Mark Plotz

Mark Plotz is the director of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, a resident program of the Project for Public Spaces. What that means, in practice, is that Mark is the man who makes Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place happen! Mark’s been poring over the results of last September’s conference in Long Beach, CA, and we recently had the chance to sit down with him when he made the trek up to HQ, to get a sense of how people responded to the new “Pro Place” focus. Mark also offered some teasers about the lead-up to Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2014, which will take place in Pittsburgh, PA next fall.

What were some of the trends that you saw in terms of what conference-goers voted for with their feet?

The good news is that Placemaking sessions fared very well, which is encouraging because it shows that the conference theme of “Pro Place” was resonating with people. One session that did very well was led by Victor Dover and John Massengale, who spoke about street design where we’re not just talking about paint and asphalt and dimensions, but really paying attention to context and creating beautiful streets.

Women and cycling was a popular subject. I could definitely see a lot of broad interest in making cycling a lot more reflective of this diverse country that we live in. A lot of bike advocacy has been geared toward the alpha-male bicyclists for too long, and now there’s a growing realization that there’s a whole new population that’s really interested in cycling and ready for alternatives to the car. We’re trying to be supportive of that in how we plan for the next conference, because people are indicating that they’re really interested in taking advocacy in that new direction.

Building on that advocacy theme–as much as people were coming to the last Pro Walk/Pro Bike and learning about Placemaking, us Placemakers all have a lot to learn from biking and walking advocates about how to run a campaign. Can you talk more about that?

Fred talks a lot about Zealous Nuts in his presentations, and there are no more zealous or nutty people than bike advocates! We’re very good at organizing, and showing up to meetings, and writing congressional offices. We’re a highly motivated crew. I think that Placemakers can learn a lot from rubbing elbows with bike advocates.

Bikers are sort of tribal. When you get a bunch of them in a room together, the conversation always seems to gravitate to the last a**hole you had an encounter with out on the road. That’s one of the things that really bonds bikers together: we’re out there and we don’t have much in the way of protection, so we’re dependent on the goodwill and skill of drivers, and also the DOT to give us a safe place to ride. So safety is a big shared concern.

You have to take the long view. The first Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference was in 1980, and it was about a hundred people in Asheville, NC. We had 900 people in Long Beach this year. From what I’ve been told by those who were there, the folks who showed up in Asheville were a bunch of idealists, working outside the system. But through the years, biking has been institutionalized, so a lot of those advocates became the first state bike/ped coordinators, and later the first local bike/ped coordinators. Over time, they were co-opted into the transportation establishment, which is a great thing.

There are still advocates out there, because that bike/ped coordinator still needs support from the public, and to know that people want this stuff. So advocates give him or her the cover. And I wonder if maybe that’s where Placemakers need to go now: to organize as advocates, develop a common agenda, and then hopefully get co-opted into transportation, governance, all of these places where our government already spends money but builds a bunch of crap.

How did that co-opting happen? How did these folks go from being the idealists outside of the system to being the inmates running the asylum, so to speak?

I would say it was ISTEA in 1991. It helps if the Feds are saying “look, if you want to get this money to build trails and other enhancement projects, you need to have a state bike/ped coordinator.” That was a major boost for the movement. But there was demand for that legislation. Back when Dan Burden was hired on as the first state bike/ped coordinator in Florida, biking was pretty popular. The Feds saw demand, and they wanted to answer it.

Any other thoughts on where PWPB is heading in 2014, and how it will continue to evolve? 

Well, of course, I think that we have the smartest conference attendees out there! And we function best and are most effective when we can demonstrate that the improvements we’re arguing for benefit a community. That when you rightsize a street, for instance, you’re not just doing good things for people who walk and bike, you’re adding value back to the property that the road had subtracted from. Placemaking is always going to be a part of it, if we’re smart. We’re seeing that in the attendance in 2012, and that’s going to continue in 2014.

The people in Pittsburgh are very excited. One of the reasons that they wanted to host the 2014 conference is that they want to kickstart their bike/ped plan implementation, but they also want to do more with Placemaking. I’m looking forward to doing interventions around the city. We’re going to do a warm-up event in the fall of 2013, and I hope to see a lot of good things come out of that, a lot of project ideas. PPS has budgeted for staff involvement with the city.

Pittsburgh is a great laboratory for Placemaking. That city has a lot of people in foundations that are interested in place, they’ve got a burgeoning tech sector, and they’ve got a couple of great people, like the guys from Walnut Capital who re-purposed an old Nabisco plant…you don’t have to sell these folks on the principles of mixed-use neighborhoods! They want more of this. They want to get developers there so they can evangelize to them and get city councilors there to see that this stuff works, and that there’s demand. That’s exciting.

Coming from the bike advocacy world, I believe that we’ve made a key mistake in thinking that federal legislation is the be-all and end-all of what’s going to make this country bicycle-friendly and walkable. But it’s more complex than that, especially when you’ve got a Congress that’s not interested in solving big problems. It’s going to be incumbent on us to engage with the private sector. It helps when you’ve got people who’ve shown that this can be tremendously lucrative, and that people want it.

Next stop: Pittsburgh! / Photo: mismisimos via Flickr

Via our Rightsizing Streets Guide, Project for Public Spaces promotes rightsizing as a means of improving streets for all users and creating a sense of place.  Rightsizing improves safety and accessibility for walkers, bikers, and drivers by reconfiguring the street’s space to match the needs of the street’s community. Rightsizing is often critical to the cultivation of streets as places, in which streets provide for safe and enjoyable human experiences and foster inclusive, healthy, and economically viable communities.

