Project for Public Spaces » public space

The Right to Contribute: A Report from the Placemaking Leadership Council

Fred Kent — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:32:56 +0000

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.

To Make a Great Third Place, Get Out of the Way

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:49:58 +0000

The following article was written for the Fall 2012 issue of Shelterforce magazine.
Click here to view the original version on their website.

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Great third places are stages for public life, and should reflect the people who live, work, and play nearby / Photo: PPS

You are never finished. That is one of PPS’s 11 principles for creating great community places. For anyone working to create a great “third place” in their neighborhood, it is critical to remember that there will never be a time when the work is done. Real-world communities are incredibly dynamic, ever-changing things. A public space cannot be finished any more than the city in which it resides can be. At their best, public spaces are the most tangible reflections of cities and neighborhoods and the people who make them special. They are stages for public life, and should reflect the people who live, work, and play nearby.

“Ninety percent of success in public spaces is about management,” says Fred Kent, PPS’s founder and president. “Lots of cities create spaces but don’t manage them.” The key to successful management is understanding and being responsive to the people a space currently serves. Since people come and go, great places must be understood as sites that are in constant flux.

Placemaking, the process that PPS uses in our work with communities around the world, is designed to involve people directly in deciding how their public spaces will look, feel, and operate. Normal citizens are the best experts that you can ask for when planning how a place should be designed or used—but they often question or ignore their own intuitive knowledge. For far too long, the shaping of public spaces has been left to architects and urban planners, who plan from the top down.

This has left many people feeling disconnected from the places that are supposed to serve their needs. Parks and plazas go unused because they don’t feature activities that excite local residents; waterfronts languish because they remain disconnected from their cities even after renovations; streets are seen as conduits for traffic instead of places for bumping into neighbors on the way home from work. Ask many citizens why they don’t go to a given place and they’ll probably have a few good reasons; ask them how they’d go about changing it, and they’ll shrug their shoulders. “That’s for the planners to decide.”

Placemaking teaches people how to evaluate places based on sociability, accessibility, uses, and comfort, and helps them to articulate and build confidence in the value of their own observations about how a place is working—or not working, as is often the case. In this way, Placemaking is a fundamental part of any attempt to create a local third place, since it simultaneously ensures that changes to a space will reflect the needs of the existing community and builds that community’s sense of ownership in a project.

Privately-owned third places like neighborhood cafés or pubs are forced to be responsive to the local community; if they aren’t providing programming and services that their neighbors want, they will most likely go out of business. Public spaces, by the very nature of being publicly owned and operated, can shirk responsibility if the community does not feel either empowered to make them their own or hold local leaders accountable. The Placemaking process encourages people to connect in public spaces, creating the kinds of engaging and memorable third places that anchor strong communities.

Pittsburgh’s Market Square illustrates the “spillover effect” created by good place management / Photo: Brendan Crain

Opening and Programming

Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle” is a central business district located at the convergence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. At its heart sits Market Square, roughly one and a half acres surrounded by historic warehouses and glassy skyscrapers, historically one of the primary marketplaces for the region.

Sadly, the solid old Diamond Market building that filled the site was demolished in 1961, when the Steel City went through one of the most dramatic urban renewal programs in the slum-clearance-crazed country. Huge chunks of the bustling downtown waterfront were cleared for a new park and sterile office complex, while several of the city’s most densely-populated central neighborhoods, including Old Allegheny Center and The Hill, were completely leveled, scattering many of the market’s core customers to suburbs and public housing complexes on the edges of the city.

When PPS got involved in the planning process for Market Square in 2006, the site had been through numerous re-workings, none of which had managed to restore it to its former status as a gathering place for the greater Pittsburgh region. Working with the city’s Downtown Partnership, PPS facilitated a public Placemaking workshop with neighborhood groups and individuals to generate ideas for uses and activities that would inform the future design and management of the square. The process led to an opening up of the square, including the eventual closure of several streets that ran through its center, to create a more welcoming space. This created one continuous piazza-style square instead of four quadrants, putting the activity at the heart of the space rather than pushing it to the corners to make way for automobile traffic.

Participants also said Market Square needed a more robust and dynamic slate of public programming. Physical changes combined with features like a farmer’s market and lunchtime concert series have helped to turn the square into an extremely popular spot for downtown office workers to gather on lunch breaks and for drinks after work. Programming, from a Carnegie Library–run reading room to the annual Zombie Fest, which celebrates the city’s status as the setting for director George Romero’s Living Dead series, has made Market Square a destination for residents across the metropolitan area as well.

