Barely a fifth of the way through the book, it is hard not to already feel engaged, like a comrade-in-arms.

But this is not the next great book on American cities; Speck says so himself in the prologue, arguing that “That book is not needed. An intellectual revolution is no longer necessary.” This struck me as odd, and it nagged at the back of my mind throughout what was otherwise a mostly enjoyable read. For, as Speck explains a mere paragraph after the line quoted above, “We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities—after forgetting for four—yet we’ve somehow not been able to pull it off.”

That “we’ve” is instructive; the book is seemingly intended for a mass audience, but I got the sense that I was part of a choir, being preached to with the church doors thrown open. While it is a very accessible book, Walkable City comes off feeling a bit more specific than it seems the author himself had hoped. There is a preoccupation with the physical cityscape that suggests the underlying assumption that the reader has some knowledge of and access to the proper channels to act on the information that’s being presented. But many (or even most, if the book is intended for a mass market) won’t.

Indeed, for a book about walkability, Walkable City seems much more concerned with cars and buildings than with people. “America will be finally ushered into ‘the urban century’ not by its few exceptions,” writes Speck, in wrapping up the prologue, “but by a collective movement among its everyday cities to do once again what cities do best, which is to bring people together—on foot.” Yet at the outset of the section titled The Useful Walk, he writes that “Cars are the lifeblood of the American city.” Are we to understand, then, that it is a collective movement among our cars that will create more walkable cities?

Of course not.  People are the lifeblood of cities, and if we’re going to pull off the feat of ushering America into the urban century, we have to show those people not only why walkability is important, but how their own actions and decisions can help to create more of it. [Of note, via PPS's transportation director Gary Toth: even AASHTO included the following line in the 1984 edition of the Green Book: “…it is extremely difficult to make adequate provisions for pedestrians.  Yet, this must be done, because pedestrians are the lifeblood of our urban areas…”]

“Specialists,” Speck writes in no uncertain terms, “are the enemy of the city, which is by definition a general enterprise.” Yet the urban designer seems not to heed his own advice. If he had, we may have seen a fifth category in the book’s General Theory of Walkability; alongside The Useful Walk, The Safe Walk, The Comfortable Walk, and The Interesting Walk, perhaps a section on The Considered Walk.

If we’re going to create more popular support for walkability in the US, we need people in auto-centric places to start thinking differently about the benefits of getting around on foot instead of by car: improved health, more time to spend with families, lower transportation costs, more unplanned social encounters, better sense of purpose and community. If you’ve lived your whole life in a landscape dominated by cars (as most Americans have), walkability may be far from the front of your mind. The idea that an intellectual revolution is no longer necessary assumes that everyone is already on the same page. They’re not.

For those of us who are already advocating for more walkable urban fabric, Walkable City offers a wealth of facts and figures with which we can load our cannons. But it also serves as a reminder that we have to keep working on how we present that information to broader constituencies. We’re getting there, but we’re still en route.

A colorful crosswalk scene / Photo: Alex E. Proimos via Flickr

For more, check out Brendan’s conversation on Walkable City with Next American City’s Brady Dale, part of the #NextCityBooks online book club series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right performance measures can make great streets for all users as ubiquitous as the American arterial highway / Photo: karmacamilleeon via Flickr

The new transportation bill, Moving Ahead with Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), became law in the US on July 6th. Since then, MAP-21 has spawned a series of mini-riots in cyberspace.  Every group of professionals and advocates seems to be able to find their reasons to gather up and start lobbing rocks at the metaphorical DOT riot police just trying to hold the line with what Congress gave them. Frustration is a natural and understandable reaction to a major change like this, but the fix is not to holler about the new Federal policy; now is the time to look inward and change what needs to be changed in our own cities and states. This doesn’t mean that we at PPS believe that MAP-21 is not problematic–just that we think it is now time to determine where the real problems are and start working with DOT and AASHTO to fix them.