The Porch in Philadelphia before and after rightsizing / Photo: University City District

These case studies illustrate that rightsizing can help activate a corner by creating a plaza, transform a corridor for blocks or miles by encouraging pedestrians and bicyclists, and improve access to local businesses, neighbors, and other attractions.

• The Porch at 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia and Broadway Boulevard in New York City transformed poorly utilized road space into active pedestrian plazas.
• When University Place wanted to create a main street in their newly incorporated municipality, their rightsizing effort included installing sidewalks where there had been only road shoulders, improving the ability of pedestrians to cross the street, and beautifying the formerly overwhelmingly car-oriented Bridgeport Way.
• East Boulevard in Charlotte was also rightsized in response to the community’s desire for a safer and more vibrant pedestrian environment with increased opportunities for outdoor dining. They brought the ‘Boulevard’ back to East Boulevard with slower car speeds making for a safer, quieter street, and infrastructure to make that street navigable on foot and by bike. Edgewater Drive has a similar story.
• In Poughkeepsie, rightsizing Raymond Avenue included streetscape improvements that encouraged pedestrian access to local retail and dining establishments.
• Main Street/US 395 in tiny Bridgeport, California was rightsized to increase parking and support pedestrians’ access to local businesses.
• Prospect Park West in Brooklyn was transformed by the inclusion of a traffic-separated two way bike lane and pedestrian refuge islands. The result was a safer street for all users, and much easier access to Prospect Park.
• Rightsizing Nebraska Avenue in Tampa and Stone Way in Seattle reduced traffic crashes, and improved the experience of the street for pedestrians and bicyclists.

East Boulevard Overview / Photo: City of Charlotte

East Boulevard Crossing / Photo: City of Charlotte

Each rightsized street was improved for pedestrians, and most created bike lanes as well, with minimal adverse—and often positive—impacts on vehicle operations. While vehicular transportation is important, our streets should welcome people using many different modes. Youth, some elderly, and many in between are unable to drive, but happy to walk and bike when it’s safe and pleasant. Further, many may prefer to walk or bike for their health, convenience, environmental concerns, or social reasons. By allowing a child to bike to school, a bike lane provides autonomy for the child (and the parent), and improves the atmosphere of that corridor. By calming the traffic next to that bike lane, the street is made safer for all. Of course, street design is not all there is to Placemaking, and not every rightsizing effort is perfectly aligned with its neighborhood’s desires or needs. However, rightsizing is often a critical component of a community’s Placemaking strategy.

East Boulevard Outdoor Dining / Photo: City of Charlotte

Rightsizing projects tend to use before and after measurements of success that come from traditional traffic engineering priorities like reducing injuries, the number of speeding cars, or travel delay. Rightsizing succeeds by these measures, but they only hint at the fundamental place-centered outcomes of such projects: enabling thriving communities. Safety and mobility offer support to, but are different than, our more basic and fulfilling daily activities: shopping, socializing, eating, learning, recreating, game-playing, bench-sitting, people-watching, and all of the many other experiences that are more frequent and better in successful public spaces. We would be well served by more documentation of these activities in addition to the standard safety and mobility metrics. Streets and sidewalks are our most common public spaces. Rightsizing is a major way to activate these spaces and build communities.

Click here to visit our new Rightsizing Streets Guide to learn more about how rightsizing can help a street near you!

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.”

Click to purchase from Powell’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

FHWA has high hopes for performance measures, too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Nairobi's Kibera slum, life is lived out on the street. Public space is the lifeblood of the neighborhood. / Photo: neajjean via Flickr

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you care about your community. You’re involved with the daily life of the neighborhood to some degree, and if you want to get more involved, you know that there are plenty of options and resources to help you figure out where your talents would be most useful and the work enjoyable. But what if your neighborhood was made out of cardboard and corrugated sheet metal? Where would you start then?

As it turns out, if you ask the experts on informal settlements at UN-Habitat, they’ll give you an answer that sounds a lot like what an org like PPS might tell you back home: start with the public spaces. While perhaps counter-intuitive at first, considering that many developing-world slums lack basic necessities like clean water, electricity, and health care, it turns out that great public spaces are even more important to places like Nairobi’s Kibera and Mumbai’s Dharavi, because they allow many issues to be addressed at once. “You have to get people to understand that, when they are planning a city, they have to think multi-sectorial,” says Thomas Melin, a Head of Habitat’s Office of External Relations. “If you go into a slum area and you try to sort out only one thing–the power, the water, etc–it will not help! It might even make things worse. You have to sort out several basic things in order to get neighborhoods to work.”

Public spaces bring many different people, activities, and government functions together where everyone can see them; this makes them ideal places to show, by example, how multi-sectoral (aka interdisciplinary) planning processes like Placemaking can start the process of transformation that turns informal settlements into thriving urban neighborhoods. In recent years, we have found ourselves working ever farther afield; it made perfect sense, then, to partner with the UN-Habitat in 2011. “When you have these kinds of partnerships,” Melin explains, “you exchange, and you help, and you assist, and both parties learn–there are enormous needs in the world, and there’s a need for a network like the one PPS has in the US, but for the whole world.”

