Today the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD) announced four organizations selected to host design workshops in rural communities. CIRD workshops bring together local leaders, non-profits, community organizations, and citizens with a team of specialists in design, planning, and creative placemaking to address design challenges identified by the community.

Selected by an [...]]]>

Today the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD) announced four organizations selected to host design workshops in rural communities. CIRD workshops bring together local leaders, non-profits, community organizations, and citizens with a team of specialists in design, planning, and creative placemaking to address design challenges identified by the community.

Selected by an advisory panel from a pool of 30 applicants, the four 2013 workshop hosts are:

• Central Appalachia Institute for Research and Development, Inc.
• Rochester Regional Community Design Center
• University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Suwannee County Extension
• City of Seguin, Texas

Two of the workshops will address the role design can play in revitalizing declining downtowns: Lima, New York (pop. 2,137) will focus on physical improvements and economic development strategies, and Live Oak, Florida (pop. 6,918) will focus on redevelopment and rebuilding after a natural disaster. The workshop in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky (pop. 21,931) will integrate arts and culture into existing community plans, raising awareness about the potential of artisans and craft industries to serve as an economic engine for a fifty-four county region.  The workshop in Seguin, Texas (pop. 25,674) will be centered around the design and public health benefits of a new waterfront trail for a low-income community suffering from high rates of obesity and limited options for walking, biking, or transit.

Each of the selected organizations applied with multiple partners at the local level. “We were so impressed by the quality of applications we received. The selected communities demonstrate rich potential for leveraging partnerships to take action on rural design issues,” said Cynthia Nikitin, CIRD Program Director and Senior Vice President at Project for Public Spaces, Inc. “Rural design is an important tool for communities to build on existing assets and improve a community’s quality of life, and its economic viability.”

CIRD offers annual competitive funding to as many as four small towns or rural communities to host a two-and-a-half day community design workshop. CIRD awardees receive $7,000 to support the workshop, in-kind design expertise and technical assistance valued at $35,000, and additional training through webinars, conference calls, and web-based resources.

This summer, CIRD will co-host three capacity building conference calls to help selected towns plan for and implement successful community design workshops. Part of the ongoing CommunityMatters conference call series, these monthly calls are open to the public and designed to help any community working on a design or planning project get the skills they need to succeed, as well as the inspiration to get started:

• Spreading the Word About Your Community Design Project, June 20, 3:00-4:00PM EDT
• Designing for the Vision and Values of Your Community, July 25, 3:00-4:00PM EDT
• Secrets of Successful Communities, August 22, 3:00-4:00 PM EDT

Participation in each call is free but registration is required. Click here to register!

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This article was cross-posted from the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design website. Click here to view the original article and access the official press release.

The Bayardstown Social Club is a Lighter, Quicker, [...]]]>

Meet Nathan!

In our Citizen Placemaker series, we chat with amazing and inspiring people from outside the architecture, planning, and government worlds (the more traditional haunts of Placemakers) whose work exemplifies how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

The Bayardstown Social Club is a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper outdoor space created in Pittsburgh’s Strip District by Deeplocal, a creative firm headquartered in the neighborhood. The space, a slightly-renovated vacant lot, is meant to act as a communal back yard for city-dwellers. While users must pay a very modest monthly membership fee to be able to use the space, Bayardstown represents am interesting model for semi-public space, especially given that it is the project of a private company, and was borne out of a desire to create more outdoor space for socializing without needing to “buy stuff.” We recently chatted with Deeplocal founder Nathan Martin to learn more about what inspired his company to start up this sharing economy-style outdoor living room.

What you’re creating with the Bayardstown Social Club isn’t quite a public space, but it is a very public private space. As a private company, what was your motivation for taking this project on?

My company, Deeplocal, is a creative studio with artists, engineers, and designers. We do a lot of advertising work, but every Friday we try to brainstorm about our own projects. We like to do things that are more for fun, and for us. A couple of months ago we were thinking about this really simple question: what do we like about summer in Pittsburgh? One of the big things is that we like places with outdoor seating, where we can just hang out in a casual environment. We have some amazing parks in Pittsburgh, but going to the park is generally something you do with group of friends; you go there for a specific reason. Usually you’re not meeting new people there. Whereas if you go to a bar, maybe it’s more about meeting new people, but it’s more of a constrained space. You’re there to buy stuff, and if you don’t, you feel bad about it.

We figured that the best summer environment is something like a back yard. But one of the challenges in a city is that a lot of us don’t have backyards, or anything that feels that friendly. So we set out to create a sort of shared back yard. Look at the model of the old social clubs—the Elks, the Rotary Clubs—there was a period when all of these social clubs were created. We wondered, why aren’t we creating social clubs nowadays that are just about gathering, talking, and meeting people?

Once you had the idea, how did you go about tackling the work that needed to be done?

