Arguments about density are often front and center when walkability is being discussed. We know that density is an important factor in encouraging more walking (and discouraging driving), but walkability is a particularly complex, and seemingly ephemeral quality. Whether or not a person chooses to walk depends on so many factors beyond just [...]]]>

Arguments about density are often front and center when walkability is being discussed. We know that density is an important factor in encouraging more walking (and discouraging driving), but walkability is a particularly complex, and seemingly ephemeral quality. Whether or not a person chooses to walk depends on so many factors beyond just the physical fabric of a place, from the socioeconomic to the psychological. As a result, there’s not always a one-to-one relationship between a neighborhood’s form and its walkability.

In a recent article looking at a study that found no link between perceived walkability and actual walking habits among women in Seattle, University of Washington professor Cindy Perry (who led the study) explained that “Just having a beautiful environment isn’t going to move people from the couch to walking…A walkable environment can help, but it’s not enough.”

The results here seem to support an argument that Placemaking advocates have been making for some time now: that it is not physical density itself, but the richness of a place that influences peoples’ decisions on whether to walk or use other modes of transportation to get around their communities. A dense place may very well still be a total place desert depending on how it is arranged, while there are scores of small towns and villages around the world that, while not physically dense, feature a rich mix of overlapping uses that make walking the default choice.

To anyone who’s tired of fighting an uphill battle in arguing for increased density in order to make the case for walkability, Julie Campoli’s new book Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form will seem a god-send. Campoli, one of the co-authors of Visualizing Density (also from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), has put together a powerful follow-up that brings the reader down into the streets of a dozen walkable neighborhoods that “represent diverse regions and vary greatly in density, [while still meeting] the minimum density necessary to support transit and retail services.”

“Paging through for the first time, it is hard not to be dazzled…”

Each of these twelve places is distinct, in terms of everything from street pattern to aesthetics and architectural style. Together, these very different neighborhoods (from Brooklyn’s industrious, tightly-packed Greenpoint neighborhood to Columbus, OH’s relaxed & funky Short North) make a strong case for density by focusing, instead, on richness. “Density is often defined in terms of population per square mile,” writes Campoli in the book’s introduction. “We need to think about urban density in more complex ways…building density measured not by the square mile but by the foot.”

After the intro, the reader is brought through a succession of twelve case studies, each with extensive panoramic photography of key neighborhood streets stretching across the tops of the corresponding pages. Paging through for the first time, it is hard not to be dazzled by how well these images communicate almost everything that the companion text could hope to say. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these pictures together are worth a million. The full aesthetic range of density is on display here, all at a human, street-level scale. While Visualizing Density was a powerful tool for urban planners, Made for Walking has even greater potential, as a tool for convincing just about anyone with eyes that a dense environment can be beautiful, enjoyable, and even peaceful–in short, whatever the community that occupies it wishes it to be.

Accompanying these panoramas are a selection of smaller photos of various aspects of each neighborhood (local landmarks, housing stock, parks, etc.), as well as a series of detailed maps of everything from the area’s green space and pedestrian network, to intersection and housing density, to the variety of local services. The clustering of color-coded dots in that last set is telling: restaurants and retail play a big role in each example, but the maps highlight the mixing of different types of local services (health, civic, financial) that create the richness required for promoting walkable lifestyles. These maps also layer in mass transit routes (bus, train, and streetcar) to show that these high-functioning local destinations exist within a larger networks.

All of this information, in concert, could have been overwhelming. In Made for Walking, it is instead immersive. Campoli pops in at the start of each section to provide a bit of contextual and historical info, but the majority of the book’s written arguments are in the front and back of the book. Flipping through each case study in between feels uplifting, as if you are walking through the neighborhood documented on the page.

Ultimately, the book is an impressive illustration of how, after reaching a baseline density, form can be remarkably flexible. The author argues persuasively for the role that form plays in creating walkable neighborhoods, but as a whole Made for Walking seems better understood as a compelling illustration of density as more of a function of place than the other way around. The call for measuring density by the foot is essentially a call for measuring walkability by the richness of place. These are soft metrics, but creating great communities is more art than science.

Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think [...]]]> This is the third of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part two, click here.

With some temporary materials, a roadway can become a bocce ball court, and a street can become a great place / Photo: PPS

Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think about the colors, sights, smells, and sounds; imagine the sidewalk ballet in full swing, with children playing, activity spilling out of storefronts and workspaces, vendors selling food, neighborhood cultural events and festivals taking place out in the open air. Take a minute, right now. Close your eyes, and really picture it.

Now, here’s the million dollar question: in that vision, what are you doing to add to that bustle?

If vibrancy is people, and citizenship is creative, it follows that the more that citizens feel they are able to contribute to their public spaces, the more vibrant their communities will be. The core function of place, as a shared asset, is to facilitate participation in public life by as many individuals as possible. Ultimately the true sense of a place comes from how it makes the people who use it feel about themselves, and about their ability to engage with each other in the ways that they feel most comfortable.

“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table,” says Katherine Loflin, who led Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. “It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place; it’s not something that you construct, physically, it’s something that you feel. And it is us as humans that convey that feeling to each other—or not!”

“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table…It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place.” / Photo: PPS

Getting Started: How You Can Make a Place Great Right Away

As Sustainable South Bronx founder and advocate Majora Carter famously put it, “You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one.” Each of us can participate, right now, in creating the city that we want to live in. If you think of enlivening a place as a monumental task, remember that great places are not the result of any one person’s actions, but the actions of many individuals layered on top of one another. It may take years to turn a grassy lot into a great square, but you can start today by simply mowing the lawn and inviting your neighbors out for a picnic.

In an essay for The Atlantic back in 1966, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey touched on this when he wrote about his father’s public spirit, and his active participation in the life of the small town of Doland, South Dakota, where the family lived. Hubert Sr. was a pharmacist, and he strove to make his pharmacy into a community hub, a place where neighbors came to meet and discuss the issues of the day. “Undoubtedly, he was a romantic,” writes Hubert Jr. of his father, “and when friends would josh him about his talk about world politics, the good society, and learning, he would say, ‘Before the fact is the dream.’

When you think about making your neighborhood a better place, think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC). In public space design, the LQC strategy is framed as a way for communities to experiment with a place and learn how people want to use it before making more permanent changes. That experimental attitude can be adopted by anyone. Just ask yourself: what’s one thing I already enjoy doing that I could bring out into the public realm?

