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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Everywhere you look, there are kids canoodling. Think of all of the germs being spread around! It’s just gross.” / Photo: PPS

Citing data showing that kissing is up to dangerous levels in the city’s streets and public spaces, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has introduced a measure to attempt to limit the length of public displays of affection in the interest of public health. Bloomberg admitted that the rampant PDA may be an unintended consequence of the improvements in public spaces that have been central to his mayoralty.

Getting people out of their cars, the mayor admitted at a press conference this morning, may have encouraged people to get a bit too close. “Our sidewalks are getting stopped up,” the mayor lamented. “When we started this, we saw research that suggested we’d find lovers in the rear places. But they weren’t there. The most fervent embracing we’ve recorded recently has usually taken place in the most visible locations, with couples oblivious of the crowd. Everywhere you look, there are kids canoodling. Think of all of the germs being spread around! It’s just gross.”

Increasing Kissing was first documented in the 1970s by William H. Whyte. / Photo: New York Magazine

The mayor pointed to a new report out of New York University that shows an alarming 34% increase in the average length of instances of PDAs around the city over the past five years. As such, the city is moving quickly to implement a ban on kisses lasting longer than 16 seconds in public spaces. The mayor indicated that a task force has been assembled with members from the city’s Departments of Health & Mental Hygiene and Parks & Recreation, along with several high-ranking officials from the NYPD.

“This isn’t just a few cute little pecks on the cheek,” explained Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, who was also present at this morning’s announcement. “We haven’t seen kissing up this high on New York’s streets since the 1970s!”

In response to critics saying that this is an extension of his “Nanny State,” Bloomberg said he is “facilitating people to control themselves” in NYC’s increasingly attractive public spaces.

The Urban-to-Rural Transect allows for a much wider variety of street types than many road design guides.

“Street design manuals and land use plans are the moulds that our cities come out of,” noted Ryan Snyder during a presentation on the Model Design Manual for Living Streets at the Congress for New Urbanism’s Transportation Summit, which took place last month in Long Beach, CA. “What we need to be asking right now is: What could our manuals give us? … Streets are the majority of our public space. Why do we only let the engineers design it?”

Snyder’s question was at the heart of a discussion that stretched across the back-to-back CNU Summit and Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference (PWPB). Among the hundreds of active transportation advocates, planners, designers, and enthusiasts gathered in Long Beach, there was a core group of engineers who were grappling with new federal legislation, shifting funding structures, and public trends—and how these rather dramatic changes would affect the future of their field. Within this group, everyone seemed to agree that design guides and tools like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO) Functional Classification System, Level of Services, and Green Book are being misused to block change rather than to build smarter, safer roads that serve their communities.

Fortunately, that’s getting more difficult in an era of fiscal constraint. As AASHTO director John Horsley explained during a panel at the CNU Summit, “We can’t build [roads] in the old way because we can’t afford [to build enough highway capacity to keep up with the] land use pattern of sprawl. My guys work for the governors. You can’t do it the same way anymore because if you look at a 10-year fiscal sustainability timeline, you just can’t get there from here.”

This is something that many people, both within and from outside of the transportation field, can no doubt understand and relate to. Economic recession and the resulting fiscal constraint are forcing people in every field—particularly those where the public sector is involved—to re-consider how they do what they do. We’re re-assessing our priorities, getting more creative about financing, and questioning our sacred cows. As many have already pointed out over the past few years, a recession, while undeniably painful, can be energizing in how it forces organizations and industries to innovate.

For Placemakers and New Urbanists (plenty of overlap there), in a way, the timing of this recession is fortuitous. Just as many Americans are waking up to the mounting problems arising from the way that we’ve built our cities over the past fifty years of auto-centric policy-making, the money for the capital-intensive model of yesteryear is disappearing. The Placemaking movement has grown significantly over the past few decades, and offers a robust model for tying citizens more directly to the decision-making process around the way their communities are shaped. Seen through this lens, public engagement isn’t a necessary evil that designers and engineers have to deal with on the way to pushing through new roads, but an opportunity for building a broad base of public support that can be leveraged to fund future solutions, many of which could avoid building costly infrastructure.