For the next few days, we have an opportunity to stop throwing stones and participate in a constructive discussion about the future of transportation in the United States. The Department of Transportation has created a website for a National Dialogue on Transportation Performance Measures to inform the implementation of a performance-based system under MAP-21. The site will be accepting public input through this Sunday, September 30th. While some may be skeptical as to whether U.S. DOT will listen, at a minimum, this will allow the transportation reform movement to crowdsource priorities to be addressed.

Principal arterials like this one are currently evaluated mostly on Level of Service and Speed / Photo: Tony Case via Flickr

The Project for Public Spaces has long advocated for silo-busting, both within the transportation policy world and between transportation and other agencies. While the loss of certain dedicated funds, programs, and policies is surely unnerving, the move towards a more holistic transportation planning, design, and evaluation process should be the long term goal. MAP-21 can be seen as a stepping stone towards that future, because a move towards a performance-based system allows for a wide range of objectives and values to be seamlessly integrated into the decision making process. For example, instead of using dedicated funds for sidewalks and bike lanes to retrofit a dangerous roadway, the vision is that multimodal safety and accessibility metrics will lead to a balanced design in the first place.

FHWA has high hopes for performance measures, too:

“Under MAP-21, performance management will transform Federal highway programs and provide a means to more efficient investment of Federal transportation funds by focusing on national transportation goals, increasing the accountability and transparency of the Federal highway programs, and improving transportation investment decisionmaking through performance-based planning and programming.”

With the Sunday deadline fast approaching, the number of ideas has skyrocketed from 29 last Monday to 192 by Wednesday afternoon. The voting system gives each idea a score.  Voting for the idea adds one point to the score. Voting against subtracts one. You can retract and/or change your vote after the fact, as well.

The Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) currently has one of the top ideas with 90 votes.  They write:

“Performance measures should be defined and measured in ways that reflect all of the benefits of an integrated, comprehensive system based on the movement of people, not vehicles. In particular, this means performance and unit costs for passenger travel should include a mobility and accessibility component such as a passenger mile basis rather than solely a vehicle mile basis.”

However, commenter Dan Kaempff thinks that miles traveled isn’t a good enough metric, arguing that “[g]reater emphasis should be placed on better linking good land use decisions with transportation investments.”

Other comments run the gamut from detailed tracking of bicycle and pedestrian crash rates to indexes of pavement conditions to the spatial and temporal extent of transit coverage.

While numerous individuals have cited the general connection between land use and transportation, relatively absent from the discussion are the core concepts and principles of Placemaking. Streets are places–or at least they should be. Placemakers should be adding to this discussion to make sure that metrics for ensuring quality of place and community engagement get a fair shake. Tools already exist for street audits and evaluating the access and linkages to multi-use destinations. Could these be used to evaluate the national transportation system?

An understandably less popular comment from Sarah Lowery of the Washington State Department of Transportation highlights the fact that some agencies will face difficulty implementing the national measures due to budget constraints. However, Sarah’s point is an excellent one. It highlights just how important it is to make sure that the measures agreed upon in this go-round are useful in the long term so that the next transportation bill, set for two years from now, won’t have to impose a similar burden on local agencies. All the more reason for Placemakers to participate now.

Bicyclists fill a street during a Critical Mass ride in Vancouver / Photo: David Pritchard via Flickr

In 1980, the very first Pro Bike conference was convened in Asheville, North Carolina. At the time, the movement to carve out more space for bicycling on North American streets was young, and the first conference was attended by around 100 people. Thirty-two years later, the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is expected to draw a thousand active transportation advocates to Long Beach, California. The expanded conference title reflects the dramatic transformation of bicycling advocacy into today’s active transportation movement, as more and more people have begun to realize the importance of thinking of streets as places that tie communities together.

Recently, PPS’s Gary Toth and Brendan Crain had the opportunity to chat, informally, with Dan Burden, Andy Clarke, and Charlie Gandy, three friends and advocates who have played very active roles in this transformation. The following is a transcript of that conversation, looking back over the past three decades and reflect on lessons learned thus far.

Brendan: Can you each start out by talking about how you got involved in advocating for active transportation?

Dan: I started with advocacy around 1962, by promoting some biking events. Then very quickly folks like Charlie Gandy and I started working through the American Youth Hostels to put on even bigger events. Charlie, I don’t know what time you entered the scene, probably the mid or late 1960s?