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities and with the gap between poor and affluent areas widening, the need to adapt and adjust Placemaking for new audiences in informal communities is particularly acute. Poverty is rampant in these settlements, making Western notions of “private space” for commercial and social activity seem quaint. “People in Kibera use public spaces very differently from how they might in, say, New York City,” notes PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin, who led a series of Placemaking workshops in one of Africa’s largest slums this past spring through our partnership with UN-Habitat. “In New York, ‘public space’ translates to a park, or a plaza. In Kibera, the streets are truly the public spaces, and people are out all day, every day: selling, begging, 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.”

Even in downtown Nairobi, the Jevangee Garden is filled with homeless residents. / Photo: Vanessa September

So why haven’t international NGOs and UN-Habitat been focusing on public spaces for ages, already? According to Juma Assiago, the Human Settlements Officer leading the Global Network on Safer Cities (GNSC) with UN-Habitat’s Safer Cities Programme, the organization’s partnership with PPS and its broader shifts in focus are the culmination of a decades-long shift in thinking. “We’ve moved from the conception of local government alone to local governance that claims responsibility for all city stakeholders in the planning, management and governance of urban centers,” Assiago says.

In the Stockholm Conference in 1972, the UN-Habitat was formed by member governments of the United Nations. This was followed soon after by the Habitat I gathering in Vancouver, where the discussion was largely focused on creating an agenda for providing more safe and adequate housing for all. True to the times, there was little concern with the spaces between the buildings themselves. Following much of the same logic that led to slum clearance and urban renewal in US cities during the decades before it was formed, Habitat’s mandate led to the organization’s early focus on bricks-and-mortar solutions. At the Habitat II summit in Istanbul twenty years later, member states and partners came to agree that human settlements development was not a housing-only challenge, but included the built environment and the living environment encompassed by the built environment. The UN-Habitat mandate widened in response.

“This was the major outcome in 1996,” notes Assiago. “To be able to achieve sustainable human settlements, member states acknowledged the need to develop partnership arrangements that allow various stakeholders, including the private sector, NGOs, youth groups, women’s groups, and academia to participate as equal partners with governments in shaping cleaner, safer and more equitable cities, towns and villages. By 2007, for the first time in human history, the majority of the population was urban as compared to rural. A fundamental shift is taking place from a sustainable human settlements agenda to a sustainable urban development agenda.”

With that has also come a shift of focus of how cities are being built, and in how people perceive development: urbanization is increasingly now seen as the source of development, and not the outcome of development. “This has led policymakers and practitioners alike to critically question: are we having people for the structures or building structures for the people?” Assiago says. “This shift in thinking is placing more emphasis on cities for people which moves us from the aerial skyline view of cities to the level of the walking persons eye level view of cities.”

Melin echoes this sentiment when speaking about Habitat’s work in Nairobi: “We use public space as a symbol when we train different municipalities around the world to take a more multi-sectorial approach and specifically think much more about individuals. Cities are about people, it’s not really houses. Take the houses away and the city will still survive; if you take the people away, there is no city.”

This, in turn, echoes the sentiment at the heart of the work that PPS does. Placemaking is, first and foremost, an inclusive process that brings people together to take part in shaping the public spaces that will serve as platforms for the daily life of their communities. Creating great places and creating great human networks are, in fact, one in the same. Elijah Agevi, the CEO of Research Triangle Africa, put it beautifully when he wrote of the workshop that Cynthia led at Kibera’s Silanga field, “It was certainly one of the key milestones during the Placemaking process. It was humbling to see different stakeholders working so constructively together towards a common goal!”

Where the Kibera slum ends, a golf course and condos begin. / Photo: Chrissy Olson via Flickr

In cities like Narobi, slums nestle up next to the freeways, garbage dumps, golf courses, and other awkwardly-inserted implements of Western culture that have gouged their way into the rapidly-changing cityscape.While the formal and informal cities often sit within spitting distance of each other, they operate as two different worlds, with very different civic lives. In the formal city, Melin explains, the system is set up to service a wealthy and powerful minority. Engagement is mostly non-existent for many residents, and often there is not even a legal right to participation. In informal settlements, however, services are provided more often by NGOs than by local governments, which has created a very different climate.

“These organizations utilize participatory decision-making as a means to ensure that they do something that the community needs, understands, and will continuously maintain,” he says. “You need to get the buy-in. There’s no use in building a clinic if everyone wants a school. This means that people in the slums have rarely seen a project which is not very participatory! If we come together with partners and want to create a public space, we have to invite participation; there’s no other way. This is the norm.”

"We not only have the opportunity to learn new things, but to learn them in new ways." Photo: The Advocacy Project via Flickr

The process of creating strong public spaces for vibrant but tenuous neighborhoods offers residents of developing-world cities a unique opportunity to not only build stronger and more permanent physical settlements, but to build more robust civic social networks as well. Placemaking can serve as a bridge linking the resources of the formal city and the open culture of the informal city, enriching life on both sides. Most likely, this will in turn inform the way that Placemaking processes are led in cities in the developing world as well, as Western society shifts toward a more publicly-oriented, less ownership-driven model out of necessity. “That’s why we’re excited about this partnership,” Nikitin says. “We not only have the opportunity to learn new things, but to learn them in new ways, and to see Placemaking from an entirely different perspective.”

“The globe is becoming increasingly urban, and on the other side, urbanization is becoming global,” Assiago says. “Sometimes, when we are approaching Placemaking and public spaces, the common mistake is to apply techniques as if one size fits all; but this is not true! Through learning from practice, we begin to understand how cities are human creations that configure themselves to development in totally different ways based on the social context…the social capital of the city. We need to be able to understand those flows in order to connect with the richness of value and quality that public spaces can provide.”