Make it Public: Bringing Existing Activity Out Into the Streets

For some of us, there may be opportunities to take the work that we do in our professional lives and turn it into a way to engage with our neighbors. Perhaps there’s a certain activity we perform that could be moved to a nearby park, or a skill that we could teach at a local library. One graphic design firm in Cape Town, South Africa, has taken the idea of public work to a delightful extreme through their Holding Public Office initiative, where they move their office out into a different public space for one day each month and interact with curious passersby. “It keeps us on our toes,” says Lourina Botha, one of the firm’s co-directors. “It forces us to be aware of our role as designers and is a fairly stark reminder that what we design has a real effect on the world.”

In other words, this project illustrates how taking a LQC approach to work enriches not just the public space where the intervention takes place, but the work that the firm does, as well. This kind of activity blurs the line between private and public, and re-frames work as a mechanism for building social capital. According to Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, “We need professionals to think about themselves not narrowly disciplinary professionals, whose work is to simply solve a narrow disciplinary problem, but as citizen professionals working to contribute to the civic health and well-being of the community.”

“Holding Public Office” brings co-workers out into the streets, re-framing work as a mechanism for building social capital / Photo: Lisa Burnell, Graphic Studio Shelf

Many people may not have any particular job function that can become more public, for whatever reason, but there are still plenty of activities that mostly take place in private that can be used to enliven public space. Active citizenship needn’t be all work and no play, after all. “Any kind of community [that is supportive of engagement] is not just going to be about the problems that residents want to solve,” explains Matt Leighninger, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. “It also has to be about celebrating what they’ve done, through socializing, music, food.”

Building off of that last point, the organizers of Restaurant Day have turned cooking into an excuse for a carnival, giving residents of Helsinki, Finland, a chance to showcase their creativity in the kitchen and turning the city’s streets into a delectable buffet in the process. Their idea to organize a one-day festival where anyone could open a restaurant anywhere (from living rooms to public plazas), started when Antti Tuomola was struggling through navigating the onerous process of starting up a brick and mortar restaurant in the city. Recalls Kirsti Tuominen, one of the friends who works with Tuomola on organizing the event, “We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do something that would be fun, easy, and social at the same time. Something positive. We didn’t want to go the protest route. That’s the not-so-efficient way of trying to make a difference; it’s often better to show a good example and then it’s harder for the opposition.”

The first Restaurant Day took place back in 2011; today, it has been celebrated in cities all over the world. The festival is a brilliant example of how a completely normal daily activity can totally transform a city’s public spaces when approached in a creative way. “The street experience itself was a joy to behold,” wrote City of Sound blogger Dan Hill after participating on one of the festivals. “It truly felt like a new kind of Helsinki. International, cosmopolitan, diverse yet uniquely Finnish…It felt like a city discovering they could use their own streets as they liked; that the streets might be their responsibility.”

Tuominen echoes this in her own reflection on the event, explaining that “[Finland] is so full of regulations that people tend to see regulations even where they don’t exist! That’s been hindering things for a long time, but Restaurant Day has encouraged people to use their public spaces in a new way. Sometimes people just need someone to show them, or give them a gentle kick in the butt, and things will start happening.”

Understanding this is key for citizens who want to take a LQC attitude toward activating their neighborhoods: public spaces have a way of amplifying individual actions. One thing from the above comments that is not uniquely Finnish is the tendency of people (particularly in the developed world) to see regulations where they don’t exist. After decades of society turning its back on public life in favor of the private realm of home, office, and car, a lot of people now feel that they need permission to use public spaces the way they’d like to. We can give that permission to each other.

In a wonderful example of triangulation, jazz musicians perform for the assembled crowds near a Restaurant Day pop-up eatery in Helsinki / Photo: Karri Linnoinen via Flickr

Leading From the Bottom-Up: Work Fast, Work Together

If you are a change-oriented person, we need you to lead. Whether you want to move your office outside, organize a citywide cooking festival, or start small by making a concerted effort to engage directly with your neighbors every day, know that your own actions are an essential component of your neighborhood’s sense of place, by virtue of the fact that you live there. Explains Loflin: “If you don’t spend at least some time thinking about the state of mind of Placemaking—every decision, behavior, everything that we do as residents in our place every day—on top of the infrastructure that’s provided by the place itself, then you miss a really important part of the conversation, where everybody gets to have some of the responsibility.”

Whatever you decide to do, know that there will be bumps in the road. One of our 11 core Placemaking principles is that they’ll always say it can’t be done. But keep pushing. Meet your neighbors, and find your allies. Creating great places is all about getting to know the people who you share those places with. Thinking LQC doesn’t just mean experimenting with what you do, but with how you do it. Look for unconventional partners, and always be willing to consider doing things a bit differently.

In an interview for the Placemaking Blog late last year, Team Better Block co-founder Andrew Howard explained how his own LQC street transformations in cities around the US have caused his understanding of how people engage with places to evolve. “As a planner,” he explained, “I always thought that, if I made the best plan, that would attract the right people to come from somewhere else and make that plan happen. What I’ve realized through Better Block is that every community already has everybody they need. They just need to activate the talented people who are already there, and shove them into one place at one time, and that place can become better really quickly.”

Great places are not created in one fell swoop, but through many creative acts of citizenship: individuals taking it upon themselves to add their own ideas and talents to the life of their neighborhood’s public spaces. The best news is that we seem to be living at a very special time, when people are once again realizing the importance of public life. It’s something we’ve seen first-hand in communities where we have worked around the world, and something we’ve heard from many others. “I think that these are the early first steps,” says Tuominen, “but I think we’re heading to something that is very good, and interesting. I love this time. You can feel it, it’s almost tangible: that things are happening and moving forward.”

Before the fact is the dream. Just a few minutes ago, at the beginning of this very article, you conjured up a vision of a better neighborhood. Go make it real.

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This coming week, the Placemaking Leadership Council will meet for the first time in Detroit, Michigan, to begin developing a campaign to put Placemaking on the global agenda. In the lead-up to the big meeting, we’d love to hear from you about what you’re doing to activate the public spaces in your community. Tell us what you’re up to on Twitter with the hashtag #thinkLQC, and we’ll share some of the awesome work citizens are taking on with other Citizen Placemakers around the world!