Andy: Are you kidding? He wasn’t even born in 1960! [Laughter]

Charlie: Geez you old coot, what are you talking about? I showed up, and you and I met, in about ’85 or ’86, through Youth Hostels.

Dan: Back then, it really was the AYH playing a huge role. It was a concurrent evolution. The League of American Bicyclists had started up just about that time in the early 1960s, although the real advocacy started with recreation. The active transportation side, the health side, and the bike commuter side probably didn’t get a good launch until the early 1970s.

At the first Pro Walk/Pro Bike—actually, back then it was just Pro Bike—we honored Bob Cleckner. Bob was the first full-time paid professional in America to go around and really try to drum up interest in this stuff, starting with bike lanes; he was my inspiration. He was getting paid to go around the country and get adults to stop thinking of bicycling as something that was just for children. He worked for what was then called the Bicycle Manufacturers Association. We shared offices with them back in those early years when we started the Bicycle Federation of America [which later became the National Center for Bicycling and Walking].

Andy: As Dan said, the League was re-formed back in the mid-60s. They’d been absent for about ten years, and it was because of the support of Schwinn and the bike industry that the League got back on its feet. By the early 1970s, we started to work more on advocacy issues. The oil crisis in 1973 was a defining moment. One is always bitten in the ass by history because you think you’re doing something for the first time and it never turns out that you are. But I would be so bold as to say that the renaissance we’ve seen in the last 4-5 years in bicycling is probably the biggest boost we’ve seen since that oil crisis and the explosion of interest in cycling . Communities realized again that perhaps we shouldn’t have completely thrown cycling away.

When I moved here from the UK in 1985, the state of bike advocacy was such that we were able to convince the Immigration and Nationalization Service that letting me in here to be the League’s government relations director would not be taking a job from anyone else who was an American in the country. In 1988 there literally wasn’t anyone doing that. I think the Rails to Trails Conservancy was probably three years old? There was no America Bikes, no Bikes Belong. A lot of the groups that we work with now weren’t around yet. In the intervening 25 years we’ve seen things come a long way.

It’s very interesting—you can chart the progress of where the inspiration for advocacy was coming from and where groups were formed, particularly at the state and local level, by just looking at their names. In the 1970s the League was the only show in town, and we were doing a lot of advocacy on getting the legal status of cyclists straight. Groups that were formed in the wake of that are groups like the League of Illinois Bicyclists. Then in the 80s the Bicycle Federation took over and groups that formed became Federations. Charlie Gandy led the way in the 90s and started the Coalition movement with the Texas Bicycle Coalition (TBC). In the 2000s, groups started using declarative titles like Georgia Bikes! or Bike Delaware. Now folks are forming Alliances, and many are formally adding walking to their names as well. It’s uncanny how that catches on, and you can tell when a group was established by the title they give themselves.

Charlie: Going to Copenhagen back in ’76 and riding a bike really opened my eyes to the notion of a bicycle being a respected and valuable tool in an urban place. That stayed latent for me until about 1990, when I formed the TBC with a bunch of other interested cyclists that were looking for political respect and power. That put me in contact with Dan Burden, who was one of the first bike professionals within a state agency, at the DOT in Florida. He came to Austin, and I put him up as an expert in this field in front of our state DOT leadership. Our tactic was to get bike coordinators at the state and local level within the DOT—this was ahead of ISTEA mandating it—and Dan convinced them that it would be smarter to fold their hand and just do that, rather than take us on. It was really a powerful lesson for me as a political organizer to see Dan’s ability, as the guy from out of town, to be effective at moving an agency to do something very tangible.

That started my learning about how we could turn the crank at the state and local levels and improve conditions for cyclists, organizing to give them a cohesive voice. I started attending Pro Bike in the early 90s as the Executive Director of the TBC. Then in ’94 I went to work for Bill Wilkinson at the Bicycle Federation, with Andy and Dan. Andy and I were protégés of Dan’s, and Wilkinson was pulling the strings. I remember going to my first Pro Bike and thinking what an incredible learning institution and networking opportunity this thing was.