Click to learn more about #WUF6

In the words of Cecelia Martinez, director of Habitat’s NYC office, “Whatever you do for human kind, you do it in cities.” To that end, we are already working with our friends at UN-Habitat and Nairobi’s City Council on an initiative, announced by the Kenyan capital’s mayor this past March, “to make Nairobi a social city” by creating 60 new public spaces around the city over the next five years. In addition, Cynthia will be attending the World Urban Forum 6 in Naples next week to lead a workshop on How to Turn a Place Around on Tuesday, September 4th. We’ve included a schedule of events where Cynthia will be participating during the week-long gathering below. If you’d like to connect with her, you can email her, or follow her on Twitter.

How to Turn a Place Around
Tuesday, September 4th, 9:00am-12:00pm
Pavilion 4, Room 20 Mostra D’altremare exhibition Center

Sustainable Urban Development Network (SUD-Net) Meeting
Wednesday am the 5th, 9:30-11:30am
Sala Sardinia Room

Launch of the Global Network for Safer Cities
Wednesday, September 5th, 5:30pm

SEDESOL Networking Event
Monday, September 3rd, 2:30pm

And, last but certainly not least, we have just released a working draft of a new publication, Placemaking and the Future of Cities. This new pamphlet, designed to serve as a guide for mayors who are interested in using the Placemaking process to directly engage citizens in the revitalization of their cities, can be downloaded by clicking here. This is a draft-in-progress, and your suggestions, corrections, updates, and other input are both welcome and valued!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see you in Long Beach!

Brooklyn's Court Street is often bustling with pedestrian activity. / Photo: PPS

“Walking: It’s What You Do Once You’ve Parked Your Car…”

Or so lamented Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, in his keynote address at last week’s Walking and the Life of the City Symposium, organized by the NYU Wagner School’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Vanderbilt set the morning’s theme by charting the history of walking from its criminalization with the first jaywalking laws in 1915, to its sharp fall from public favor in the 1970s following a spike in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), changes in land use (widened streets, trees removed between roads and sidewalks), and the popularization of our favorite modern conveniences, like drive-throughs and escalators.

“Walking is like sex” Vanderbilt postulated. “Everyone is doing it, but nobody knows how much.” Quipping that we haven’t yet had “the great Kinsey report of walking,” he proposed that much work needs to be done to define not just the quantitative indicators for walking, but also the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make truly complete streets. Together, the researchers’ presentations started to present a Kinsey-like breadth of information about the role that walking plays in contemporary culture. Full presentations will soon be available online here, and a publication of the day’s proceedings is in the offing. In the meantime, brief summaries of the presentations are coupled below with a big question raised by each researcher’s findings.

• 

  Pedestrian satisfaction is closely linked to motivation; vibrant walking streets like this one in Lisbon can encourage people to get out and enjoy traveling on two feet. / Photo: B G via Flickr

  McGill University’s Kevin Manaugh aims to fill the gap between behavioral psychology and the built environment. Arguing that there’s a difference between choosing to walk (the environmentalists), and having no choice but to walk (poorer populations), his research categorized types of walkers to understand who’s doing the walking and why they’re doing it. Manaugh’s research shows no relationship between the distance walked during a trip and the satisfaction experienced by the walker, illustrating how the enjoyment of walking relies heavily on one’s motivation. How can we motivate more people to start walking by choice?

• Picking up where Manaugh left off, Dick Ettema, of Utrecht University, explored how well-being has been defined by academic researchers. He suggested that urban design could be improved through deeper research into the relationship between sensory experience and behavior change, noting that “Physical experience is much more important when walking [than other modes of travel].” Ettema’s research into understanding optimal arousal for pedestrians raises an interesting question for anyone interested in the idea of re-thinking Streets as Places: What are the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make out streets truly complete?
  

• Columbia University’s David King looked at the relationship between transportation system funding and walkability, making a strong case for “person-oriented development” by highlighting key problem areas, such as fuel taxes driving transit investment decisions, wealthy areas enjoying the majority of bike and pedestrian investment, and a planning preference for increasing speed. With lawsuits against cities for decades of underinvestment in pedestrian infrastructure and non-ADA compliance becoming increasingly common, he asked “Are pedestrian environments something we should be engineering, the same way we engineer road environments?“

• The second panel of the day kicked off with the Rudin Center’s Andrew Mondschein, who discussed his research into how people cognitively map their streets and neighborhoods. Presenting different processes of spatial learning, he explained how we engage in ‘active learning’ when walking, noting that frequent pedestrians tend to have a better understanding of their streets and neighborhoods than transit riders. With this in mind, Mondschein raised the question: Might mobile apps, GPS, and other ICT platforms be chipping away at our ‘walking IQ’ by making us less reliant on our cognitive maps?

• Sarah Kaufman, also of the Rudin Center, also presented research on the impact that digital technology is having on walking. “Right now,” Kauffman explained, “we know that physical & augmented reality are separate; in future, we will feel more transported and immersed by AR apps…especially in areas such as navigation, tourism and translation.” Kauffman’s primary question, regarding the future of this field, is worth repeating verbatim: “Are we aiming to augment reality, or substitute it?“

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  Data on mid-block crossings is hard to come by, but important / Photo: Ian Muttoo via Flickr

  UC Berkeley’s Robert Schneider’s work aims to better quantify pedestrian activity by gathering more complete data. Explaining the need for different types of data that are currently lacking (middle-block crossings, trip generation, travel within activity centers and parking lots, and movement within multimodal trips key among them), his talk highlighted innovative forms of data collection which might make this process easier, such as video and GPS tracking using stationary cameras and smart phones. If we’re currently missing a great deal of data on shorter walking trips, how might collecting that data more efficiently change how we design for walking?