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

Yesterday, at an event hosted by [...]]]>

Future plans for Cadillac Square call for a lively marketplace / Image: PPS

You may have heard about downtown Detroit’s big comeback story. Campus Martius has become one of America’s great urban squares. Demand for housing has outstripped supply for months. Major tech firms like Twitter are opening up offices in refurbished historic buildings. The Motor City’s historic core is ascendant.

Yesterday, at an event hosted by Dan Gilbert of Rock Ventures LLC, downtown Detroit became the Rust Belt comeback kid to watch. Gilbert, who moved thousands of employees downtown from his company Quicken Loans’ former headquarters in the suburbs, has bought more than a dozen downtown properties in recent years and is deeply invested in the revitalization of the district. He is a new kind of visionary who understands the fundamental value of great places, and the need to work with his fellow citizens to shape the city’s future together, rather than imposing a singular vision from the top down. The movement that he has built is about turning everything in Detroit up-side down and reorienting the role of each player, from pedestrian to CEO, to maximize their contribution to the shared experience of the city.

The Woodward Avenue corridor will be defined by its key public spaces / Image: PPS

Our own involvement in that movement began last September, when PPS joined Terremark Partners, Shook Kelley, and Gibbs Planning Group for a charrette organized by Rock Ventures. “We proposed developing a Placemaking vision for the major public spaces, and refining the plan through the Power of 10 concept,” says Meg Walker, a Vice President at PPS who worked on the project. “That’s been a key factor from the start. A lot of developers aren’t as enlightened as Dan Gilbert…they wouldn’t necessarily think about the glue that’s holding this all together.”

The Power of 10 framework suggests that a great city needs at least ten great districts, each with at least ten great places, which in turn each have at least ten things to do. Great public spaces produce an energy and enthusiasm that spills over into surrounding areas. By being conscious of this and planning for it from the start, Placemakers can speed up the process of revitalization by making sure that the key places within their district complement each other and great a major regional destination. That is the promise of the Placemaking vision for downtown Detroit. It is a grand experiment made up of many small, human-scaled parts: the largest full-scale Power of 10 exercise undertaken yet.

And of course, the citizens of Detroit have played a fundamental role in shaping the plan and identifying the attractions and uses that they want to see in their downtown. “The people in Detroit love their city so passionately,” says PPS president Fred Kent, who presented the public space plans at Rock’s unveiling event yesterday. “It’s unlike any other city I’ve ever been to. When people love Detroit, they really love it. That’s what makes it such an ideal place to try something like this. Dan’s vision has been to get everyone involved, and tap into that love that Detroiters have for their city. Revitalizing cities around place is all about the community organizing, and his passion for that, and understanding of it, is truly revolutionary.”

That passion was channeled via a slew of engagement activities over the past several months. This included a series of Placemaking workshops last November and December, and an interactive pop-up “Placemaking hut” at the annual holiday tree lighting ceremony in Campus Martius. This activity was bolstered by interviews and focus groups, input from which was used to create a stunning, detailed report in February that was used by Rock to create the vision plan for downtown, which is available online as a PDF here. (Really, don’t miss it!) “We knew that we need public input,” says Walker. “You can’t just come up with this kind of plan in a vacuum.

Grand Circus Park will be the northern anchor for the downtown plan / Image: PPS

Now, with so much momentum behind the project, the real thrill will be watching the plan take off in just a couple of months. Rock will begin implementing the Placemaking vision this summer via a large-scale Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategy that will include installations, pop-ups, and other activities in key public spaces like Cadillac Square, Capitol Park, and Grand Circus Park. This experimental approach will inform the long-term transformation of downtown’s public realm. The focus is on re-orienting downtown around the pedestrian experience and making walking a joy. The Motor City, the focus has long been on the streets—and turning Detroit around will require a total re-thinking of critical arteries like Woodward Avenue as streets for people, rather than cars.

Or, as Fred put it in his presentation, “We want to create a city where you don’t drive through the center, you drive to it.”

Capitol Park will become a hub for arts and creativity / Image: PPS

We’ll be keeping you updated on progress as Rock moves forward with the implementation of the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper plan this summer. The process won’t only be exciting for Detroiters, but for anyone who sees the potential in a struggling downtown and is looking for a way to transform a whole district. By focusing on creating great public destinations with residents rather than building trophy buildings or designing spaces as showpieces without involving the people who will use them, Detroit has the potential not just to change its own narrative, but to change how cities around the world take on urban revitalization. We’ll also be in Detroit in two weeks for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council, and will have plenty of exciting new info to share with Placemakers afterward. More to come soon!

For more reactions to yesterday’s unveiling, check out some reportage from around the web:

• “Developer Proposes Baby Steps for Detroit” (Wall Street Journal)
• “Detroit to Become Paris of the Midwest?” (The Windsor Star)
• “Dan Gilbert outlines vision for livelier downtown Detroit including Papa Joe’s, sidewalk cafes” (Detroit Free Press)
• “New retail, activated parks and plazas, and other highlights from ‘A Placemaking Vision for Downtown Detroit’” (mLive)

Dan Gilbert (left) and Fred Kent (right) at the unveiling of Detroit’s new downtown plan / Photo: @OpportunityDET via Twitter

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You are never finished. That is one of PPS’s 11 principles for creating great community places. For anyone working to create a great “third [...]]]> The following article was written for the Fall 2012 issue of Shelterforce magazine.
Click here to view the original version on their website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening and Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting People There

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tapping Local Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Doesn’t Have to be Big

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

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

So writes Jim Russell in a recent post over at Burgh Diaspora, in arguing that cities are wasting their money on Placemaking when they should be focusing more directly on talent development. In his view, widely held these days, Placemaking is about plunking down “cool urban amenities” and [...]]]>

Is this Placemaking? Some would say yes… / Photo: Brendan Crain

“People develop, not places.”

So writes Jim Russell in a recent post over at Burgh Diaspora, in arguing that cities are wasting their money on Placemaking when they should be focusing more directly on talent development. In his view, widely held these days, Placemaking is about plunking down “cool urban amenities” and increasing token diversity to make a city seem edgy or superficially interesting. It’s a simple cut-and-paste process of taking some signifier of young, contemporary, urban hipness (a bike lane, public art, a funkily decorated coffee shop) and inserting it into a neighborhood in the hopes of re-framing that neighborhood as the Next Big Thing.

