These are just a few of the dozens of ideas that the people of San Antonio contributed by visiting the online PlaceMap that PPS created as part of an ongoing engagement with the city’s government and citizens to to help them bring back downtown as a vibrant, livable place for a new generation of residents. This interactive map, based on PPS’s core “Power of 10” principle, called on citizens to “Re-Imagine the Heart of San Antonio.” And they proved ready for the challenge.

It’s all a great illustration of the way that online community engagement — Digital Placemaking — expands and enhances the work that PPS does face-to-face with community members and municipal officials to create great places and to plan for more livable, sustainable communities.

San Antonio's downtown is filled with unrealized Placemaking potential. Photo: Matthew Egan via Flickr.

The PlaceMap was launched in June as one element of PPS’s “Placemaking Academy” for San Antonio city officials. Acting as strategic advisers, PPS led the city’s staff to completely rethink the way they think about planning — not only in terms of community outreach, but in the way they work together, and also in the way they see the places around them.

“PPS has really helped us to get our staff excited about Placemaking,” says Lori Houston, assistant director of the Center City Development Office for the City of San Antonio. “They’ve done a great job with that.”

In August, the first phase of the PlaceMap project ended with citizens coming together in meetings at the library and at a “Views and Brews” event hosted by Texas Public Radio (TPR) to discuss the results. Participants sifted through, discussed, refined, and expanded on the varied concepts that had come up, including many that fit into the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC) category.

Now TPR is planning a new campaign to solicit more LQC ideas via the PlaceMap, then have a vote on which one should be implemented, find a sponsor, and make it happen.

More and more cities are looking to enhance and open up their planning process, and Digital Placemaking is a great way to achieve that. In Baltimore, PPS added online mapping to the outreach mix to connect with a wider circle of voices, while making the community process more transparent. With the Institute for Urban Design in New York City, PPS launched a version of the PlaceMap that gathered ideas and raised awareness of urban design by leveraging the inherent “place-context” of online mapping.

For San Antonio, getting to the next level of public involvement in planning is key. The PlaceMap is part of an overall strategy to achieve the city’s goals of revitalizing its downtown in a holistic, community-led way. “I really think that the PlaceMap has given us an interface with the public that allows them to participate meaningfully,” says Houston.

She adds that having an online option expanded the city’s ability to include people beyond the usual suspects. “It allows people to come to the website on their own terms,” she says. “It allows for more thoughtful presentation. Public meetings are not convenient for everyone. You typically get the same stakeholders.”

Houston added that being able to submit pictures was another real plus. By uploading images to the map, users can share their vision for the city’s public spaces in a very concrete way.

Many of the San Antonio PlaceMap users illustrated their ideas with photos — some from the streets they wanted to see improved, some from other communities whose successes they’d like to emulate. “People are saying, ‘I saw this in another city,’” says Houston. And if other cities can have these things, the implication is, why can’t San Antonio?

The possibilities of Placemaking in San Antonio were clear to Janet Grojean of Texas Public Radio as soon as she heard a presentation from PPS’s Phil Myrick back in June. “I really liked what Phil was saying, when he was talking about Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper particularly,” says Grojean, the station’s director of corporate and community outreach. “I raised my hand and said, You can count on your local public radio station. We’re in.”

Grojean is a lifelong San Antonian, and she is well aware of the problems faced by her city’s downtown. It’s a place that has for a long time held little appeal for residents. “Locals only go downtown when there are relatives in town who want to see the Alamo or the Riverwalk,” says Grojean, with a laugh.

The nature of the problem — a city that had its heart hollowed out — made a Placemaking approach resonate with Grojean. “That’s what Placemaking is, right?” she says. “Taking something that isn’t and trying to turn it into something that is.”

PPS’s Myrick says that the PlaceMap was a great way to spread the news about the Placemaking approach to revitalizing San Antonio’s downtown — an effort that PPS has been involved with for several years now.

“We wanted to use the Power of 10 as one of the ways to talk about downtown strategy,” says Myrick. “We liked the idea of having an online component that invites the community to participate. It’s simple but structured. It’s a way to get community input into a variety of planning initiatives. I’d recommend it as a framework even on a regional planning level — it helps communities have concrete conversations about where investments and growth should occur, in ways that puts the sense of place back in our most cherished places.”

Grojean says that for her and her colleagues at TPR, the community-led Placemaking process, enabled in this case by the PlaceMap, is a natural fit.

“Radio is community,” says Grojean. “Placemaking resonates with who we are. We are community, trying to make a difference.”

We’ll be watching to see what the San Antonio community and TPR come up with in months to come, and we’ll keep you posted!

Contact Phil Myrick or Dan Latorre if you’re interested in incorporating Digital Placemaking into your community’s Placemaking practice.

Photo: Matthew Egan via Flickr

Now that most people are online, or soon will be, we’ve got a whole new way of bringing people into the process, and we’ve embraced the potential of today’s 2.0 social media to enhance our existing Placemaking services.