Well we started by asking, what’s the simplest way to do this? We figured that if we could just get access to a vacant lot, all we’d really need to turn it into a casual space where people could meet and hang out would be a grill, maybe a stage where bands can play…pretty simple stuff. We talked to our lawyer to figure out how we could legally allow liquor. We didn’t want to create a bar! We did want people to be able to drink socially, though.

Volunteers & Deeplocal staff worked together to prepare the space / Photo: Deeplocal

What we figured out was that, as long as we don’t serve any alcohol or food, it’s basically legally like having a house party. Instead, we’ve partnered up with some local businesses, and we’re going to make a little menu so people can order certain items from places that are nearby, for delivery. There’s a natural food market store, and a couple of smaller, startup restaurants, and food trucks. There’s a unique challenge in Pittsburgh with food trucks, where they can only remain parked on public streets for two hours at a time. We specifically designed the lot to leave space that allows them to pull off of the street and be in a “private” yard so they can be out all night. Partnerships are key; it’s a great situation because we don’t have to worry about getting a liquor permit.

We also designed all of the walls in the structure that we built with mostly found materials; we used pallets that were donated from around the community. We made the height of all walls under the limit for a building permit so we didn’t need one. We found an area that was primarily commercial space. There’s no residential within earshot of the site. The whole area sort of shuts down at 5, and we start up at 6, so it allows us to not interfere with other residents of the neighborhood. It’s all an experiment. The idea was just to create the simplest thing that would be a lot of fun, and that we would want to go to and doesn’t cost a lot of money to set up.

Your website says you’re going to have 200 spots open initially, and then you’re going to see how people use the space, and adjust based on that. What are the virtues that you see in doing things quickly and iteratively?

It’s just like prototyping with technology, which is a big part of what we do at Deeplocal. When we have a new product idea, or something we want to work on, we always force each other to simplify it. If you can’t make some version of that thing in two weeks, I don’t care how interesting it is, it’s probably not going to get done. What I’ve found over the years is that, if you can’t take some piece of what you want to accomplish and get that part done in a few weeks, you probably won’t ever complete it. More importantly, once you start working on something, you learn really quickly along the way when it becomes tangible. Like with this space, for instance: we put some picnic tables in, strung some lights up, put in a campfire, and built two walls. Everything else, we decided, we’re going to learn along the way.

People also bring their own ideas to it. Now that we have people coming through the space, we can see where they stand, where they bring blankets, where there’s low lighting and people aren’t hanging out. You can observe what’s going on, and then retrofit. We know that people are going to tell us what they want. Right now we’re working on creating a cell phone disruptor; the idea came from someone who attended our opening night party, who said ‘you know, it would be cool if you had adult swim hours where, for one or two hours a night, it would be cell phone free.” And I said that’s a great idea, we’ll do that. Someone else had the idea for us to get some boomboxes and a box of cassettes, and let people take the music they wanted to listen to into their little area instead of having some sophisticated sound system set up. That’s a great idea because it creates this communal activity of sorting through cassettes which is a lot of fun.

Now that we’re open, I’m also starting to see groups planning events. Dribble, a design website, is planning their meetups now at Bayardstown, and some knitting groups and other interest groups are going to use the space to meet. Now we want to reach out to some of these groups that normally meet at a Starbucks or something and invite them to use the space. It’s kind of interesting to just try out different things. It’s not a profit-making project for us. I just like to do stuff like this, and it keeps my team motivated to do fun things. It’s something that we can afford to do because it’s not that expensive. The only reason that I have a company is so that I can do stuff like this.

Bayardstown in full swing on a recent summer evening / Photo: Deeplocal

There’s a lot of discussion about the grey area between strictly private and strictly public space. Do you feel like what you’re doing is part of a larger responsibility that you have to the community, as a successful private enterprise?

For me, the motivation is that I just like being a part of the community. Before I started Deeplocal, I ran an art group for about ten years; that led to me working in economic and community development, because I wanted to have more of an impact locally in Pittsburgh. I grew up in the area. Then I had an opportunity to build a company. Today we do a lot of work for corporate clients, but I’m still really dedicated to the arts community here, which has changed and grown a lot in the past several years. We’ve always tried to find creative ways to support that community at Deeplocal. For about three years we ran the Old and New Media artist residency with a local bookbinding group. More recently, we’d been hosting monthly Waffle Wednesdays, where we served waffles in the office and anyone from local nonprofits, foundations, museums, etc. could come and ask questions and get advice about projects they were working on. We would have, pretty regularly, about 75 people at Waffle Wednesdays. It was cool because it was a really casual, but productive social event. We stopped doing that when we moved to our new office. So I’ve been looking for a new way that we can be doing that kind of stuff, connecting people.