By focusing on programming rather than a dramatic redesign, Market Square has once again become a major gathering space for Pittsburghers. On a recent Saturday afternoon, even without any events in progress, the square was packed with people sitting, talking, playing, and enjoying each other’s company, illustrating the spillover effect of great public space management: once people have reasons to visit a space and experience its unique sense of place, they’ll keep finding their own reasons to come back.

At the Perth Cultural Centre, a “lighter, quicker, cheaper” approach got things moving quickly, changing the way that locals viewed the precinct’s public spaces / Photo: PPS

Getting People There

The Perth Cultural Centre (PCC) is a cluster of institutions located at the hinge point between the central business district of Western Australia’s largest city and one of its burgeoning nightlife districts, Northbridge. It features a mix of historic buildings from the 1800s and Brutalist structures built in the 1960s and ‘70s, and includes art museums, theaters, a history museum, a major library, and a compact college campus. When it came time to revamp the PCC in 2008, the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA) decided that they would work to connect the 23 institutions within the precinct to each other by improving the public spaces that surrounded them, and to extend the precinct past its formal edges, with cultural activity reaching out into the surrounding area like an octopus.

But these myriad spaces were no-go zones for many residents due to poor visibility, lack of activity, and public perception of the PCC as a high-crime area after dark, so the MRA reached out to PPS in 2009 to lead a Placemaking process to determine how the staid grounds could be turned into a series of lively public gathering places. The MRA’s understanding of the importance of careful management and cohesive vision proved to be key to changing the public’s perception of the space in a very short period of time.

“One of the big things for us was to take the focus off of the buildings and put it on the things that happen in the spaces between them,” MRA’s executive director of place management Veronica Jeffery explains. “That’s why what we call the ‘quick wins’ strategy was so important: it basically went from planning straight to implementation, and was really powerful. It didn’t leave time for contemplation, which meant that people could see their ideas transform into action.”

This “lighter, quicker, cheaper” approach focused on creating more flexible space through the addition of seating, improvement of lighting after dark, and ample programming to draw people into the PCC precinct. PPS encouraged the institutions clustered in the area to bring their programming out into the public realm and take better advantage of their co-location with other major cultural and educational organizations. Fast-paced collaboration led to a burst of activity that drew people to the site and encouraged them, in turn, to mix and mingle with each other. This created the sense that the PCC was not a walled-off precinct that “belonged” to the MRA or the institutions within, but a great third place that Perth residents were welcome to claim and use as their own “back yard.”

“Ultimately, the centre is a public space,” says Jeffery. “We want everybody to feel comfortable here.” The MRA’s willingness to try new things and actively work with a variety of organizations and local constituencies has made the PCC into the kind of place where locals feel that comfort and sense of attachment—because it directly represents their needs and interests.

Residents of Nairobi’s Kibera slum discuss the future of Silanga Field / Photo: PPS

Tapping Local Wisdom

Currently, PPS is working with UN-Habitat to adapt the Placemaking process for use in developing world cities and towns. One of the first projects that we are undertaking through this partnership is a slew of Placemaking workshops in Nairobi, Kenya, where the mayor has promised to create 60 new public spaces around the city in the next five years. This is no small feat in any city, much less one where a full half of the population lives in informal settlements and slums, on just 5 percent of the land area. The spaces created will undoubtedly be filled with people due to the density of human life here, but a truly successful place is not just a busy space, it is a great destination.

Especially in cities like Nairobi, the need for great destinations is acute. Says PPS vice president Cynthia Nikitin, who is leading our efforts in the Kenyan capital: “In Kibera [the massive slum where PPS is working on a project to upgrade an athletic field], the streets are truly the public spaces, and people are out all day, every day: selling, socializing, trading. People make their living—they live their lives—right out in the streets. Having safe and adequate places for that activity is as vital in these areas as water or electricity.”

Creating destinations that people choose to go to, rather than just spaces where people go out of necessity, is an ideal way to improve the quality of life for people living in slum settlements. Public spaces in these areas can serve many necessary functions: as marketplaces, as places for getting water, as hubs for social services like healthcare and education. But the concerns in these areas are often very different from those that might be found in more established cities in developed countries. Safety, especially for women, is a major factor. And as always, the people who understand the problems that need to be addressed are the people who are already using the spaces.

Silanga Field is a wonderful example of how this valuable knowledge is being tapped. One of PPS’s local partners, the Kilimanjaro Initiative, had been working on making improvements to a soccer pitch over the course of several years. “KI enlists the help of the community throughout each phase,” their web page explains, “to give its members a sense of ownership and pride in the field.”