So what do you think? How can we get more people walking? Are digital apps the answer–or do they just raise even more troublesome questions? Is contemporary research on walking even asking the right questions, to begin with? Join the discussion commenting below!

Even in Red Deer's downtown area, pedestrians play second fiddle to automotive traffic / Photo: Gary Toth

Red Deer, Alberta, is a small city about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. Once a sleepy agricultural outpost that provided a convenient stopover for travelers moving between the territory’s two larger cities, Red Deer has experienced substantial growth over the past three decades due to the growth of the oil industry, booming from 30,000 residents in 1975 to just over 90,000 in 2012. As might be expected given that time frame, virtually all of the new growth has taken the form of auto-oriented sprawl.

Today, the City Council is seeking to change that, and have developed a new civic vision that is outlined in the Strategic Direction 2012 – 2014 report. This vision included the creation of an Integrated Movement Study (IMS) with the following goal:

“Our deliberate decision to create viable alternatives to single occupant vehicle travel in our transportation network encourages healthy active lifestyles, environmental stewardship, supports safety for people of all ages, increases use of our public and green spaces, and integrates our sidewalks, trails, bike lanes, transit service, rail, and roads with our built environment.”

Red Deer began to retune their downtown streets even before the start of the Integrated Movement Study, as evidenced by the rightsizing of Gaetz Avenue. Note the deployment of chicanes. / Photo: Gary Toth

Earlier this month, PPS’s Gary Toth was invited by the City and 8-80 Cities, which is leading the IMS, to conduct several interactive sessions on the role that Complete Streets might play in moving Red Deer to a balanced and livable transportation network. While in Red Deer, Gary facilitated two interactive discussions on Complete Streets as part of a workshop called Building Better Blocks. The first discussion began with photos of several streets, some with designated bike and bus lanes and some with none. Participants were asked to discuss whether the streets were complete. Quite a few of the participants argued that the streets without bike lanes were not complete, but as the discussion unfolded, the group came to understand that Complete Streets policies do not require that designated space be provided for each mode, but rather that travel via all modes be safe, comfortable & convenient for everyone, regardless of age or ability.

This means that bike lanes are not only not required, but sometimes even discouraged. When street dimensions and adjacent land uses slow vehicular speeds to below 20 mph, for instance, it is actually preferred that bicyclists share the street with the cars. Sharing space forces everyone to be more cautious and observant, and creates safer driving conditions for the drivers and bikers, as well as nearby pedestrians.

Workshop participants quickly pointed out that while this Dublin Street was technically a “Complete Street”, its value to the community was limited due to lack of fostering the Street as a Place. / Photo: Gary Toth

Participants at the Red Deer workshop also quickly grasped the fact that allocating space for all modes doesn’t automatically generate pedestrian and bicycle traffic. With little prompting, participants recognized that streets such as the one from Dublin, pictured to the left, would benefit greatly from a Placemaking process that would engage residents in planning for how the street will be used, ensuring that the space would meet local needs and attract more people out to use the street. This idea is at the core of PPS’s Streets as Places initiative.

Armed with this new awareness of what it takes to complete a street, workshop participants went outside to test their ideas in a unique learning environment. Called Safety City, the space is a reduced-scale network of streets and buildings created to teach the children of Red Deer about how to safely navigate their city’s streets, both on foot and in cars. The adults in the workshop were provided with a range of props that they used to re-shape the small scale streets with bike lanes, medians, crosswalks and bulb-outs—and there was no lack of creativity in doing so!

The following day, Gary led a group of City officials—planners, engineers and others— advocates, and stakeholders through an exercise designed to foster mindfulness of the 20^th Century practice of planning streets solely for high-speed auto traffic. Starting with the dawn of the private car and accelerating after World War II, street planning policies have completely ignored the diverse uses of streets for generations, sacrificing communities to move automotive traffic as efficiently as possible. What is needed now in Red Deer (and around the world) is a return to the practice of creating a wide palette of street types that are sensitive to the community context. This range is known by planners as a “Street Typology,” and while the name may be cumbersome, Street Typologies are nimble tools that lead to streets that better serve their surroundings.

Street Typologies seek not to turn over every one of our streets to the bicycle and pedestrian at the expense of moving goods and vehicles, but instead aim for a balanced transportation system. Developing a range of context sensitive street types provides cities with the flexibility to design different streets in different ways, and fosters a civic mindset that leads to more people thinking about streets as places not just vessels for moving cars, but for tying the community together. Street Typologies also ease the resistance of transportation professionals to new ideas, since they reassure these professionals by making it clear that not all streets will need to be retrofitted to 20 mph Main Street-style corridors. Finally, these typologies convey to community, biking, and pedestrian advocates that the era of relegating all non-motorized street users to secondary and peripheral status is over.

A Red Deer City engineer explains how his group retuned the demonstration street to foster Placemaking as well as comfort for all modes. Median, landscaping, mid block crossings and even a roundabout were created. / Photo: Gary Toth

While each group of participants came up with a slightly different “toolkit” of streets, all agreed that there was room in Red Deer for a wider variety of street types: slower streets where bikes and pedestrians are the priority; destination streets where the primary purpose of the street is social and economic exchange; and wider, faster streets designed to move people and goods around town. As this booming city in the “Texas of the North” has shown, a lot can change in a few decades. Now, with a better understanding of how to create more complete streets, Red Deer is on the road to success.

