Charlie Gandy and Bikeable Communites Executive Director Josh Frank enjoy Berlin Bistro's new parklet. / Photo: Allan Crawford

What happens when local small businesses bring a healthy dose of creative talent and out-of-the-box thinking to their entrepreneurial mix? What happens when they see themselves as progressive artisans and thought leaders and feel empowered to spread their enthusiasm with fellow local business owners? Business zones in cities and towns that were once depressed and/or even blighted are resurrected and revived. Economic prosperity blooms and grows in fresh and remarkable ways.

There’s a name for these small business mavericks and innovators – they’re called “gazelles.” They take a fresh look at a place and its elements; they rearrange things, turn things over, add new twists. They notice new possibilities for creating appealing places. They let go of labels, status quo and tradition and instead put out the welcome mat for fellow citizens to rediscover areas and neighborhoods of their city anew.

The elegant and spot on “gazelle” term was coined by economist David Birch. He characterized gazelles less by the size of their business than by their rapid expansion. In a 2009 article by Joshua Zumbrum on Forbes.com, Zumbrum explains that “Birch defined the species as enterprises whose sales doubled every four years. By his estimates these firms, roughly 4% of all U.S. companies, were responsible for 70% of all new jobs. The gazelles beat out the elephants (like Wal-Mart) and the mice (corner barbershops).”

We’re very fortunate to have several of these “gazelles” here in Long Beach: small business entrepreneurs who have the vision, focus and leadership savvy to grow their business in leaps and bounds. Two inspiring local examples are Kerstin Kansteiner, owner of Portfolio Coffee House, Berlin Bistro and head of the 4^th Street Business Improvement District, and Luis and Brenda Navarro owners of Lola’s Mexican Cuisine on 4^th Street. The three embraced a Placemaking tactic called “parklets” that have brought extraordinary results to both their businesses and very positive media attention to Long Beach as a progressive city ready to try out new ideas.

The idea for these parklets came from successful experiments in San Francisco. Kerstin, Luis and Brenda did meticulous research (including a trip to San Francisco to see parklets in action) and it sold them on moving forward with the concept. Their credibility from working successfully with the City on other recent community projects made them a welcome partner at City Hall.

In January 2012, the first parklet in Southern California was installed at Lola’s. It measures seven and a half feet wide and thirty feet long – equal to one and a half car parking spaces.  But what is a parklet?  In this case it’s 225 square feet of highly visible, beautifully designed outdoor dining space for twenty plus people. This is prime real estate owned by the City of Long Beach that was previously being used to park two cars for free. The second parklet at Berlin Bistro opened just this past April.

Both the Lola’s and Berlin parklets are organized on a private business model. The business deal Lola’s has with the City allows the restaurant to use the space as an extension of its sidewalk space.  Lola’s pays $850/year for a “Sidewalk Restaurant Service Permit” from the City. Lola’s paid all costs of design, construction, maintenance and operations of the parklet to the City’s standards. Luis estimates $25,000 has been invested in creation of their parklet. Lola’s retains ownership of the parklet and can remove it anytime or for any reason.

“Prior to putting in the parklet we had been seriously considering moving. We’d outgrown our space and other business districts in Long Beach had come courting, encouraging us to relocate.” Say Luis and Brenda Navarro, “But the parklet has done so well for us we’re happy to stay now.”

The benefits to Lola’s have been swift, bountiful and ongoing.  Immediately upon installation people took notice.  The twenty plus prized sidewalk dining spaces became a highly visible calling card for Lola’s. Elegantly crafted, designed, and built by local progressive architectural firm Studio 111 and JR Van Dijs Builders & Developers the parklet has garnered serious media attention, including a profile in Sunset Magazine on this innovative new way of using public space. Lola’s sales numbers have already started moving up significantly compared to last year and Luis reports he has hired four new employees to keep up with the new demand.

That is the power of place: the power to allure, to engage, to entice people to feel welcome, to spend time, to enjoy themselves.