Now, as the money available shrinks and public awareness of the importance of Place grows, the time is ripe for the development of new design guides that offer more flexibility in the possible outcomes that they can produce, and for highlighting the flexibility that already exists in guides like the Green Book. As Snyder argued above, these guides play a crucial role in how our world is organized; streets are places, and they must be treated as such. This means involving many more people than just transportation officials in determining how to measure the success of a given roadway. “Traffic engineers are doing what the public has trained them to do for decades,” argued PPS’s Gary Toth during a discussion at PWPB. “They’re problem solvers, so if you want new solutions, give them new problems.”

Great streets are entirely within our reach--as long as we're asking engineers the right questions! / Photo: PPS

By necessity, transportation engineering is a hyper-professionalized field; we certainly don’t want average citizens in complete control of how roads are designed. But there is more room for people to work with engineers on the roads that do come through their neighborhoods. Current design guides oversimplify the types of communities that our roadways serve—the Functional Classification System goes so far as to divide all roads into two types: urban and rural. By contrast, the New Urbanist Urban-to-Rural Transect includes seven different types of land use patterns.

“Part of our problem,” Horsley stated, “is that we live in a siloed world. Our guys think of themselves as street, road, and highway designers, not [community builders]. The Placemaking concept that PPS advocates is an alien concept to them. Somebody needs to link what needs to be done at the community level to what our guys do when they plan the networks. Part of what we need to do is give permission to the transpo guys to look at a broader array of issues…We need different vocabulary for the same objectives.”

If the crowd at the CNU Summit and PWPB is any indication, that new vocabulary is evolving quickly. Guides like Snyder’s Model Design Manual for Living Streets, which was created to guide how roads are designed and built in the infamously auto-centric city of Los Angeles, explicitly builds people and Placemaking into the design process. “Our streets are public space, and they impact so many areas of our lives,” Snyder explained. “We wanted to look at equity, look at things for all ages, all modes, connectivity, traffic calming as part of the design; we wanted something that connects people.”

Connecting people is what roads have always done, in theory, but for too long we’ve been thinking of that connection purely across long distances. We connect from home to work, or from our neighborhood to our friends across town. Today that logic is clearly shifting. Our streets must be designed to encourage human connection within neighborhoods: out on the sidewalks, in the bike lanes, along leafy boulevards, and in public squares lined with lively local businesses. What should our design manuals give us? That’s a question that Placemakers—not just engineers—need to answer, and now.

Kit Keller

Kit Keller, Executive Director of the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (APBP) chatted with us recently about her organization’s presence at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, the vital role that women have played (and continue to play) in the bicycle movement, and how walking and bicycling advocates can make the most of the new federal transportation bill. Whether you’re attending the conference or following it online, Kit shares what’s special about this year’s conference and the exciting things to expect from the National Women’s Bike Summit immediately following it.

Do you think this Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place will be different than past conferences?

This is an exciting year for the conference. By adding in Placemaking, it emphasizes the importance of walking and biking to livability and good community planning. All too often, we see very over-engineered dead space facilities where there’s no sense of place and no people because there’s no destination. To integrate Placemaking into the conversation about biking and walking is brilliant.

Locating the conference in Long Beach is also interesting, because they really work on being innovative in this area. To have the leadership in the city be so visibly supportive before, during, and presumably after the conference is wholesome and hopefully will inspire more cities to become engaged in walking and biking issues. Long Beach’s mission to be the most bicycle friendly city in America is pretty exciting and is a great example. Go Long Beach! By envisioning our goals, we can make stuff happen. Hopefully we’re entering into a period of the Olympics of walking and biking for city governments.

What will the APBP be doing at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place?

The APBP views the conference as akin to our own conference, in that we make it a point to hold our annual meetings at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. We provide the opportunity for members to get together at booths and we hold our in-person board meetings there. We will also be presenting the APBP Lifetime Achievements Awards, the Professional of the Year Private and Public Sector Awards, and Young Professional of the Year Award. In addition, we will present our board candidates, as we will be having our board member election following the conference. We have eight candidates running for four board positions—and five of those candidates are women. I think this reflects the growing interest of women in our field.