Gary: I think we should get Charlie talking about how he did the first Walk Audits for FHWA in the mid-90s.

Charlie: In about ’96, Wilkinson comes out with his hand up in the air barely holding onto this piece of a proposal and he says “I’ve got something here related to walking, does somebody want to take this?” At that time, both Burden and Clarke turned their heads and walked away. [Laughter] Nobody wanted to do walking stuff. But I was working on my first million frequent flyer miles, and I jumped at the opportunity to go around to Grand Rapids, and the Bronx, and Snowmass, and a bunch of other places. “Pedestrian Roadshows,” is what they called them.

Dan: Actually, walk audits really started in the 80s. When I came back from Australia after doing some work on bicycling there, I realized that the real answer to reactivating and re-energizing cities was in the walkability side. So starting around 1981, at the Florida DOT, we changed my job title instantly. And that was the origin of the first ped-bike coordinator! I was having trouble with my engineers, when they would design intersections; they were getting them completely wrong. So I said we need to go out and walk around them and understand. It was later, when Bill saw what I was doing, that he realized that there was funding that could be secured for this, and later developed the Pedestrian Roadshows.

Charlie: That was back when they were referring to the sidewalks as “auto recovery zones,” right?

Gary: So the pedestrians were impact attenuators?  [Laughter]

Dan Burden leads a walk audit in Linden, Michigan / Photo: Michigan Municipal League via Flickr

Dan: But looking even further back, there are a few people that I’d be remiss in not bringing up, who were critical to the formation of the bikeped movement as we know it now. These people did things that nobody was doing. The first is Dr. Paul Dudley White, who was the heart surgeon for Eisenhower that really launched biking as an adult activity. He got the attention of the press, and he did it by pushing the idea that people needed exercise. Way before the modern health movement got going, he realized that benefit. He was probably doing his work starting around 1959, but he really was starting to command serious press until 61. This was around when I was starting to realize this is what I wanted to do with my life, so Dr. White was a hero of mine.

Another name that should not be lost to history is Dr. Clifford Graves, a surgeon in San Diego who started the International Bicycle Touring Society and got big-name adults to go on bicycle tours in Europe and the US. He also started bicycle clubs for teenagers in the California area, and all of those preceded anything going on with the League. Fred DeLong was an engineer that worked for one of the big battery manufacturers out of Philadelphia, and his work preceded John Forester‘s Effective Cycling program, by about four years. DeLong helped raise awareness about the technical side of adult bicycling—how to brake, how to turn, how to set up your bike—he really put the science into it.

Brendan: The idea that just getting adults to ride bikes was seen as broadening the constituency is so radically different from how we think of bicycling now. Bikeped advocates have been very good, historically, at drawing new people and new groups in, and that’s clearly been important in terms of this going from something that was very informal, driven by zealous nuts, to creating a contemporary movement that’s very broad and formal, with so many people dedicating their careers to bicycling and pedestrian issues. Just thirty years ago, there were only two or three people doing this work full-time!

Andy: It’s been really interesting to see how the bike movement has provided the passion and fuel for the Safe Routes to Schools movement, which has taken us into uncharted territory in terms of constituencies that now care about Safe Routes and the issues around that. The same is true of Complete Streets. The walking movement is such a more prominent issue for the broader public today; it’s more marketable, immediate, and unimpeachable. But without bicyclists at the start of that, there wouldn’t be the walking movement or the active transportation movement or the Complete Streets or the Safe Routes movements that we have now. It’s important that we’ve been able to, in certain cases, sort of let go and let these branches grow off.

Charlie: I’d like to build on that because, as the bicycle movement has become more mainstream, it has made sense for us to broaden the perspective and to partner up and to see the value in the coalition with pedestrians and a realization that what we’ve been talking about is Placemaking—and I remember learning early on from Dan about how instilling that vision of the place puts bicycling in context. We self- identify as bicyclists and we’ve organized a political voice around that, and we’ve found through coalition that we have more of a mainstream voice. Today, it’s the health people and women bicyclists that are really emerging, at least in the US, as fresh voices within the movement.