In the meantime, the startup scene in Pittsburgh has gotten much bigger, and the art scene has gotten much bigger; there are a lot more young people than there ever were in the past, who are doing interesting things. I do feel like I have a duty to try to create things locally. I want to be part of a community that’s helping to change the city.

You were talking about old-school social clubs, earlier, like the Elks and the Rotary Club. Those are groups that have the social aspect, but they also go out and do things in the community. Do you have larger ambitions for Bayardstown, in that direction?

I think it would be great if it does evolve that way, and we’ve already had people talking about getting involved in some of the vacant land reclamation projects, and about doing cleanups locally. To me, what’s interesting is letting people bring their own ideas to the table. If we can get some momentum as people gather and get to know each other in this space, and we can find a way to use that that momentum to mobilize people to do a little bit more, we’re definitely interested in that. Just like any sort of movement, it’s all about whether we can get enough momentum with enough people. If we can’t, it may just stay a shared yard!

I think the biggest thing to remember is that it doesn’t take a lot of work to do stuff like this, which makes it easier to take that experimental approach. If you have some ambition, there’s enough opportunity in most cities—especially in mid-tier cities like the St. Louises, or Milwaukees, or Pittsburghs of the world, where people want more of the interesting stuff that they see happening in bigger cities. You have almost more opportunity in a smaller city to just go out and do it, and learn through doing before you go through all of the hassle of making something more permanent. I’m a big fan of asking for forgiveness later. That’s what we’re doing with the Bayardstown Social Club. We figure we’re about 95% legal. We’ll see about the other 5%!

It is no secret that market halls, market sheds, and market districts were once more prevalent in American cities [...]]]> This guest post features a collection of wonderful historic postcards and photos from the private collection of PPS markets consultant David K. O’Neil. We thank him for allowing us to share them with you here!

It is no secret that market halls, market sheds, and market districts were once more prevalent in American cities than they are today. Hundreds of markets burned down, were demolished, were removed for “higher and better uses” (oh, how I hate that term), or were replaced with empty “market squares”. Most towns, large and small, had at least one market that usually served as one of the most important, centrally located institutions in a growing city. Local economies were built around markets, which offered affordable opportunities to people who were looking to start a small business and vital lifelines connecting consumers and producers.

Many of these old markets were also quite beautiful, and as we prepare for our How to Create Successful Markets training workshop, we decided to reflect on some of our favorite old markets that are now gone forever…

The demolition of this genteel Southern market hall sparked the preservation movement that saved central Savannah / Photo: David K. O’Neil

City Market, Savannah, GA

Built on an earlier market site, this Romanesque style market hall was erected in 1872 and served as the central gathering place for the city until it was demolished in 1954.  The market’s demise was seen as a turning point in the preservation movement. A band of seven women who fought unsuccessfully to ‘save the market’ vowed to never lose another big battle, and they formed the Historic Savannah Foundation, which has gone on to save over 350 buildings in their city.

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The centrally located Washington Street Market was the largest in Buffalo at a time when the city was one of the most prosperous in America / Photo: David K. O’Neil

Washington Street Market, Buffalo, NY

Block between Chippewa, Washington and Ellicott Streets

Also known as the Chippewa Market, it was built in 1856 in the Romanesque revival style and measured 395 feet by 36 feet wide with a 24 foot veranda on each side. Hundreds of vendors sold their wares both indoors and out, anchoring a larger market district of jobbers, suppliers, warehouses and storefronts. Washington Market was the largest retail market in  Buffalo, occupying a 2.5 acre site. The others included the Clinton Street Market, Elk Street Market, and Broadway Market. After the market was demolished in the 1960s, the site was briefly occupied by a smaller market, but is now empty and serves as a parking lot.

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The fact that a grand market hall once stood on the National Mall underscores the importance that markets once played in cities across the US / Photo: David K. O’Neil

In this photo, food is unloaded next to the market with the Washington Monument rising in the background / Photo: David K. O’Neil

Center Market, Washington, DC

7^th St. NW and Pennsylvania Avenue

This grand market occupied one of the premier locations in Washington, DC, right on the mall! The market was built on a site chosen by George Washington himself.  A market operated here, in various forms, from 1801 until the 57,000-square-foot brick market hall was developed by a group of private citizens. Their architect was Adolph Cluss (who also designed DC’s still-operating Eastern Market) and the original part of the building went up in 1871, with an expansion added in the 1880s. It was also known as the Marsh Market, since the site was totally underwater at one time in the late 19^th century. A canal on the mall facilitated the delivery of goods from local and distant farms.

Center Market was destroyed in 1931, and the site is now occupied by the National Archives Building.