The success of the Berlin Bistro parklet has been even more impressive. At less than three months old the increased business brought in by the parklet has meant Kansteiner has needed to hire six new employees. Yes, I said six. Film and television locations scouts discovered both parklets almost immediately. Berlin’s parklet has already shot one car commercial and has another one scheduled. Luis and Brenda have hired a location agent to help them manage growing interest in Lola’s for TV & film.

A third parklet is planned at Number Nine, another restaurant in Retro Row located about ten doors down from Lola’s.

The benefits of parklets to the City of Long Beach include new revenue from permits and increased sales tax. Both parklets are part of vibrant Long Beach business districts (Lola’s on 4^th Street Retro Row, Berlin Bistro in the East Village) that have worked long and hard to create an interesting mix of businesses to create unique dining and shopping experiences. An additional benefit for all customers and residents was found while doing the overall parking inventory for both sites. Space was found for four new car parking spaces. Both districts are two of the first “Bike Friendly Business Districts” in the country as well, and have worked diligently to educate local citizens on the ease and benefit to themselves and the community of bicycling to support local shops.

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Charlie Gandy is the President of Livable Communities Inc., and is serving as the Local Host Chair for Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, which will take place in Long Beach this September 10-13. Charlie is the founding director of the Texas Bicycle Coalition (now Bike Texas), and the former Director of Advocacy Programs for the Bicycle Federation of America (now the National Center for Bicycling and Walking).

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.

Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" beautifully illustrates the mix of uses and resulting social vibrancy at Paris' now-demolished Gare Montparnasse / Photo: Paramount Pictures

When you’re watching a movie, how much attention do you pay to the setting? 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. We’ve collected ten of our favorites here, with explanations of why we think they tell great stories about place. Take a look, and let us know if you have a favorite Placemaking-related movie or two (or three!) that we should add to our Netflix queues!

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Ikiru (1962; director, Akira Kurosawa)
A bureaucrat who learns he is dying of stomach cancer unexpectedly finds a sense of purpose in his life by cutting through red tape to get a park built for neighborhood children.

Thieves’ Highway (1949; director Jules Dassin)
A feud among corrupt produce dealers at the San Francisco market comes alive because of the location footage. A wonderfully pulpy film noir thoroughly grounded in a very specific place.

Mon Oncle (1958; director, Jacques Tati)
An eccentric uncle comes to visit family in an absurdly well-ordered and well-groomed suburb. Accustomed to the joy and texture of city life, he is utterly unable to adapt. Tati is a brilliant physical comedian who once said, “”Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables” (“geometrical lines do not produce likeable people”). Watch him be hilariously confounded by a kitchen full of “convenient” modern appliances.

Play Time (1967; director, Jacques Tati)
Tati’s signature character, M. Hulot, is trapped in the linear, slick, modernist environment of 1960s Paris. There is almost no dialogue. It is all about sight and sound gags. You will have to watch this four times to get them all. And you will want to watch it four times.

La Bête Humaine (1938; director, Jean Renoir)
About trains and train conductors and cheating wives. The most beautiful footage of trains and rail yards ever filmed.

Brazil (1985; director, Terry Gilliam)
Wonderful to watch for its humorous takedown of bureaucracy and top-down institutions, and its praise for zealous nuts.

Hugo (2011; director, Martin Scorsese)
The balletic interplay of people in Hugo’s grand train station – travelers, shopkeepers, musicians, lovers – is a thrill to watch. Scorsese has created a place so vibrant, and so real, that you long to step into the screen and inhabit it yourself.

The Sandlot (1993; director, David M. Evans)
This film about a neighborhood baseball field recalls a time when a kid could walk (or as was often shown in the film, run) to the neighborhood ballfield, and stay there all day, every day, unsupervised. The only time he was expected at home was for dinner.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946; director Frank Capra)
Perhaps the ultimate American love song to community wisdom, with a walkable downtown to beat the band.

High Noon (1952; director, Fred Zinnemann)
Talk about a sense of place. All the drama in the world is contained on High Noon’s Main Street.