That’s not what Placemaking is. Or at least that’s not how many of us who use the word mean it. For every person who thinks that you can ‘placemake’ unilaterally by dropping in cool amenities, there is another who believes that Placemaking is as much about the discussion that participants have with each other as it is about whether a space contains public art or picnic tables when all is said and done. The physical attributes of the space in question are important, but they are the means, not the end. If you’re not building social capital in the community where you’re working, you’re not Placemaking; you’re just reorganizing the furniture.

Context (the size of a site, its location within the city, its present configuration) gives the people who choose to participate in a Placemaking process a universally agreed-upon starting point. But for that raw space to become a place, people have to identify priorities, make decisions, and take action. Involving the intended users of a public space in that process helps the resulting design to be responsive to the community’s needs—including the inherent need of all communities for people to connect with each other. Any organization can pave a plaza, but it’s not a place until people are using it. By bringing people together around a shared starting point to define and work toward shared goals, Placemaking can play a critical role in strengthening local economies.

For hard evidence of this, look to Tokyo. Writing for Next City‘s new Informal City Dialogs, urbanologists Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava explain how the Japanese government relied on the citizens of Tokyo to rebuild their (literally) bombed-out neighborhoods incrementally after WWII, while top-level funds were used to build state-of-the-art infrastructure to connect those neighborhoods and facilitate their growth, both physically and economically, over time. “After the war,” they write, “one of Tokyo’s few abundant resources was memory.” That the city rebuilt on the foundation of those memories—of local traditions, building techniques, shared needs—is now one of the world’s biggest economic juggernauts is no coincidence.

In his critique of Placemaking, Russell looks a bit closer to home, at Detroit. The city, he writes, is currently benefiting from a big fish, small pond talent migration, where talented young professionals are moving back because, as one such person asks in a quoted passage, “Where else in the country can you make an actual impact on a whole city when you are in your 20s?” Since Detroit is infamously lacking in amenities and diversity, Russell argues, people clearly don’t move there “to live out [their] Portland fantasy on the cheap. You certainly don’t leave Seattle in hopes of a place-making upgrade. You migrate for opportunity, despite the challenges and the warts.”

There’s a disconnect here that bothers me: in so much of the contemporary mainstream discussion of Placemaking, the signifier has become the signified. “Placemaking” is now often used as a stand-in for the finished product; if a parklet is built or a cafe popped-up, it doesn’t matter who asked for it, or whether anyone even asked in the first place. The people behind the project will tell you that it’s Placemaking, regardless. The implication in these instances is that a place can be imposed on a community, rather than created with it. That’s the exact same logic that was used to justify slum clearance and build tower-in-the-park complexes in the US during the years when Tokyo was going through its incremental resurgence.

In Detroit, an abundance of cheap space lowers the barrier to entry for participating in urban revitalization / Photo: Brendan Crain

That brings us back to Detroit: a city that is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Tokyo when it comes to the development of Place Capital over the past half-century. But what’s happening in Detroit right now is not the result of some inherent “opportunity” that can be pulled from the air. Like Tokyo after the war, Detroit’s “challenges and warts” are the opportunity; they create a physical context that people can make tangible changes to, even as upstarts in their 20s with modest resources. The abundance of cheap space lowers the barrier to entry for participating in urban revitalization, and while most cities don’t have Detroit’s elbow room, people can still take part in the shaping of their communities by working together to define their shared public spaces. As my colleague Ethan put it recently, “Human capital and creative talent increasingly goes where it likes; talent increasingly goes to great places; but talented people become most attached to places that they help create.”

Like Russell, many people today are beginning to voice the concern that Placemaking is “counterproductive” to economic development, because they’ve been led to believe that the process is simply about cutting and pasting things that worked somewhere else into struggling spaces. But great places and strong local economies are created in the same way: by getting people together to define local challenges and come up with appropriate solutions to address them. Placemaking makes tangible the opportunities inherent within a place so that they might be taken advantage of. People develop places; thereafter, places develop people.

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Note: You can read Jim Russell’s response to this blog post by clicking here, and Brendan’s follow up right here.

Growing up in Omaha wasn’t necessarily glamorous. In 1980s, Omaha [...]]]>

Connie Spellman

PPS Transportation Associate David M. Nelson is our resident expert on all things Omaha. When he heard that we were interviewing Omaha By Design director Connie  Spellman for the Placemaking Blog, he was not at a loss for words! David had this to say:

Growing up in Omaha wasn’t necessarily glamorous. In 1980s, Omaha was opening a new freeway on one side of downtown and tearing out a million square feet of gorgeous warehouses—the single largest loss to the National Register of Historic Places—on the other. The egregious acts of the 80s became the built environs of the 90s. And Omaha, simply put, was a place you left, not a place you lingered.

Then came 2001, when everything began to change. An organization called Lively Omaha was formed, which would go on to catalyze an incredible urban renaissance within Nebraska’s largest city. In fact, Omaha By Design, as it is now known, inspired me to pursue my career in planning and design. Through their tireless environmental and urban design work, Omaha By Design has restored the elegance of the prairie landscape, implemented a form based code, and empowered neighborhood after neighborhood to realize their own visions. Today, Omaha is one of the most liveable communities in the US—a distinction for which Connie Spellman and everyone else behind Omaha By Design deserve much of the credit.

Omaha by Design has been something of a pioneer in working with Placemaking at a citywide level. Can you tell us a bit about how your work in this field got started?

The Omaha Community Foundation (OCF) was first introduced to Placemaking when PPS came to town as a consultant for the National Park Service (NPS). The NPS was interested in building its new regional facility on Omaha’s riverfront, which was beginning to experience a revitalization. As part of that process, Fred Kent suggested hosting a Place Game Workshop, so the city partnered with the OCF to help organize the event and get the right people to participate.

At about the same time, OCF had commissioned a report, Above All Others on a Stream. The consultant summed up the comments from over 75 donors interviews with the five words they wanted Omaha to be: smart, significant, sparkling, connected and fun. That threw everybody for a curve, because, in the late ‘90s, those weren’t terms you’d use to describe Omaha! That led the OCF to create an initiative called Lively Omaha [which became Omaha by Design in 2003] to begin working toward making those descriptors a reality.