We refer to this as Digital Placemaking. It’s the integration of social media into Placemaking practices, which are community-centered, encouraging public participation, collaboration, and transparency. In the last year, we’ve completed five pilot projects that have demonstrated how integrated, authentic digital engagement can extend and deepen Placemaking.

Some call this Open Source Placemaking, which connects with the values of the Open Government movement. What we’re really talking about here is getting out of the current oppositional vicious cycles and creating virtuous cycles… an effective way to reboot the relationship between bottom-up efforts and top-down institutions in place-based work.

The Environments of Our Lives

Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” and Marshall McLuhan famously said, “We shape our tools and they in turn shape us.” At PPS, we like to tweak that a little, saying, “We shape our public spaces; thereafter they shape us.”

Today, it’s just as insightful to also say, “We shape our media; thereafter they shape us.”

Bricks, cement, asphalt, or electronic information in bits and pixels … all of these are media we use to shape our world, and have a responsibility to use well. Likewise buildings, public spaces, video, the web, mobile apps … all of these are environments.

How we make these environments, at all scales, has an impact on how we communicate with each other and on our quality of life. Starting the process by listening to the communities who will use these environments leads to authentic great places.

For our first Digital Placemaking effort, we started by adapting and evolving our time-honored Power of 10 approach, which asks community members to look around themselves and take inventory of the things that make their places great — and the things that could be better. The Power of 10 proved to be a natural fit for the online space, and the results to date have proved that digital engagement enhances and amplifies authentic Placemaking at the citywide or district-wide scale.

The excitement and attention this exercise generates in these communities is just the beginning. There are many cities ready to embrace this holistic approach of Placemaking, and in our world today the urgency to change only grows louder each day.

Our recent work with UN-HABITAT frames the reality we face today quite clearly. Here’s what they have to say in one of their publications:

“There are four mega-trends that are marking our modern society. The first two are omnipresent. They visibly shape our societies and our daily lives — globalization and information and communication technology. The latter is often referred to as one of the main driving forces of the new economy. Third is climate change and the growing number of disasters wrought by this scourge, and finally, the trend less spoken about but most profound in its impact on the way we live: urbanization and the growth of cities.”

We are in an age of sweeping change. Communities engaged in Placemaking benefit from the acceleration that authentic community-centered digital methods can enable.

The Pilots: Digital Placemaking Services in Action

Screen shots of recent Digital Placemaking projects in Baltimore, NYC, Denver, and San Antonio

PPS has been busy putting these ideas into action in the field with several pilot digital Placemaking projects. These include an open-space plan for all of downtown Baltimore; a re-visioning pilot for the National Trust Main Streets program in Tupelo, Miss.; “By the City / For the City” an awareness and education campaign for the Institute for Urban Design in New York City; corridor visioning in Denver; and a downtown-wide master plan project (local video) for San Antonio, Texas. We’re about to start our sixth project for Gothenburg, Sweden. Each of these projects gives us an opportunity to review and refine the way we weave digital services into the overall Placemaking effort, and also build on the Ushahidi Open Source platform we use. In upcoming posts we’ll talk further about these insights, our methods, and the technology.

In all our digital work, we always remain grounded in a human-centered approach. Some of my personal inspiration comes from Christopher Alexander, author of the seminal book A Pattern Language, who has profoundly influenced the practices in both public spaces and software. Alexander once said this:

“…What one would hope is that pieces of software make each person that encounters that software, more of a person. We’re all of us more capable of doing harm to other people by simply treating them or our transactions as something machine-like. That danger is right there at the core of it, and yet this very computer phenomenon also has the capacity to go to a much much richer place, that actually makes a person, man, woman, child, more humane and caring.”

This is the kind of authenticity we are striving for in our community-centered digital work.

Why? Placemaking is a sacred multi-faceted approach that capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential. Recently we’re seeing a pattern in which more cities are looking for game-changing ways to improve their places. These cities are choosing to work with new partnerships and coalitions for a broad process that is more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative. Digital Placemaking can be a critical success factor in these Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper approaches to re-making our public environments.

Authentic democratic participation depends on quality dialogue — both discussion and debate. And in today’s world we talk with each other across all forms of media, increasingly centered around our digital networks. Some traditions are worth leaving behind, and others must be cherished enough to renew again and carry forward. It is with this spirit that Digital Placemaking is being co-created here at PPS and with the communities we work with.

This is the first post on Digital Placemaking by Daniel Latorre, PPS’s VP of Digital Placemaking. Upcoming posts will share more info about our pilots, Placemaking insights in this digital context, relevance to Open Government, the Open-Source-urbanist community and civic digital innovation stories related to our work in helping people make great public spaces that strengthen communities.

Contact Phil Myrick or Daniel Latorre if you’re interested in incorporating Digital Placemaking into your community’s Placemaking practice.