During the first Placemaking workshop Nikitin led with local residents in the spring of 2012, Silanga residents were encouraged to participate in creating a long-term plan for the site. They voiced a strong interest in improving safety in their community, which led to a plan that incorporates environmental improvements and a slate of programming for children and families that are specifically geared toward making the field a place where everyone can feel safe.

The process illustrated the true value of a great third place in any community: a sense of community ownership and control of one’s place in the world, which can be expressed in the way that people engage in discussion and collaboration around a site plan, long before permanent changes to that site are implemented.

It Doesn’t Have to be Big

In developed and disenfranchised communities alike, the assumption around great destinations is that they cost a lot of money to create and have to take the form of new parks or flashy waterfront promenades. “When talking about expanding public space within Nairobi,” Nikitin says, “I kept bumping up against this assumption from city staff that this meant they had to buy big chunks of land and even clear people out of existing neighborhoods to make room for new parks. The idea that schools and sidewalks, streets, plazas, and fire stations could be meaningful places within the city’s public realm was new to them. There’s a division there between ‘public spaces’ and spaces that merely happen to be public.”

In fact, the kinds of great community third places that build social capital and encourage people to take an active role in the daily life of their neighborhood are often smaller, more manageable spaces like community gardens, street corners, and schoolyards. These hubs provide places for people to gather and organize, and are vital to building constituencies for broader efforts to create more equitable cities. This is not necessarily an expensive or labor-intensive process; it merely requires the people who are currently “in charge” of a given space to step out of the way and let the people who use it play an active role in how it is shaped.

All Placemaking is Creative: How a Shared Focus on Place Builds Vibrant Destinations

Project for Public Spaces — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:09:05 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Who is the community, and what is their role?

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

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

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

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

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

What role do artists play?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every place can be vibrant. Vibrancy is people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 Mini-Adventures in the Library

Project for Public Spaces — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:27:24 +0000

It takes a village, the saying goes, to raise a child. Embedded within this age-old nugget of wisdom is the assertion that parenting is, at least in part, a public affair. From streets to parks, children learn so much from interacting with public spaces, both in terms of learning about their physical environment and interacting with other people. Kids have an insatiable curiosity; they want to touch, climb on, smell, taste, and otherwise interact with everything around them. In a way, they’re some of the best tour guides you could ask for, because they don’t miss a single detail when exploring a new place.

Recently, we came across a Amy Bowers’ MamaScout, a blog that “celebrates passionate, creative family living through posts showcasing open-ended play and projects, stellar resources, weird ideas, and gentle encouragements to slow down and embrace the ordinary.” Amy often writes about inventive ways that parents can use public space to spark their kids’ imaginations, with posts on everything from poetry bombing to hands-on exploration and the importance of wandering.

But it was a post on libraries that caught our attention last week, for how it exemplifies the kind of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper thinking that each individual can use to activate their public spaces in new and exciting ways right now. Amy was kind enough to agree to let us re-publish her post, so without further ado, here are 25 mini-adventures that you can have at your local library—whether you have kids, or not!

We spend many afternoons at our neighborhood library. At one point our time switched from going to find particular books, to just hanging out.

For hours.

Reading, exploring, asking questions, sharing, talking….

I wanted to share a quick list of fun things you can do at the library other than just check out books. Any of these ideas would be a great boredom buster. Just tell your kid you have an adventure in mind and embrace the mission with verve. You will have a great time!

Please share the interesting, fun or just odd things your family does at the library in the comments!

You can download a copy to keep in your purse or journal here.