I was hired to lead the initiative. The original idea was to transform Omaha into the “City of Fountains,” even though Kansas City had already become known for its fountains. I guess the idea was that Omaha was going to do them one better; but I didn’t really think that fountains would get us the outcomes we were shooting for. I started looking back over the process that led to the initiative’s creation, and that’s how I personally discovered PPS’s work. The rest, as they say, is history.

How did Placemaking help you to re-orient the work you were tackling? It sounds like it helped to crystallize something for you.

I wasn’t familiar with the term “Placemaking,” at least not at first. The parts that captured my attention were the ideas about public space. Public space, to me, was a park, or a road; I had a very limited understanding about what the term “public space” meant. Realizing that public space is basically everything except your home or business was a very eye-opening experience for me. And because some of the people at the OCF had gone through the Placemaking workshop, I started asking them about what they did and how it was organized.

I remember the president of the foundation taking me over to a window in his office when we were talking about this; we looked out over the Civic Center, and there was a very blank porch along the entryway, the plaza was empty, and there was a faded bench on the corner—it’s a very vivid memory, because it was the first time I looked at my city with fresh eyes. I had lived in Omaha for probably 30 years at the time, and I loved it, but I’d never really looked at it. I got hooked very quickly. I thought, “I get it; we can be better.”

Omaha by Design’s 2012 PARK(ing) Day installation, at at 13th and Howard Streets in downtown Omaha / Photo: Omaha by Design

And that eventually led to your organization conducting Place Game Workshops all over Omaha; several a year?

I went to one of the Placemaking trainings in New York right after I got hooked, and then we worked with PPS to create our first website, which we had for six years. Then we invited PPS to Omaha to train local residents to become Place Game facilitators so we could start doing more of these games around Omaha. It was a great way to start helping other people open their eyes and see the city in a new light.

We’ve done more than 70 Place Games during the past 11 years. The amazing thing is that quite a few of the facilitators who attended that first training session with Fred are still volunteering with us today. We’ve had new ones join us as well, so we’ve got a half dozen that still love to lead Place Games.

How has the organization’s work and scope changed over time? And what role has Placemaking played in that evolution, if any?

The catalyst for us to start looking at our role was the local development of two Walmart stores back in 2001. The architects were coming in with a very generic design for the stores, right about the time we were beginning to introduce this new vocabulary and encourage interest in how our city looks and feels. You could sense the beginning of this heightened awareness when the attorney for Walmart was asked by a planning board member (who had just come back from Fort Collins, Colorado), ‘Why are you building this plain, bland box in an area that is one of the most beautifully-maintained and landscaped places in the city?’

The attorney’s response was essentially, ‘Fort Collins has design standards, and we build to design standards and local politics.’ That led to Lively Omaha conducting a lot of research about design standards. We talked with City of Omaha officials, and while there were components of urban design in the master plan, it was not a major element.

Fortunately—and this is another influence of PPS—I had created an advisory committee to guide what our organization was doing. At the Placemaking training I attended, I learned that you need to engage leadership in public space work, and that includes city government department heads, the development community, designers, neighborhoods, public art folks—people from all corners of the city. When this idea of creating design standards for Omaha came up, it was great to have that advisory committee available to kick around ideas and to ask, “Why aren’t we—why isn’t Omaha—asking for more?”

So with the support of our advisory committee and the leadership of our founding donors, we decided to begin broadening our focus by working on an urban design plan for the city. Our donors helped raise about $750,000 to hire Jonathan Barnett with WRT in Philadelphia and Brian Blaesser with Robinson Cole in Boston to create a comprehensive urban design plan for the city. That was passed unanimously by our city council in 2004. Of course, we all recognized that just because it’s in the master plan doesn’t give the urban design plan the effect of law, so our donors agreed that we needed to work to get the new design standards codified. That took us two years, and we were able to get major changes to the existing city codes passed—unanimously, if you can believe that—by the planning board and city council, with developers at the table.

The Urban Design Handbook for Omaha illustrates the high standard of design that Omahans consider appropriate for protecting their city’s unique character, for everything from parking garages (shown here) to pubic spaces / Photo: City of Omaha

What is Omaha by Design working on now?

Right now we’re transitioning to becoming an independent nonprofit organization. 2011 was our 10-year anniversary, and that was when the OCF (which originally thought this was going to be a three-year pilot project!) and our original donors suggested that we were ready to start thinking about striking out on our own. After we reached out and determined that the community wanted us to continue on as an independent organization, we spent about six months going through the process of figuring out what that means and creating a vision statement, mission statement and business plan. If there was any organization pursuing something we were doing, we eliminated it. But there wasn’t much overlap; we’d always been focused on something very different from what other nonprofits were doing for the city. I think that’s why we continue to be supported.

Our mission today is simple: we’re dedicated to improving the way Omaha looks, functions and feels. We facilitate partnerships among our public, private and philanthropic sectors to carry out projects that will improve the quality of our city’s built and natural environments. All of our projects stem from recommendations outlined in the urban design and environmental components of Omaha’s master plan, which we helped develop during the past decade. We also monitor the local environment for adherence to policy changes resulting from these visioning documents and stand ready to act on activities that threaten to undermine their validity.

Ultimately, we’re successful for two reasons. First, we have the incredible support of our community leadership. That allows us access to the resources to make this work, and it’s been the direct result of a lot of coalition building we’ve done over the years. The second reason is the people who do the work; 99% are volunteers. They give willingly of their time, talent and resources. Some of the people who attended our very first meetings have kept with it all the way. Without them, we would have been a three-year pilot project that came and went. Omaha by Design is lucky to work in such a generous community; it makes great things possible.

Our Rightsizing Streets Guide aims to help planners and community members update their streets to [...]]]> Many of our streets haven’t changed in decades, even when they’ve proven dangerous, or the surrounding communities’ needs have changed. When the roads have been altered, they have often been made wider, straighter, and faster, rather than more livable.