Why is women’s bicycling such a hot topic?

It’s a hot topic everywhere, it seems. At conferences like the National Bike Summit, people want to talk about getting the number of women riders up. Women currently are about 24% of the ridership compared to men. The conversation got started a couple of years ago with a survey APBP did on women’s cycling that grew out of the International Scan on Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety and Mobility. We saw so many more women cycling in the cities that we visited outside of North America than in the States, so we set out to figure out why that was. We imagined our survey would only be answered by a few hundred women but it went viral and we got 13,000 responses.

Women are changing the landscape of bicycling advocacy / Photo: Sustainable Flatbush via Flickr

What we learned is that women are very worried about safety issues on the roadway, and that many of the facilities that are suitable for a more recreational or more assertive and experienced rider aren’t inviting to new riders or riders carrying children with them who are just looking to have a pleasant ride to work or other destinations. So the conversation is one you see not only in professional and advocacy circles, but you see it in the industry as well. Older male cyclists are becoming a diminishing part of the market. The bike industry needs to be seeking new markets, and women’s cycling is quite natural.

At Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, we’re excited about a visioning session on doubling the number of women who ride bikes. The session will be small group discussions exploring how to break down the barriers that cause women to not ride, or not ride as much as their male counterparts. We will utilize real world scenarios in order to look at some of those issues. The aim is to offer new perspectives to people so they can take action in their own communities in an effort to double the number of women riding. The National Women’s Bike Summit will directly follow Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place on Thursday, September 13^th, and we’re thrilled that it will be presented by APBP and the League of American Bicyclists. Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is very supportive and has offered space for that discussion to happen.

The keynote speaker for the summit on Thursday is Leah Missbach Day, co-founder of World Bicycle Relief, an organization that has captured the imagination of a lot of people to empower women and girls in developing countries. The WBR works at getting these women bicycles to help them get to school to get an education, and to work toward improving their lives.

We’re going to do six break-out sessions with a variety of facilitators and speakers on health, recreation, racing, women who have children who cycle, and women who are running programs to encourage more women to cycle.

Can you talk about the impact that women have had on the active transportation movement over the long term? 

Women are very concerned about the health of their families, and children, and their broader communities so it seems natural to me that more women would be coming into the planning and engineering field seeking to build a career around making communities more walkable and bicycle-friendly. I think just from the sheer amount of women who have received APBP awards in recent years, it really indicates the growing importance of the role of women in our field.

What can planners and engineers do to make the most of MAP-21?

It seems to be a point of collaboration across people working in public health, safety, sustainability, Placemaking, and all types of professions that resonate with complete streets. APBP has been working closely with the National Complete Streets Coalition. We’re taking MAP-21 and utilizing all possible avenues for funding bicycling and walking, not just through the transportation alternatives aspect, but also through all of the other transportation funding. Obviously, congress was not thinking about Placemaking when they created the opportunity for states to opt out of spending federal money on bicycle and pedestrian projects. The most important thing that professionals in our field can do right now is to work with their states’ Departments of Transportation to make sure that they don’t opt out.  Since available funding is going to drop under MAP-21, our job is to make sure every penny that is available gets utilized effectively.

What can planners and engineers do to improve the next transportation bill?

We need to start ourselves, and take our policy makers on bike rides or walks through our communities to show them what was funded, and what else needs to be funded. We have to show them how people are walking and biking to school, work, the library, and the grocery, and to socialize. People are utilizing the facilities that have been put in place, whether they’re trails, cycle tracks, or protected bike lanes, and policy makers need to see that. Get them out to see that people who are too young or old to drive, if they can get around a community and if the community is safe for them, then it’s likely to be safe for people of all ages. The young and the old (their children and their parents) count on being able to walk and bike for transportation and for health.

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For those of you interested in learning more about how to foster great streets and communities, register today for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place, North America’s premier walking and bicycling conference, taking place September 10-13th, 2012 in Long Beach, CA. Join more than 1,000 planners, engineers, elected officials, health professionals, and advocates to gain the insights of national experts in the field, learn about practical solutions to getting bike and pedestrian infrastructure built, and meet peers from across the country.