1. Look at microfilm from your birthday, or a hundred years ago, or when grandma was born.

2. Look for the biggest book in the library. Take your picture with it.

3. Browse the travel section, find a place you want to visit, make some plans.

4. Go to the cookbook area, choose a recipe, go the store, get the ingredients and cook it that day.

5. Everyone find a poem, read it out loud and then copy it into your journal.

6. Choose a random CD, listen to it all the way through.

7. Kind Bomb

8. Scan the books of quotes. Find a good one and write it outside on the sidewalk with chalk.

9. Bring paper and colored pencils. Draw from the easy I-Can-Draw-Books for an hour.

10. Take a present to the librarians.

11. Leave a thoughtful review on a post-it note in a book you really loved.

12. Find out what services your library offers. Ellison machine? Study prints? Study rooms?

13. Occupy! Have a meeting, writer’s group, books club, homeschool co op, adventure planning committee at the library.

14. Make photocopies of your hand, funny book titles, weird images….

15. Make a list of suggested books and media for your library to buy. Make the library YOUR library.

16. Arrange a library tour.

17. Browse books on the flora and fauna of your area. Learn to identify something new.

18. Check out the corresponding children’s or adult section to your favorite area (reptiles, art, mystery…)

19. Ask about the special collections.

20. Read a biography from the children’s sections on someone you know very little about.(I choose Justin Beiber).

21. Find a baby name book, make a list of funny name combinations, choose a new name for the day.

22. Hunt for authors with your same last name.

23. Look in the reference section. What is the weirdest reference book you can find?

24. Buy old magazines, cut them up and make happy posters, rehang in the library.

25. Make sure each kid has their own library card and bag. Do not fuss about late fees. Ever.

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Best of the Blog: Top 12 PPS Posts of 2012

Project for Public Spaces — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:00:50 +0000

2012 was a big year in general here at PPS—and the same was true for the Placemaking Blog! We’ve had a blast communicating with Placemakers around the world through our blog, as well as through Facebook and Twitter. And so, to end the year on a reflective note, we thought we’d put together a round-up of our top posts from the past year, organized by popularity. See anything you missed??

Photo: Vincent Desjardins via Flickr

1.) Towards an Architecture of Place: Moving Beyond Iconic to Extraordinary

“In the last decade, some of the new buildings that have won the most acclaim exemplify what we might call a kind of new “Brutalism.” They recall that style’s monolithic disregard for human scale and for connection to the surrounding streetscape.”

Photo: PPS

2.) Seven Ways to Disrupt your Public Space

“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.”

Photo: Universal Pictures

3.) Ten Great Movies for Placemakers

“While the best way to learn about what makes a great place is often to get out and observe how public spaces work first-hand, there are films that illustrate Placemaking principles quite beautifully.”

Illustrations: Andy Singer

4.) Levels of Service & Travel Projections: The Wrong Tools for Planning Our Streets?

“When we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.”

Photo: Fred Kent

5.) Whom Does Design Really Serve?

“The design professions have been given free reign to set up a wholly dysfunctional system when it comes time to promote the best and brightest, and the results are devastating our public spaces…Whether [competition] jury members actually have to use the spaces that they praise is irrelevant. They are tastemakers, not Placemakers.”

Photo: PBS Newshour

6.) You Are Where You Eat: Re-Focusing Communities Around Markets

“[Public markets are especially viable] today because the global economy has skewered our sense of being able to support ourselves. Markets are very reassuring places, because they give you a sense of responsibility for your own health. People are experimenting, and reinventing what it means to have a good life.”

Photo: PPS

7.) Is Your City Design Centered or Place Centered

“It is critical to remember, in any project, that you are creating a place, not a design. While good design is important to creating great places, it is but one tool in your kit–not the driving force behind good Placemaking.”

Photo: PPS

8.) What Makes a Great Public Destination? Is it Possible to Build One Where You Live?

“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.”

Photo: Brendan Crain

9.) Place Capital: Re-connecting Economy With Community

“Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.”

Photo: Dover Kohl & Partners

10.) Creating Great Streets: What Does it Take? An Interview with John Massengale & Victor Dover

“Although a lot of time and money was being put into large projects, they weren’t necessarily leaving behind streets that are better to grow a business on, or to make a home…We thought, ‘Why is that?’ It’s the Placemaking piece, actually.”

Photo: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority

11.) Creativity & Placemaking: Building Inspiring Centers of Culture

“Shifting attitudes are chipping away at the austere walls of yesterday’s “culture ghettos,” with people demanding more inspiring, interactive gathering places. Creativity is becoming one of the most coveted social assets for post-industrial cities with increasingly knowledge-based economies–and this is good news for culture vultures and average Joes, alike.”

Photo: Ethan Kent

12.) How Small Change Leads to Big Change: Social Capital & Healthy Places

“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.”

Place Capital: Re-connecting Economy With Community

Project for Public Spaces — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:04:59 +0000

At Cleveland’s Market Square Park, local residents, businesses, and leaders have invested heavily in Place Capital. / Photo: PPS

“We’ve been wrong for the last 67 years,” Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, announced in his closing address at last month’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place (PWPB) conference. “Ok. Time to admit it, and move on! We have completely screwed up transportation in this country. We can never expect to see the legislative or policy change until people understand the fundamental underlying problem. Asking for 20% more bike lanes is not enough.”