Our Rightsizing Streets Guide aims to help planners and community members update their streets to make them ‘right’ for their context. The centerpiece of the guide is a set of ten rightsizing case studies that highlight impressive outcomes using before and after data on mobility, crashes, and other parameters. These are just a few of the projects that have been built and many more are being planned all over the country. Our glossary of common rightsizing techniques and our best practices guide to street selection criteria and before and after measurements can help facilitate similar changes in your community.

Nebraska Avenue (Photo Credit: Florida DOT)

Rightsizing in Context

Rightsizing’s approach is not new to PPS or the larger transportation community. The emergence of the Context Sensitive Solutions movement in 1998 accelerated transportation professionals’ reevaluation of the presumption that wider, straighter, and faster roads are universally better. This paradigm shift has been glacially slow, but as with the glaciers, this movement has reshaped the landscape of transportation. The fact that wider, straighter, and faster isn’t always better has been the topic of several PPS articles.

This approach has momentum. Context Sensitive Solutions opened the door in ‘98; a few years later, the Complete Streets movement swept through it. These approaches emphasize that streets are not solely for moving cars at high speeds, to the detriment of other possibilities and the physical health of community members.

But these approaches created a new problem.  As more and more people began to realize that streets don’t always have to be designed exclusively for high speed travel by cars, the public clamor for streets designed for people intensified.  This clamor, rooted in years of frustration, was vented at professionals with little or no experience or any sound engineering practice on how to design streets for all users.   If anything, awareness amongst the public that their streets don’t have to be just for cars increased the communication gap between engineers, planners, and community members.

New knowledge is needed about how to design roadways differently, and also the ramifications of doing so. This information is important both to stakeholders and transportation professionals, which is why I wrote the Citizens Guide for Better Streets several years ago. Professionals need to be comforted with data demonstrating that new approaches work within their transportation metrics, and stakeholders need to see case studies describing how and where innovative street designs have been launched.

Credit: Andy Singer

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of communities undertaking projects that reverse the trend of wider, straighter, and faster streets.  I collected a number of these case studies during presentations by transportation professionals around the U.S. Thanks to a grant from the Anne T & Robert M Bass Foundation, PPS went further and spoke with folks who have championed rightsizing.  The first results of our research are presented in our Rightsizing Streets Guide on the PPS web site.

Why ‘Rightsizing?’

It has become fashionable to call projects that reallocate street space to accommodate bikes, pedestrians and transit, “Road Diets.”  This term resonates with advocates who have been frustrated with bloated overdesigned roads for years; I share their frustration.

But after working inside the transportation establishment for 34 years, I believe that Road Diet is often a polarizing term. When citizens walk into the City Engineer’s office and ask for a road diet, the outcome they have in mind is already clear, before any conversation takes place, and before any analysis of the problem and data takes place. This can put professionals on the defensive and drive them deeper into the comfort of their automobile-centric training. It is like having the message delivered on a note wrapped around a rock that hits them in the head.

Credit: Andy Singer

Rightsizing, on the other hand, opens, rather than narrows, the conversation. It avoids putting the transportation professional on the defensive and shifts the conversation from debating the solution to working together to define and then solve the problem. The decades of experience vested in our professionals can then be applied to solving a different problem: creating a road that serves all users, not just cars.

Much of the time, this will mean shrinking the road (aka putting it on a diet). Almost all of the time, it will involve reallocating existing space between the modes. Sometimes, we might all come to agree that the ‘right’ size could actually be an expanded roadway. In some circumstances, more cars, trucks, transit, or pedestrians may demand more space. Hey—if we are going to demand that our engineers have an open mind, then so should we, right? After all, isn’t the ultimate goal to accommodate all users adequately and safely, rather than to just shrink roads indiscriminately? If the preferred solution is sensitive to all contexts and modes, and is not smaller, that should be okay.

In accordance with this philosophy, what you will find in our new Rightsizing guide is a depiction of all sorts of projects that recast roads in order to accommodate all users. Changes described in the case studies include not only vehicle lanes converted to bike lanes, sidewalks, and medians, but also the creation of public spaces, and roundabouts in place of traffic lights.

Explore the Site, Help It Grow

PPS hopes that this will be the beginning of a larger set of resources with information on more projects that can lead to Livability and Streets as Places.  We want this to be a project created by and useful to everyone—professionals, community members and advocates alike. We don’t want this resource to be static as of January 2013; we invite any and all of you to submit additional rightsizing case studies so that we can continually expand our highlighted range of solutions for our streets.

Click here to explore the resources in our Rightsizing Streets Guide, and let’s make this approach standard practice!

All slideshow images appear courtesy of David K. O’Neil.

The sun has barely risen, but the horses and delivery wagons forming a [...]]]> This slideshow charts the rise and fall of the Washington Market, from its earliest days to its destruction in 1960. Click the arrow to the right to advance to the next image.

All slideshow images appear courtesy of David K. O’Neil.

The sun has barely risen, but the horses and delivery wagons forming a steady stream from Dey to Canal Streets since nightfall have to share the road again. Rats scurry back into the maze of wooden sheds with their vegetable scraps as an early-to-rise New Yorker walks briskly down Washington Street, market bag in hand. He wants to be sure to get the day’s choicest fish, to be glimpsed jumping in their tanks. Not far behind him is a housewife, coming to the market for some young turkeys, chickens, and ducks. She places these in the basket her servant carries alongside her, next to the butter which has a separate tin cover. Soon the market is in full swing, with vendors prominently shouting out the fresh spinach and kale from New Jersey, bundles of rhubarb and asparagus from Long Island, and baskets of strawberries from the Carolinas.

Such was the scene in the Tribeca of 19^th century in downtown Manhattan. Commerce of a different sort continues in this neighborhood of the 21^st century. New Yorkers walking into the tony enclave’s restaurants, art galleries, Duane Reades, and Starbucks cafes, who today look up and see One World Trade Center rising overhead, are probably unaware that an enormous food hub called Washington Market used to make its home here.

Washington Market, a piece of forgotten New York history, would have celebrated its 200^th anniversary this year. The market got its start in 1812, and operated until the 1960s when it gave way to redevelopment, including the site that was to become the World Trade Center. With many of today’s cities experiencing a market renaissance, the rise and fall of the historic Washington Market offers both inspiration and wisdom for sustaining the growth of today’s farmers markets.