Gary: It seems like a lot of this type of advocacy starts with biking first and then branches out to walking and related activities; why do you think that is? And why did the bicycling movement emerge so many decades ahead of the walking movement in the first place?

Dan: A bit of historic perspective on that: the pedestrian movement was actually occurring as bicycling was emerging, but cycling came out more strongly, I think, because it had technological side to it that adults could get into—where a lot of people, even to this day, think of walking as, well… pedestrian! That it’s something you try to get away from as an adult.

I think we should keep in mind that there was a pedestrian movement that was growing up simultaneously, and it wasn’t as though the bicyclists branched out and created the pedestrian movement, although many are reaching across the aisle now. There used to be a small annual pedestrian conference in Boulder, Colorado back in the 80s and 90s; it was the only place where people were really talking about these issues for a long time. Those went on for 12 -13 years before the city council finally stopped funding them. Even a few years before that, Donald Appleyard organized one of the first meetings to talk about traffic calming, in Seattle. Looking at these early strings, we can see where they finally stitched one another together.

Once they become good advocates for bicycling, an issue they care so much about, they begin to realize they’re not the only ones that are being overlooked. So they get into the pedestrian side, and eventually they start to realize, well, we need destinations and places to go for this stuff to work, and then it broadens out from there.

Andy: This is absolutely true of Complete Streets. For the longest time, we banged on about what was then called “Routine Accommodation,” and how we wanted bicyclists and pedestrians to be routinely accommodated in all projects. We almost got that principal written into the transportation bills in ’91 and ’98, but it just wasn’t resonating. Finally, in the early 2000s, Martha Roskowski of America Bikes convened a phone conference with bunch of smart marketing people, and that was where the phrase “Complete Streets” was coined, I think by David Goldberg, from Smart Growth America. Almost overnight, Complete Streets started to carry a tune. This was something we’d written about with different names for years! [Editor's Note: The term "complete streets" has been attributed to several people in different accounts, including Martha Roskowski.]

A Complete Street is a street where everyone feels comfortable, whether they're in a car, on a bike, or on their own two feet / Photo: Complete Streets Coalition via Flickr

Brendan: Looking back over the past few decades of advocacy, what are your thoughts on how the movement has evolved, broadly? Did you expect to be this far along, or think you would be even farther? And what impact would you say PWPB has had since the first conference in 1980?

Dan: I discovered recently, while having lunch with Richard Killingsworth, that it was a presentation at a PWPB conference that totally turned around his attitude toward his work at the CDC. He went back and said ‘Folks, it’s not about curing diseases anymore, it’s about preventing them.’ But no one would listen to him. And he worked for a year and finally got folks like Richard Jackson, Andy Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin to take a different approach. Not long after, he got funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2001 to leave the CDC and start Active Living by Design, and over time Frumkin and Dannenberg moved out to Washington, and Richard Jackson went to UCLA where he’s still advocating for Healthy Places. So if we stop to think about it now, there are billions of dollars now being focused on health through active living, and that started at a Pro Bike conference. There wouldn’t have been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation putting money into this if it wasn’t for Richard Killingsworth realizing that there had to be a new approach for the CDC.

Andy: Looking at the movement, in terms of the numbers—specifically the number of people involved, the number of staff in advocacy groups and government—the movement has come an enormous way. It’s like night and day. It’s been extraordinary to see that and be a small part of it. But on the other hand, 30 years is a helluva long time. In terms of outcomes, it’s hard to be too optimistic about the impact that we’ve had because we’ve still seen 30 years of really awful community development in the majority of communities across the country. It’s a really big ship to turn. We really have to step up our game to make a much bigger change in outcomes—not in the next 30 years, but the next three years if we’re going to have a legacy we can all be proud of. We can’t wait 30 years to have another incremental step up in the number of people walking and biking.

Dan: There’s an enthusiasm that you don’t see in other professions and other trades that is a hallmark of what the walkability and the bicycling movements. If I were to project forward about what’s coming, we have to get the vast majority of people who come into the movement to realize that it’s the Placemaking—the creation of places for social exchange—that’s the missing piece. We’ve got to get away from just thinking of it as active transportation and think of it as rescuing our cities, redesigning our cities for people, and building the economy around the scale of the human foot. Until we do that walking can’t work, and bicycling can’t work.