Gary Toth – Senior Director, Transportation Initiatives, Project for Public Spaces from Clean Air Partnership on Vimeo.

Last month Gary Toth spoke at the Complete Streets Forum in Toronto about the symbiotic relationship between the Complete Streets and Placemaking movements. Early on in the talk, posted above in full, Gary points out that a complete street makes travel “safe, comfortable, and convenient” for all modes–but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it overtly provides for each one in its own area. Complete streets can often include flexible or mixed-mode areas (Salt Lake City’s green lanes are a great example), but the focus should be on creating a street that is welcoming to everyone, no matter the mode of travel.

The question at the heart of Gary’s talk is about how we build community through transportation. When talking about streets, “Complete,” he argues, “has got to be about community-building, not just about taking space away from cars.” Efforts to create more complete streets often bump into opposition that claims bike lanes and bump-outs are part of a “war on cars,” and Gary explains how to re-frame the issue as being about creating neighborhoods that are safer and more inclusive: the kinds of places where you feel comfortable letting your child ride ahead a bit when out biking.

If you enjoy the video above and are interested in learning more about how to engage your local transportation agency to start rethinking streets as places, here’s a link to the Citizens Guide to Better Streets, which Gary mentions at the end of his presentation.

The Destination Creation organizers recorded all of the presentations given during the two-day event, which brought together leaders from the Placemaking and Place Branding movements to discuss how, as ULI’s Edward T. McMahon so succinctly put it in a recent article, “Place is more than just a location on a map.”

Fred’s talk provides an overview on Placemaking, with a specific focus on the importance of the Power of 10 philosophy and the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategy for improving a place. Gary spoke about the importance of planning for Streets as Places in creating great destinations.

We write about these ideas frequently here on the Placemaking Blog, but there’s something especially compelling about listening to someone speak about a topic that they’re passionate about, so this seemed worth sharing! You can click here to visit the conference site to hear both talks, complete with accompanying visual presentations.

Photo: Clickr.com

A street can be much more than just a route from Point A to Point B; indeed, streets can be truly great places when a variety of needs, uses, and modes are planned for. Fortunately, the Federal Highway Association (FHWA) has recognized that wider, straighter, faster planning strategies do not work for every road, leading to the creation of the Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) program, which aims to create thoroughfares that are more responsive to local needs.

From the FHWA’s website:

As citizens’ expectations for transportation projects have risen, so too has awareness of community needs among transportation planners and roadway designers. The question now becomes, “how do we create projects that are broadly supported and meet a range of needs?” The collaborative Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) approach is an answer to that question. With the CSS approach, interdisciplinary teams work with public and agency stakeholders to tailor solutions to the setting; preserve scenic, aesthetic, historic, and environmental resources; and maintain safety and mobility. The goal of FHWA’s CSS program is to deliver a program of transportation projects that is responsive to the unique character of the communities it serves. In short, CSS supports livable communities and sustainable transportation.

A team including our own Gary Toth and Aurash Khawarzad recently led a CSS team in re-thinking Denver’s Brighton Boulevard, which was chosen as one of four pilot sites in the CSS Champions program. Brighton Boulevard currently serves as a busy arterial connection between downtown Denver and its eastern suburbs. The road is surrounded mostly by industrial properties, and tensions have arisen as the city moves forward with plans to redevelop the corridor into a more walkable, livable area.

As the desire to create more multi-use neighborhoods becomes increasingly pervasive, more and more cities will be facing the same kinds of challenges that Denver is facing on Brighton Boulevard. Above is a new video, produced for PPS by Khawarzad, that illustrates how the CSS process works directly with local stakeholders to reconcile conflicting needs. If you think that your community could benefit from this approach, email gtoth@pps.org.

Abandoned public baths along the Dún Laoghaire waterfront / Photo: Gary Toth

Places, like many things, go through cycles—and even the grandest of public spaces can wind up looking a bit worn and forlorn. Last month, PPS’s Fred Kent, Gary Toth, and Kathy Madden traveled to the wonderfully bucolic community of Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, to conduct one of our How to Turn a Place Around training workshops. The area between Dún Laoghaire’s waterfront and high street is picture-perfect at first glance, but the 30 workshop participants quickly identified many underlying flaws. Led by the PPS team, these locals recognized assets that together represented a “gold mine” of Placemaking potential, and developed some wonderfully creative ideas for knitting together the area’s public spaces to create a truly extraordinary destination.

Dún Laoghaire, a suburban seaside town about 7.5 miles south of Dublin along Dublin Bay, has long been nourished by its access to the sea—first as a sea base for Ireland to carry out raids on Britain and Gaul, and later as a commercial shipping center. In 1821, Ireland decided to build a harbor here due to increasing difficulty for ships to navigate, berth and transfer cargo along the River Liffey in Dublin (at one point, shipwrecks rose to literally hundreds per year off the coast). As a result, a new town center developed uphill along a former military road, and came to be called George’s Street. Ireland’s first railway started in Dublin and terminated in Dún Laoghaire (then called Kingstown), establishing Dún Laoghaire as a preferred suburb of the capital. Ever since, the fortunes of the town’s waterfront and its high street have been tied together.