For most of its early history, New York was a Market City. Washington Market was one of several markets all over Manhattan, delivering fresh food to urban dwellers at a time when much more of the food was being produced locally. “When the market started, it was quite popular because it made it easier for people to get provisions from one central location,” says Hal Bromm, founder of the Committee for Washington Market Historic District. “You can imagine it as a kind of [early] urban supermarket.”

Washington Market began at the small neighborhood scale, and its growth over decades follows a trajectory recognizable in public markets to this day. David O’Neil, PPS’s public market expert, describes, “The simplest way to start is with a day table. From there, outdoor markets evolve by bringing in more vendors, selling more days, or operating at multiple locations throughout the city. Relating to Washington Market, “It started outdoors, then moved indoors, and then grew enormously over the years to include retail, wholesale, cold storage space, commission houses and brokers. When markets grow, you get to a certain scale of operations that gets other people providing supplies such as ice, lights, and hardware. There is a lot of evolution within the market and adjacent to it.”

Washington Market eventually grew to encompass several city blocks – a city within a city. It was a bustling, messy, vibrant place, active throughout all hours of the day and night. Enhanced sophistication in methods for growing and distribution allowed food to be brought in from all over the world via boat and train, then sent out to areas far beyond New York. An 1872 article published in the New York Times reveals, “Through Washington Market, filthy as it is, cramped, cabined and confined, the epicure grasps the luxuries of an entire continent, and the fruits of the islands in the tropic seas. Of such enterprise and such a trade New York ought to be, and indeed is, proud, though it cannot be concealed that the auspices under which it has grown up have not been encouraging, and the conveniences and facilities extended to it have been remarkably scanty.”

By the 1880s, there were more than 500 vendor stands and over 4,000 farmers’ wagons driving into the city daily to sell. With the growing complexity of its operations and evolution into a regional food distribution hub, New York City’s Office of Public Markets stepped in to regulate the competitive relations between farmers, wholesalers, and consumers. The office took responsibility for such things as public health and safety, traffic regulations, and weights and measurement standards. Although this specialized city bureau no longer exists, it underlines the vital role markets played in civic life.

In the end, despite its preeminence as a food center, Washington Market was forced to relocate to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 1962, overcome by a changing food system and the underlying real estate value it was sitting upon. Bromm explains, “The city’s goal was to get everyone to move to Hunts Point, where they could have a centralized location and transportation links that would make [food distribution] more efficient. By  the 1960s there was the South Street Seaport Market, which was for fishmongers and folks who dealt with seafood; Washington Market, which was produce, dairy, etc.; and then the meat market, which was up at Gansevoort and Little West 12^th Street. These three major markets each dealt with different aspects of the food chain.”

As O’Neil similarly emphasizes, “There was a lot of consolidation going on in the food industry, with bigger and bigger users and suppliers and small vendors falling to the wayside or going out of business. Washington Market was antiquated. There were all sorts of problems with aging infrastructure and accessibility, not being close to the highways.”

The perception of obsolete structures underlines Bromm’s point that “In terms of Washington Market, there was another goal, which was they thought the swath of land occupied by the market could be demolished and used as an urban renewal area. Remember, this was in the era of developers like Robert Moses.”

In the late 60s the city demolished huge swaths of the market between Greenwich, Washington, and West Streets, roughly from Laight Street at the north end all the way down to what was to become the World Trade Center site at the south. The area was cleared of many five- to six-story buildings with ground floors that housed market operators and businesses, with upper floors for offices and storage. In the book The Texture of Tribeca, which he co-authored, Bromm describes the photographs of people protesting in the street and carrying ‘Save the Washington Market’ signs. Says Bromm, “They were very upset that the city was going to move the market to Hunts Point and demolish all those buildings.”

Relegated to the margins of the city, the market quickly diminished in the public eye and never regained its former vitality as a public space. “Markets create value through socialization,” O’Neil explains, “and Hunts Point was missing the layers of people and urban uses.”

Cities today are seeing a markets make a comeback, as communities and civic leaders aim to tap into markets’ magnetic ability to attract people and bolster surrounding businesses while improving fresh food access. In 2000, there were about 2,800 farmers markets operating in the United States–a number that has now grown to over 7,000. From New York on one coast to Portland on the other, many American cities are seeing their market networks mature and thrive. The Santa Monica Farmers Market, successfully operating for over 30 years, is one of the pioneers of this new wave. Like Washington Market, it started out small and then expanded its network to encompass the four weekly markets currently operating.

Likewise market halls, once the cornerstone of community planning, are re-surging in cities large and small. In 2014, Boston Public Market anticipates moving into Parcel 7, the site of its new home with 30,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. Just last month, the community of New Bohemia in Cedar Rapids, Iowa passed a milestone with the opening of NewBo City Market. With this new market building, the community reclaims back stronger than ever a flood-ravaged industrial site.

Of course, the evolution of successful outdoor markets is not always to move into indoor market buildings. Vendors are adept at bringing infrastructure with them such as generators and refrigeration. Even with food preparations, there are a variety of possibilities from hot plates to food trucks. “If you do want more infrastructure or a permanent stall,” O’Neil remarks, “you generally go indoors. You would have more improvements like plumbing, electricity, storage, and signage.”

In addition to vendors taking stalls inside the market building, some will choose to open a permanent storefront facing the market or nearby. A market district is in the making when people, not necessarily market vendors themselves, see markets as an opportunity to start a business because of the clustering of food uses and foot traffic.

The historic Washington Market and these present-day exemplars all show how a market is more valuable than the sum of the transactions that take place immediately within its bounds. “The innovation of markets at the small scale tends to establish what people want and what works,” O’Neil explains, “which leads to larger copies in mainstream economy. It has all been quite positive. Local food and environmental movements that started in the market world and are now being picked up by Walmart and McDonalds.”

As supervisor of the Santa Monica Farmers Market program, Laura Avery’s experience is a testament to this. “The food movement is growing nation-wide,” says Avery, “and Santa Monica was there before it started. Our markets are thriving because of an incredible public interest in local sustainable food which developed a life of its own.”

The common thread that runs through all markets is that of change. As O’Neil says, “Markets are always in flux. They will be different tomorrow and you can’t get comfortable.”