I agree with Andy: we can’t wait 30 years; three years may be all that we’ve got. We’re talking about a totally wrecked economy, one where we keep trying to go back to building things that cannot be sustainable, cannot even be maintained; if we keep doing things the way they were done in the past, the US is at risk of becoming a third-world nation. There’s more at stake here than just giving ourselves a nice place to ride a bike or to walk.

Charlie: One of the identifying characteristics of this group is its collaborative spirit. I’ve noticed in my travels that that’s a fairly unique thing. Throughout the past few decades, there’s been a whole lot of innovation and invention going on, and guys like Dan, Andy, Pete Lagerway, and so many others have been freely sharing these ideas. I think that’s true at PWPB as well as one on one, and I think that’s a unique element of our success.

Andy: I would absolutely echo that; that’s a really important thing to identify. You see, from one consulting firm to another, people just want to help each other get the right answer, and just want to get a good outcome. That is pretty remarkable, I think.

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You’ve read about the past thirty years of bikeped advocacy–if you want to become part of the next crucial three, join us in Long Beach this September 10-13 for Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. Remember–standard registration ends at midnight on August 10th, at which point registration rates will rise, so click here to register for the conference today!

"Whenever you see a corner, think of it as a square, because that puts that corner into the public realm, rather than into the traffic realm." / Photo: Cher Amio via Flickr

PPS President Fred Kent is featured as the guest on today’s episode of the cdmCyclist, a podcast hosted by Frank Peters in southern California, where we’re looking forward to hosting the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference this September 10-13. Fred not only talks about the important role that walking and bicycling play in successful places, he gives a bit of background on how he came to be involved in the Placemaking biz, and how active transportation advocates and Placemakers can strengthen each others’ efforts by working together. A short preview of Fred’s interview:

“It’s all woven together. It’s so naturally intuitive. We all share the same [desired] outcomes. Whether you’re an avid bicyclist, an avid walker, or just an avid playground user, we all want the same thing. So that’s why this conference that we’re all doing together in Long Beach in September is such a big shift away from isolating the biking and walking people, to integrating them into the broader community life and happiness that we all know happens when we create environments that are good places…

We see streets as public spaces; when they’re public spaces they’re meant to be for everyone. That starts to put into perspective the role that the automobile plays in a space because it’s only one of the users…Whenever you see a corner, think of it as a square, because that puts that corner into the public realm, rather than into the traffic realm. You can downsize or right-size or modify the role that the vehicle plays and enhance enormously the pedestrian and bicycle [uses]. Corners are where you start! That’s the hardest part, because that’s where the traffic engineer controls the outcomes more than any other place.”

Click here to visit Frank’s website and listen the full podcast of Fred’s interview.

Click here to learn more about Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, and register for the event.

We’ll see you in Long Beach!

“For urban planners, the end result of what we do is very physical; my thinking is that we might as well make the physical dimension part of the front end of the process,” James explains. “And from the planner’s side, when you come to a new community you have no idea what they want, or what they think. This is a way to draw that out.”

Check out the slideshow above for more colorful highlights from the afternoon’s festivities.

Here in the US, we are part of several new partnerships and programs that will have us working in all 50 states, from big cities to small towns. The formation of major partnerships like Livability Solutions and CommunityMatters; PPS’s absorption of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking and the re-focusing of its Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference on the theme “Pro Place”; new work with federal and state agencies, including the EPA, NEA, and DOTs in multiple states–all of these events indicate a shift in the way that people are approaching their work, as they come to understand how focusing on place changes everything.

We are also working with the Ax:son Johnson Foundation and UN-Habitat to convene an international group of Placemaking leaders in Stockholm, Sweden, next summer. This event will be structured around the transformative agendas at the heart of our work, and will be the first of three major conferences leading up to Habitat III in 2016. We’re also bringing together the best and brightest place-centered minds for a Placemaking Leadership Council, which will meet for the first time at the end of the year, and will be instrumental in shaping our work as the Placemaking movement continues to grow.