George's Street, briefly pedestrianized, was re-opened to auto traffic in 2008 / Photo: Gary Toth

Dún Laoghaire was one of the Irish centers that began to experience decline when Ireland accelerated its construction of big freeways like the M11 and the M50 in the 1990s (just a few decades after the same strategy destroyed Main Streets across the US). George’s Street now suffers from over 30 vacancies along its length. The street was briefly pedestrianized at the start of the new millennium. Due to shop owners’ complaints and a lack of a sufficient revitalization of the street, one way traffic was restored in 2008. The waterfront has, similarly, lost a lot of its luster. Elements like the public baths, which flourished until 1997, are no longer functioning; some are falling into disrepair.

How to Turn a Place Around (HTTAPA), which is designed to enhance the impact of designers, planners, and other professionals by illustrating how their efforts to revitalize public spaces can strengthen existing communities, got a few tweaks for its first Irish audience. The course included a session on Streets as Places and a Street Audit. The focus was on George’s Street and a parallel strip of the harbor between the East Pier and City Hall, an area that provides a solid foundation for a great waterfront district, but that faces a lot of challenges. HTTAPA focuses on the idea that, because people are holistic thinkers and see their world in an integrated way, engaging the people who live and work in a space is the best way to turn everything upside down, and take places from inadequate to extraordinary.

A panoramic view of the harbor from the Grand Marine Hotel / Photo: Gary Toth

On the first afternoon, the attendees evaluated six distinct sites in the downtown area of the waterfront via a process we call the Place Game, which helps attendees to better understand these sites and the connections between them from their own perspective. The sites included: Carlisle Pier and its entrance area; entry areas in front of the East and Ferry Terminal Piers; the Pavilion, a newer public space created when the airspace over the train line to and from Dublin was covered over and landscaped; and a plaza alongside the new library, currently under construction.

Kent, Madden, and Toth guided participants through the Placemaking process, helping them to identify challenges and brainstorm a range of solutions, from short-term, inexpensive fixes that could start to change the way that other residents of Dún Laoghaire thought about the waterfront and start building local momentum immediately, all the way up to creating a long-term vision for the area.

On the following day, participants conducted a Street Audit at five sites—three along Marine Road and two on George’s Street. Guided by the Streets as Places concept and observation of these sites, the team came to understand the important role that streets could play in knitting together the various destinations within the vibrant downtown district that they’d imagined. The broad corridor of Marine Drive was identified as a critical lynchpin in their vision, as it represents the greatest opportunity for linking George’s Street to the waterfront.

Harsh streetscaping on Marine Drive, between the water and George's Street / Photo: Gary Toth

Below, we’ve mapped the ideas that were generated for central Dún Laoghaire during the HTTAPA training. If you are working on a public space project in your own city, take a look—and if you’re interested in learning more about the Placemaking process and the various strategies and concepts behind creating a great place, you’re in luck! We’ll be offering another HTTAPA training here in New York City in just two weeks (April 19-20). If you’re interested, email Casey Wang: cwang@pps.org.

View How to Turn Dún Laoghaire Around in a larger map

MAP KEY
DARK BLUE AREAS: Sites analyzed on during the waterfront Place Game evaluation
LIGHT BLUE AREAS: Sites analyzed on the second day of HTTAPA through PPS’s Street Audit process
PINK LINES: Existing streets and paths that need to be re-engineered to restore balance & re-thought via the Placmaking process
YELLOW LINES: New paths that could be engineered to improve connectivity throughout the downtown

So much future potential. Photo: Ed Yourdon via Flickr.

And it wasn’t just Tahrir Square or the boulevards of central Cairo that played a role. It was the streets of residential neighborhoods as well.

Back in July, PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin visited Cairo for the UN’s Designing Safe Cities with Women and Girls stakeholder planning meeting (the trip was part of our partnership with UN-HABITAT). While she was there, she talked with people about how, during the February revolution, they had used the streets outside their homes in a way they had never envisioned before.

“The neighbors were protecting their own streets,” Nikitin says. “They had cellphone sentinels deployed, and if they saw Mubarak’s people coming, they would call and text and hold them off. Middle-class people who had never wielded a weapon before banded together with their neighbors. Women were on daytime duty and men were on the nighttime watch.”

Those actions revolutionized the way people saw these streets. “The street become not just a place to park their car, it become the gateway to their homes in a way that was sacred,” says Nikitin. “People came out in the street to defend their homes and also to participate in this revolution. They also were using the streets in a new way, meeting neighbors. It created a sense of shared space that protected their neighborhoods like a moat.”

Vendors are vital to the Cairo streetscape. Photo: Ed Yourdon via Flickr

It was a sense that no one wanted to give up.

“People were still talking about it in July,” says Nikitin. “It deepened the social cohesion of these neighborhoods. And they’re talking about how to bring that forward, saying, ‘We don’t want to just go back into our little apartments and shut our door, we want to go forward. But we don’t know how to do that.’”

Some architects and planners also recognize the pressing need for a better relationship to public space in Cairo. In an article published over the weekend in the English edition of Al-masry Al-youm, Steven Viney reported on a presentation from a planner called Fady al-Sadek about “The Streets of Cairo and the Battle of Public Space.” From Viney’s excellent report:

Sadek said disrespect for Cairo’s public spaces, and therefore the connectedness of its citizens, has resulted in urban planning disasters, such as the large informal expansions that now accommodate approximately 60 percent of Cairo’s population.

This disrespect has not only meant over-congestion and poor planning. The majority of Cairenes have become alienated from their own city because the common ground no longer belongs to them.