However, if there is one constant throughout our country’s market history, it lies in markets’ dearly held place in public life. As a New York Times journalist wrote nearly 150 years ago, “Perhaps the chief attraction [of the Washington Market] lies in the essentially human character – in the bustle and the confusion, the rushing and the tohu bohu of the place. The rage which possesses both buyers and sellers, the concentration of purpose of so many thousands, the clangor of many voices, and the sounding of many footsteps, all impress themselves forcibly upon our imagination and appeal to our sympathies.”

Through communities’ diligence, safeguarding, and adaptability, many of the new farmers markets coming to life today will grow and last for as long, if not longer, than the historic Washington Market.

Thanks to Clarence at Streetfilms for the heads up on this: the impassioned presentation by transportation reform leader Mark Gorton during this fall’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach is now available in full online. If you weren’t able to make it to the conference [...]]]>

Thanks to Clarence at Streetfilms for the heads up on this: the impassioned presentation by transportation reform leader Mark Gorton during this fall’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach is now available in full online. If you weren’t able to make it to the conference (or if you want to relive the barnstorming closer), you can listen to Mark break down the myriad ways in which decades of car-centric planning has led to a series of unintended consequences with one quick click of the “play” button above.

So does this speech get you fired up? Or could it contribute to engineering bashing as described by Bryan Jones? Or both? Sound off in the comments below!

Over the years, Granville Island has received much attention from urban planners, developers, architects and Placemakers as a successful model for brownfield redevelopment. Truly successful places—those that appeal to our minds, hearts and souls—offer us a way to connect with [...]]]> This is a guest post by the authors of the People+Place blog.

Granville Island's Wrights Canadian Ropes Ltd building is now the The Public Market / Photo: Lino Siracusa

Over the years, Granville Island has received much attention from urban planners, developers, architects and Placemakers as a successful model for brownfield redevelopment. Truly successful places—those that appeal to our minds, hearts and souls—offer us a way to connect with each other. These places develop organically over time, and are more about emotion than they are about economics and design. Granville Island is one of those special places, created out of necessity and a unique sense of what the community needed at the time.

It is doubtful that Granville Island could be replicated somewhere else today, and further, whether one would want to replicate it in any regard. The island, as it is today, is so much a product of its time, the people who saw a vision for what it could become, and some several unique conditions that allowed it to develop as it did. Nevertheless, many of the elements and processes used in the re-development of Granville Island are applicable to other sites. To better understand the island in its present state, let’s look at how it came to be.

Granville Island originally comprised two sand bars in Vancouver’s False Creek, which were used by local First Nations people as places to meet and to collect shellfish. In 1916, the federally-administered Vancouver Harbour Commission (VHC) built a seawall around the sand bars and created 41 acres of land to be used by industry. The VHC leased parcels of land to tenants who built their factories and mills in post and beam structures clad in corrugated tin. For 40 years, industry thrived on the island while the city of Vancouver grew around it.

Granville Island, circa 1916 (Click to enlarge) / Photo: Lino Siracusa

In the 1960s, many of the industries began to move away due to changing market conditions. Those that remained were dirty. The island became an eyesore while the waters of False Creek became heavily polluted. The public’s sense of the environment was increasing, and they felt that something should be done to clean up the area; both the City of Vancouver and the Federal Government agreed.

The Canadian government transferred the management and redevelopment of the Island to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) in 1973. This occurred at a time when CMHC was developing the south shore of False Creek for housing. A group of influential and innovative people was appointed to a new body,  the Granville Island Trust, to assist CMHC in implementing a plan for the future. A budget of $20 million was allocated for the redevelopment.

While the City of Vancouver and the Trust couldn’t initially agree on a vision for the Island, they eventually came to a compromise and a basic concept came together. This vision is articulated in a plan, the Granville Island Reference Document, which still acts as the chief formal agreement between the City and the Federal Government, providing a regulatory framework for the island.

A fundamental principal was that Granville Island would become a “people place” while still remaining reflective of its industrial maritime heritage. The Reference Document establishes some broad guidelines: the island is accessible to everyone, existing buildings are re-used when possible, and space is allocated for a variety of land uses (limiting retail to arts and crafts, maritime products and a pubic market).

However, unlike most land use plans, the Reference Document does not establish any zoning or other criteria for urban works such as street profiles. Nor does it prescribe how the vision shall be implemented. This permissive regulatory framework was acceptable to the City of Vancouver because Granville Island is federal land. If the land was privately owned, city zoning would have applied. This framework, along with the limited government funding for redevelopment, set the stage for Granville Island to develop in a very unique and organic way.

Buildings that once housed Spear and Jackson Saws & the Tyee Machinery Co. are now the False Creek Community Centre / Photo: Lino Siracusa

The redevelopment of Granville Island commenced in 1975 and was essentially completed with the opening of the Public Market in 1979 (though one could argue that its redevelopment still continues in an incremental manner to this day). Another principle that was established at this time was that Granville Island would involve both public and private investment. The cost to implement the vision exceeded the $20 million budgeted by the federal government.

It was determined that the federal funds could best be used for infrastructural projects such as replacing underground services, building new seawalls, roads, street lighting and providing other unifying design elements. Some of these funds were also needed to reacquire industrial leases that were years away from expiration. However, not all leases could be reacquired, as the money available simply wasn’t sufficient. This explains why a concrete plant is still located on the island, mixed in with the Public Market, artisan studios, and other public attractions!

The public sector was invited to bid on development opportunities relating to specific sites. The successful bidders were offered long-term leases. The old post and beam tin clad buildings were turned over to the developers in an as-is condition. Therefore the new tenants had to make significant investments to bring the buildings to code and the projects to market. CMHC imposed strict requirements for design and use of space to ensure that efforts to create a “people place” were not compromised. These design requirements ensure that the industrial maritime heritage is respected. Similarly, building use is strictly controlled by lease agreements so that all activities are harmonious.

Early tenants included those from the public sector (the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, False Creek Community Centre), those from the not-for-profit sector (Arts Club Theatre), and those from the private sector (The Creekhouse, Granville Island Brewery, Bridges Restaurant, Maritime Market, Kid’s Only Market, and the Granville Island Hotel), as well as many independent artisans who occupied CMHC buildings. The diversity of tenants has contributed to the unique experience that we see today on Granville Island.

Triangle Square today functions as a multipurpose space used by the farmers market & street performers. / Photo: Lino Siracusa