These initiatives are the culmination of our work up to this point. We look forward to collaborating with our new partners on re-centering the discussion about sustainable, prosperous cities on Place, and to creating a “Town Square of Placemaking.” Below, we’ve rounded up photos from some of the most exciting work that we’re doing right now. There will be many opportunities in the coming months to plug into the growing global network of Placemakers. We’re looking forward to connecting with you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!

We traveled to Nairobi this spring as part of Transforming Cities through Placemaking & Public Spaces, our joint program with UN-Habitat. We continue to work closely with our friends there, and are looking forward to bringing Placemaking to a global audience at the World Urban Forum in Naples, Italy, this September. (Photo: PPS)

Just last week, we announced the exciting news that PPS will be leading the National Endowment for the Arts' Citizens' Institute on Rural Design as part of our work with the Orton Family Foundation and its new CommunityMatters partnership. We're looking forward to putting lessons learned from recent work in rural communities, like the above-pictured plan for the future of Windham, NH's Village Center, to good use! (Photo: PPS)

We’ve had the pleasure of working on some of the most treasured places in Detroit, including Eastern Market, the largest public markets in the country, where we developed a comprehensive outreach program to foster closer links between the market and the community. Michiganders have taken to championing Placemaking, as well, from the grassroots to the real estate community the governor's office. (Photo: PPS)

You’ll be able to learn from farmers markets and public markets around the world at the 8th International Public Markets Conference, which will take place in Cleveland, OH, this September 21-23. It will be a great opportunity to explore how “market cities” are revitalizing their neighborhoods by focusing on creating healthy places. (Photo: PPS)

Inspired by PPS’s work, Philadelphia’s University City District has created “The Porch,” a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper public plaza at a major transportation hub downtown. Philly is one of ten communities to receive free technical assistance from the Livability Solutions partnership on major Placemaking projects thanks to an EPA Technical Assistance Sustainable Communities Grant. (Photo: PlanPhilly via Flickr)

We’re looking forward to traveling to one of our very favorite places, Vancouver’s Granville Island, with a group of civic leaders from Salt Lake City to help Utah’s capital develop a leadership agenda around key destinations. We’ll also be hosting another round of Placemaking trainings at our office in New York City this fall—dates coming soon! (Photo: PPS)

Our team of transportation experts has been very busy working with cities and towns around the world. You can meet and chat with them at this year's Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach (Sept. 10-13, 2012), which will put a fresh spin on North America's premier event for bike/ped advocates and enthusiasts by focusing the conversation on how transportation can help create great places. (Photo: PPS)

San Antonio’s appetite for Placemaking has made turned it into what we like to call a “popping city.” We’ve recently worked on recommendations for Alamo Plaza (pictured above during the Luminaria festival), participated in the Downtown Transportation Study, worked with Rackspace on a public space plan for their headquarters, and participated in planning for the revamp of HemisFair Park—all within the past few months! (Photo: PPS)

We’ve been working on the Perth Cultural Centre in Australia, helping the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority to re-think the campus as a true cultural hub by focusing on Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper tactics (like the concert pictured above), busting silos and bringing art out into the streets. The results have been astounding! (Photo: MRA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, here’s to your health!

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

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

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!

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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.

Says commenter Suzan Hampton of Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, which is in the Architecture of Place Hall of Shame: "It feels like being in an airport terminal in there." / Photo: heyskinny via Flickr

Over the past couple of months, we have written several times about the need to move toward an Architecture of Place, creating design that makes people feel empowered, important, and excited to be in the places they inhabit in their daily lives. Two blog posts generated some lively discussion around the subject, which has led to new insight about how those of us concerned with the current direction that architecture is headed in can steer things onto a more productive track.

One of the principal challenges facing architecture today seems to be the lack of understanding of how people relate to the context of a site. Words like “community” and “stakeholders” have been bandied around so much that they have become abstract, and the need for individuals to have agency and a sense of ownership of their surroundings is lost in the mix. Commenter Richard Kooyman, for example, argues that:

It’s a fad today to say that everyone is ‘creative’ or to use terms like  ‘stakeholders’ as if by doing so we are now all empowered to make the changes society needs. The reality is that not everyone is equipped or even cares to be creative and real stakeholders are still those that hold the purse strings of projects.