Overcoming this division is one of the biggest challenges facing urban planners: How can Cairo, formal and informal, be progressively brought back together?…

In this vein, public spaces play four vital roles: opening channels of communication among the communities of Cairo; rebuilding the relationship and trust between residents and planning authorities; bridging the gap between the macro and micro urban scales of planning and development; and the establishment of bottom-up rather than top-down developments.…

The example of Al Azhar park was used: an old trash dump transformed into Cairo’s finest green public space. The space now very successfully bridges the gap between the more affluent, modern east side of the park with the western, semi-informal side.…

Al-Azhar Park is one of Cairo's public space success stories. Photo: Andrea Diener via Flickr.

Sadek believes that respect for public space is at the root of what is needed to reinstate a lost nationwide sense of community. It would present the groundwork for what is fundamentally needed to overcome most of Cairo’s urban planning challenges.

Clearly, there is a real appetite in Cairo for a Placemaking approach to planning. It will be interesting to see how things develop there as the political situation continues to evolve.

(Thanks to @beirutpspace for the link to the Al-masry Al-youm story.)

Photos: Street scenes, Ed Yourdon; Al-Azhar Park, Andrea Diener; via Flickr.

NYCDOT Opens Plans to Public Review

It’s an ambitious goal: invite hundreds – perhaps thousands – of opinions from community members with oftentimes drastically different needs, wishes and histories.  And then take these many visions and incorporate them into the design of a single community plaza.

Myrtle Avenue Plaza Community meeting

On Myrtle Avenue in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, the NYCDOT’s Plaza Program set out to do just that. The participatory processes–led by DOT’s community partner the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, the local BID and LDC– incorporates the community’s experience and vision into plans that will transform a busy street dominated by traffic into active places where people will linger or sit, talk with neighbors, shop at local businesses.

The new Myrtle Avenue Plaza was one of nine projects selected to transform neighborhoods as part of the NYCDOT Plaza Program’s first round of interventions. Since then, budget cuts forced the Plaza Program to scale back. Now on its fourth round, the Plaza Program will reclaim three underutilized streets and create pedestrian-oriented plazas and hopefully three new plazas per year in the future.

Myrtle Ave. between Hall St. and Emerson Place was selected as the location for a new plaza because that section in particular, “met the criteria of the NYC Plaza Program and, in addition, had the support of elected officials’ discretionary funds, the Department of City Planning and Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program funding,” according to Vaidila Kungys, Project Manager at the NYCDOT. In addition to funding, Kungys relayed that “section also had more space than other sections of Myrtle Ave we were considering.”

Plans for the reconstruction of Myrtle Avenue Plaza. For more, click on the image.

Early workshops and on-site visits involved the public early in a Placemaking process. At the start of the project in 2007, PPS began working with Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership to create a framework where community members’ voices were incorporated into the design process alongside design professionals’.

“They really tried to listen to what the community wants,” Michael Galinsky, a community member present at the February 1, 2011 community meeting, told the Brooklyn Paper.

The Myrtle Avenue project, said Kungys, capitalized on the “underutilized road space” on the section between Hall St. and Emerson Place and that its “flexible design” will cater to the varied needs of the community.

A recent photo of Myrtle Avenue by Shravan Vidyarthi from The Brooklyn Paper

The plans include a variety of seating and additional greenery with flexible public spaces to host performances. There’s even talk of hosting a farmers market.

These improvements–funded with $6.5 million in public money raised by the partnership–will change the character of this stretch of Myrtle Avenue from one that’s dominated by cars to one that welcomes people.

“The main purpose is to make the pedestrian experience more enjoyable,” said Blaise Backer, executive director of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, to the 50 community members and local reporters at the February 1st community meeting.

We’re inspired by the hard work and dedication of members of the partnership in working to create a place their community can treasure.

Next Steps

The design team will present revised plans to the community board  transportation committee in March or April and construction is tentatively slated for summer 2012. We’ll be watching the plaza’s progress closely.

What do you think of the new plans?

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Will Stein is an intern at PPS. Meg MacIver also contributed to this post.

Gary Toth in NYC

In this new StreetFilm, PPS’ Senior Director of Transportation Initiatives, Gary Toth explains Floating Parking and Bike Buffer Zones.  This new, contested street feature confers many benefits- and not just for cyclists.

In fact, floating parking and bike lanes can actually change the way a street is experienced. They slow traffic and make the sidewalk more livable.  And floating parking does this in a way that doesn’t involve a lot of tax payer dollars to build infrastructure. These are low-cost interventions that can turn a street into a community place.

“Floating Parking” & Bike Buffer Zone in Separated Bike Lanes from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

• Organize and align national and regional membership organizations with a similar interest in creating sustainable, vibrant communities
• Pursue development of a common platform of federal transportation initiatives that support or complement Placemaking principles.

This agenda is focused on opportunities to collaborate with other movements such as smart growth, historic preservation, community development and environmental activism, among others. Our campaign can support the goals of these other movements by joining together around the cause and power of Placemaking.

The Streets as Places agenda also seeks to influence Congressional reauthorization of the federal transportation law, which funds state transportation assistance. The present law expires September 30, 2009 and must be reauthorized before that date or federal transportation assistance to states terminates. By targeting a “must pass” law, we have an opportunity to secure federal funding and policy support for community-based Placemaking programs.

PPS will seek cooperation with both (1) the T4America coalition partnership, which consists of organizations seeking to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) through integration of transportation and land use planning, design and practice and (2) the broader reform coalition which, in addition to our platform priorities, seeks basic reforms in institutional governance, transportation program delivery and finance.