The following week, at the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, the same attitude was present. In her opening remarks to the gathering of market managers and advocates assembled at the Renaissance Hotel, USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan stated that “We’re all here because we recognize that markets can be far more than places just to buy food. We’re looking at markets as venues for revitalizing their communities.”

These statements capture a sentiment that permeated the discussion at both of the conferences that PPS organized this fall: that reform—of transportation, food systems, and so many aspects of the way we live—is no longer about adding bike lanes or buying veggies from a local farmer; the time has come to re-focus on large-scale culture change. Advocates from different movements are reaching across aisles to form broader coalitions. While we all fight for different causes that stir our individual passions, many change agents are recognizing that it is the common ground we share—both physically and philosophically—that brings us together, reinforces the basic truths of our human rights, and engenders the sense of belonging and community that leads to true solidarity.

Even when we disagree with our neighbors, we still share at least one thing with them: place. Our public spaces—from our parks to our markets to our streets—are where we learn about each other, and take part in the interactions, exchanges, and rituals that together comprise local culture. Speaking at PWPB, Copenhagenize.com founder Mikael Colville-Andersen made this point more poetically when he said that “The Little Mermaid statue isn’t Copenhagen’s best monument. I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.”

“I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.” / Photo: Spacing Magazine via Flickr

Our public spaces reflect the community that we live in, and are thus the best places for us to begin modeling a new way of thinking and living. We can all play a more active role in the cultural change that is starting to occur by making sure that our actions match our values—specifically those actions that we take in public places. At PWPB, April Economides offered a simple suggestion for softening business owners’ resistance to bicycle-friendly business districts: tell the proprietors of businesses that you frequent that you arrived on a bike. At another PWPB session on social media, Alissa Walker advocated for users of popular geo-locative social media platforms like FourSquare to start “treating buses and sidewalks as destinations,” and ‘checking in’ to let friends know that they’re out traveling the city by foot, and on transit.

And of course, when trying to change your behavior, you often need to change your frame of mind. At the Markets Conference, Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman recalled the efforts that were required to change the way that vendors at the West Side Market thought about their role within the local community when the market decided to remain open for more days each week. While many vendors didn’t need to be open extra days, Cimperman helped to re-frame things: “[I asked people to consider:] Who are we here for? We’re not here for ourselves. We’re here for the citizens of Cleveland.”

Individual action is invaluable, but when working to spark large-scale culture change, it is even more critical to develop an overarching strategy. Putting forth a constructive vision, along with clearly-stated goals that people can relate to, provides the framework that helps to guide the individual decisions that people within a movement make as they work to change the culture on the ground. To put public space at the heart of public discourse where it belongs, we should focus on changing the way that folks talk about the issue that’s already on everyone’s mind: the economy. Bikenomics blogger Elly Blue was succinct in her explanation of why tying culture change to economics is a particularly fruitful path in today’s adversarial political climate: “We can shift the paradigm of how we build our cities; thinking about economics is a great way to do that because it cuts through the political divide.”

Great places foster human interaction & economic opportunity / Photo: Fred Kent

Across the political spectrum most of us, after years of economic hardship (and decades of wayward leadership), have learned to react to things like “growth” and “job creation” with an automatic thumbs-up. We too rarely ask questions like “What are we growing into?” and “What kind of jobs are we creating?” This brings us to the concept of Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts. Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible. Strong networks of streets and destinations are better at fostering human interaction, leading to social networks that connect people with opportunities, and cities where economies match the skills and interests of the people who live there. Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.

At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community. Today’s economy is largely driven by products: the stuff we make, the ideas we trademark, the things that we buy (whether we need them or not). It’s a system that supports the status quo by funneling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands. Leadership in this system is exclusively top-down; even small business owners today must respond to shifts in global markets that serve only to grow financial capital for investors, without any connection to the communities where their customers actually live. (For evidence of this, consider the fact that food in the average American home travels an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to table, turning local droughts and floods into worldwide price fluctuations).

Through our own Placemaking work, we’ve found that public space projects and the governance structures that produce them tend to fall into one of four types of development, along a spectrum. On one end there are spaces that come out of project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership is often behind these projects, which value on-time, under-budget delivery above all else. Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires. Next, there are spaces created through a design-led process. These spaces are of higher quality and value, and are more photogenic, but their reliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places. More and more, we’re seeing people taking the third kind of approach: that which is place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.

Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards. They make sure that the sidewalks are clean, the gardens tended, and their neighbors in good spirits. They are involved meaningfully throughout the process—the key word here being “they,” plural. Place-led processes turn proximity into purpose, using the planning and management of shared public spaces into a group activity that builds social capital and reinforces local societal and cultural values.

After participating in the discussions at PWPB and the Markets Conference this fall, we believe that the concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general. If we re-build our communities around places that put us face-to-face with our neighbors more often, we are more likely to know each other, and to want to help each other to thrive.

“It’s because our public spaces got so bad that we have led the world in developing ways to make them great,” argued Eastern Market director Dan Carmody at the Markets Conference, explaining the surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades. We have momentum on our side; if we focus on creating Place Capital, we can continue to build on that forward motion, and bring together many different voices into a chorus.

Like capital attracts capital, people attract people. As Placemakers, we all need to be out in our communities modeling the kind of values that we want to re-build local culture around. Our actions in public space—everything from saying hello to our neighbors on the street to organizing large groups to advocate for major social changes—are investments in Place Capital. Great places and strong economies can only exist when people choose to participate in creating them; they are human-powered monuments. So let’s get to work.

7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:24:10 +0000

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.

Public Space Powered Democracy

Project for Public Spaces — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:50:37 +0000

With no place to voice our views as citizens, do we become more passive about what happens to our country and our future?

By Jay Walljasper

The influence of the new digital commons in democratic uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain has been chronicled at length in news reports from the Middle East, with Facebook, twitter and other social media winning praise as dictatorbusters.

But the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands. To celebrate their victory over the Mubarak regime, for example, protesters in Cairo jubilantly returned to Tahrir Square, where the revolution was born, to pick up trash.

Tahrir Square in Egypt, by Jonathan Rashad on Flickr

It’s the same story all over the Middle East. In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, people express their aspirations and face bloody reprisals in Green Square and Martyr’s Square. In Bahrain, they boldly march in Pearl Square in the capital city of Manama. In Yemen, protests have taken place in public spaces near the university in Sanaa, which students renamed Tahrir Square. Kept out of the central Revolution Square in Tehran by the repressive government, Iranian dissidents gather in Valiasr Square and Vanak Sqaure.

Last week in Tunisia, they changed the name of the main square in Tunis to honor Mohammad Bouazizi, an unlicensed street vendor whose suicide in December in response to government harassment sparked the revolution that toppled the regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

The course of recent history was rewritten by events happening in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as dissidents ousting an oppressive regime in December 1989 helped bring down Communism. Those protests were inspired in part by events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that seized the world’s imagination earlier that year when democracy activists unsuccessfully challenged the power of China’s dictatorship.

This is not just an Old World thing. The Boston Common has been a sight of protests, and public gatherings for three centuries. In 1713, two hundred Bostonians protested food shortages in the city and in 1969 100,000 protested the Vietnam War.

The state capitol in Madison, where thousands of workers now protest the Wisconsin governor’s fierce attacks on collective bargaining rights, represent another case of a public commons becoming a staging ground for political resistance. The capitol, which sits right in the heart of downtown Madison, was nominated to our list of Great Public Spaces of the world.

The people rallying behind public sector union workers at the Capital are actually protected by the Wisconsin state constitution, which forbids the legislature from denying public access to the building when it is in session. State law does permit capitol groundskeepers to clear the building in an emergency, presumably on orders of the governor, but those groundskeepers are presumably members of the same union the governor wants to crush.

This all shows that the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park or other public space that is open to all.

Tahrir Square Egypt on January 26, 2011

An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate run shopping malls replaced downtowns as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, who almost certainly will say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls, which limits our abilities to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens.

Of course, public spaces enrich our lives in many ways beyond protests. Local commons become the site of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services and other expressions of a community.

The moment when I first became aware of the importance of public spaces was when the Minnesota Twins won their first ever World Series in 1987. I did not have tickets to the game but gathered hopefully with thousands of others outside the stadium in Minneapolis to share in the joy of the victory. When the Twins won the game, thousands more poured out of the ballpark into the streets and we all marched to…where? Minneapolis has no downtown square or landmark gathering place so we milled around the streets for a while—an unsatisfying way to celebrate a World Series championship. If it had been the Red Sox, everyone would head for the Boston Common. We weren’t so lucky.

I’ve often wondered if this lack of a central commons in Minneapolis and most other American communities somehow inhibits our civic expression. With no place to voice our views as citizens, do we become more passive about what happens to our country and our future? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine Hosni Mubarak wishes he had built a shopping mall in Tahrir Square.

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