The idea behind good Placemaking, and using a Place-centered approach when designing a building or public space, is not that each individual within a given community is the expert on what that space should look like, but that the community, as a group, has an important expertise about how that space is used, and how the people most likely to enliven it on a day-to-day basis (themselves) are most likely to do so. Another commenter, Gil, makes this case quite well:

At the end of the day it is people’s perceptions of how great, or not so great, their places are that matters most…I have yet to attend a public hearing on a proposed project where anything resembling “community attachment” has emerged in the dialogue that emanates from the planners, or engineers, or architects, or those that interpret the rules.

There is a misconception of how community knowledge should be integrated into the design process that we have encountered often in our work around the world. The idea is not that the pen and paper should be handed over to community members to create a final design, but that their needs and concerns be treated as contextual factors that are just as important as the shape of the site, the surrounding buildings, or the site’s location within a city. People make a space into a place–or, as Cindy Frewen writes:

When integrated and understanding place and people, design can mean thoughtfully imagined, beautiful, remarkable, moving…Design can help place, if we understand the need to be relevant and connected.

Commenter Cindy Frewen cites Kansas City's River Market as an example of a "place based, grassroots, emergent" design process. / Photo: Scott Unrein via Flickr

A good designer is someone who thinks creatively about how to develop the most efficient and attractive solution possible to a given problem. For architects, this means creating places that are not just visually appealing, but that are also responsive to the needs that the people who will use those places–not the needs that the architect thinks those people want addressed. When design is responsive (not enslaved) to local needs, it’s better for everyone involved: the people who use a place, and the architects, who can point to a well-used and loved place rather than a pristine object. It is our belief that, if more architects were to take a Place-centered approach in their work, it would create a much broader constituency for their work.

It’s also important to acknowledge, though, that non-designers are part of the problem, too. Decades of top-down decision-making have led large chunks of the vocal public to be distrusting of architects and urban planners today. In some cities, this has created a culture where any change is seen as bad change, and community involvement can be, for designers, a headache at best. As The Overhead Wire writes, about San Francisco:

When there is an open piece of land, often times people don’t think it should be anything.  It’s kind of crazy, especially with housing costs so high.

While NIMBYism won’t disappear overnight, architects and designers can begin to counteract this knee-jerk fear of change by treating the communities that surround a project site as part of the context that informs the building or public space they are trying to create. It’s important to remember that, as Ben Brown writes in a recent post on the Better! Cities & Towns blog, most people are “driven by intuition first, reason second.” People are very good at intuiting whether or not a new addition to their neighborhood is saying “come visit” or “keep away!”

So how do we communicate the value of understanding people as a fundamental part of a site’s context–both to architects who would choose to operate as “lone geniuses,” and to members of the public who would rather fight development than try to improve it? As commenter Greg cautions:

I don’t think the argument [for an Architecture of Place] will be broadly persuasive until we find a way to take it out of the purely subjective. Because others can and will respond “but that building doesn’t make me feel that way,” and then there is an impasse.

Thorbjoern Mann, shortly thereafter, suggests that scale is the critical issue to be addressed:

The disconnect between ‘high architecture’ and the life of places can be traced to several factors. One is the habit of making decisions about projects looking at scale models of the proposed buildings. The larger the building, the more the viewer’s attention is drawn to its overall shape, form, geometry, and away from what happens at the ground level where people interact with it.

Says The Alley Project's Erik Howard: "The best design is built around people." / Photo: youngnation.us via The Huffington Post

And Graig Donnelly points to an article on the Huffington Post about The Alley Project (TAP) in Detroit that beautifully illustrates how a participatory design process–especially one that builds off of existing community efforts–can create a more powerful sense of place than any of the buildings listed in our Architecture of Place Hall of Shame. Explains TAP’s Erik Howard: “Good design speaks to activities and people. Then those get translated into design solutions. The best design is built around people.”

We couldn’t agree more.