San Francisco's farmers markets offer fresh, local food

Don’t miss out!  If you’ll be attending the 7th International Public Markets Conference, or live in or near the Bay Area, you’ll want to attend our Best of the Bay Tasting Event, featuring fresh food from some of San Francisco’s top chefs.  Additionally, attendees will be able to sample beverages from a selection of local wineries, breweries and distilleries.

The evening will feature San Francisco’s best-loved chefs preparing direct-from-the-farmers-market delicacies, as well as samples of the region’s best organic beers, local vodka cocktails and some of Napa Valley’s finest wines.  This celebration of fresh, local foods is open to the public, and will take place on April 25th from 6:30-8:30 pm in the Grand Hall of the Ferry Building Marketplace.  “We are pleased we can highlight the diversity of our California spring harvest, and showcase the local chefs and farmers markets vendors that celebrate these ingredients,” said Dave Stockdale, CUESA executive director and Best of the Bay co-host.

“We are hosting this tasting event early in the evening so that chefs from 13 of the area’s best restaurants* can showcase their freshest takes on local offerings in person,” added Jane Connors, event co-host and manager of the Ferry Building Marketplace.  They will be joined by 14 Napa Valley Wineries*, 2 organic brewing companies* and Square One Organic Vodka, all sampling their finest wine, beer and cocktails. The tasting will also feature treats direct from several Bay Area farmers markets vendors, such as oysters on the half shell, empanadas, sorbets, and more.

PPS, CUESA and the Ferry Building Marketplace will play host to the event, coinciding with the 7th International Public Markets Conference taking place in San Francisco from April 24-26th.   The Conference will highlight the many ways local markets help reconnect local economies to communities, and will host market leaders from around the world including London, Barcelona, Budapest, New York, Seattle, New Orleans, and more.

“We hope to highlight the best of what public markets have to offer,” said PPS Senior Vice President Steven Davies, “and connect our conference attendees with the local community at this exciting celebration of the Bay Area.

Tickets are $65 for conference attendees (please purchase tickets through the conference website) and $75 each for non-conference attendees (available online at http://www.pps.org/best-of-the-bay/).

*See below for list of chefs, restaurants, wineries, brewing companies and distilleries

Chefs and Restaurants
Paul Arenstam, Americano
Alexander Ong, Betelnut
Bruce Hill, Bix
Craig Stoll, Delfina
Jake DesVoignes, Fish & Farm
Nate Keller, Gastronaut
Annie Somerville, Greens
Ronnie New, Magnolia Pub & Brewery
Daniel Clayton, Nibblers Eatery & Wine Bar
Staffan Terje, Perbacco
Bruce Hill, Picco
Chris L’Hommedieu, Restaurant Michael Mina
Erica Holland-Toll, The Lark Creek Inn

*Wineries, Breweries and Distilleries
Butte Creek Brewing
Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing Company
Square One Vodka
Cain Vineyard and Winery
CONSTANT
Cuvaison Estate Wines
Ehlers Estate
Etude
Joseph Phelps Vineyards
Merryvale Vineyards
Paraduxx
Parry Celars
Salvestrin
St. Clement Vineyards
Trefethen Family Vineyards
Tres Sabores

Many appreciate the San Francisco bus' cable lines, which indicate a bus route

PPS founder and president Fred Kent has recently started a social network group dedicated to the best transit systems in the world.  An interesting discussion has sprung up about transit in San Francisco — how the bus’ cable lines indicate a route, and how successful the schedule information release has been in encouraging locals to develop maps and programs for free public use.

What’s your favorite transit system?  Join in the discussion and tell us here.

Join the Placemaking Movement, PPS’s online social network dedicated to connecting Placemakers around the world!

• Wisconsin farmers highlight the benefits of shopping locally… in case you weren’t sure. [Chicago Tribune]

• The town of Hurlingham and Fulham in England hands over a popular community park to a private polo organization for the purpose of constructing a  private and exclusive polo field. [BBC and The Cowan Report]

• Niagara Falls, NY is on the brink of passing a controversial new zoning regulation on increased building heights in an effort to encourage green building practices while at the same time rivaling neighboring Canadian high rises. [Buffalo News]