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This view of the old Maxwell Street Market shows a market district at its colorful, vibrant height / Photo: David K. O’Neil

Maxwell Street Market, Chicago, IL

Halsted Street from Taylor to 16^th Street

A classic market district, Maxwell Street Market was where waves of immigrants went for Sunday bargains, music, and cheap eats. Outdoor vendors would set up on tables, or sometimes just sell things right off the sidewalk itself. The market was home to many famous (and infamous) Americans: Benny Goodman, Muddy Waters, William Paley, and even the notorious killer Jack Ruby. In its heyday, the market ran for nearly a mile. Its slow demise began in the 1950s when the eastern part of the market was cut off for the freeway. The expanding University of Illinois at Chicago dealt the final blow when it demolished the last of the market for athletic fields and parking lots.  The ‘new’ Maxwell Street Market—aka Maxwell Street “lite”—still takes place on Sundays at Canal Street, but has little of the character of the old place.

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The Sheriff Street Market was an ornate, stunning building that was Cleveland’s largest until the West Side Market opened in 1912 / Photo: David K. O’Neil

Sheriff Street Market, Cleveland, OH

Sheriff Street (E 4^th) between Huron and Bolivar

Built in 1891 by a private investor group, the Sheriff Street Market was Cleveland’s largest market until the West Side Market opened in 1912. The market was being remodeled to incorporate a bus terminal when it caught on fire and was largely destroyed. A small part of the building was left, and operated as a market until it finally closed for good in 1936. The site was released to a group of 170 tenants from the old Central Market (which had also suffered a fire) and continued until 1981 when the number of tenants had dwindled to a few dozen and the site was sold to make way for the Gateway sports and entertainment complex.

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While it didn’t stay a market for very long, the Dreamland Pavilion was an important local landmark in San Diego’s history / Photo: David K. O’Neil

City Public Market, San Diego, CA

First and A Streets

This market was truly more of a dream than a reality. Built at the turn of the last century, the market was intended to give San Diego an amenity enjoyed by other large cities and entice new residents to the growing municipality. The market did not last long, however, and the first floor was soon converted into a boxing arena while the upstairs became a dance hall.  One well-known traveling woman evangelist, Mrs. Aimee McPherson, thought San Diegans were in need of saving and rented the first floor to conduct revival meetings that were very well attended.

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This aerial view shows the market on the edge of Portland’s densely packed downtown–a location that caused quite a bit of controversy / Photo: David K. O’Neil

The building’s stately Streamline Moderne facade must have been quite an impressive site up close / Photo: David K. O’Neil

This view of the market’s interior belies the struggle its developers faced in making it profitable. The market was open for less than a decade before it was sold off to the Navy / Photo: David K. O’Neil

Portland Public Market, Portland, OR

SW Front Avenue, between SW Salmon and SW Yamhill

Opening to great fanfare on December 14, 1933, the 220,000-square-foot market was billed as the largest in the United States. Controversial from start, the market was seen as being in the wrong location and undercutting the city’s other public markets. With room for over 200 vendors, a 500 seat auditorium, on-site parking, elevators, and modern storage facilities, the market was developed by a group of private businessmen who planned to sell it to the City once it became profitable. Success never came, and the market closed in 1942 and was leased to the US Navy.  Subsequently, it was sold to the Oregon Journal Newspaper, which finally sold it to the City in 1968.  It was demolished in 1969 to make way for the McCall Riverfront Park.

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The solid, brooding old city hall towers over this scene of the market in full swing during its heyday / Photo: David K. O’Neil

An image of the original market’s demolition to make way for a new WPA-funded facility that still operates today / Photo: Claude Page

City Market, Kansas City, MO

4^th and Grand Streets

Many early markets in the US were housed on the ground floor of town halls, following an ancient tradition that came to these shores from Europe. The old City Hall in Kansas City is a dramatic example of this co-location of politics and commerce.   After the Depression, the complex was demolished and City Hall moved into ‘downtown’ while the market was rebuilt in the same location with assistance from the WPA. It continues to operate there today, and is once again experiencing record sales and crowds. The current market’s wish list includes seeing the trolley—which can be seen above—returned to service.

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The architecture of San Antonio’s market was downright delicate compared to some of the others seen above / Photo: David K. O’Neil

City Market, San Antonio, TX

Commerce Street at Milam Square

San Antonio’s market history goes back nearly three centuries, intertwined with the traditions of Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers. The historic market plaza was given to the people through a land grant by the King of Spain in the 18^th century. This elegant market house, designed by English-born architect-turned-rancher Alfred Giles, was erected in the plaza in 1900. Incorporating fanciful ironwork, cupolas, and verandas, the second story had a large auditorium used for concerts and (again!) boxing, all overlooking a landscaped park with a fountain. This was a far cry from the rough and tumble days of rowdy saloons, donkey carts, covered wagons, chili stands, and a hanging tree where horse thieves were strung up in the open plaza. This lovely old market house was torn down in 1938. A Mercado is operating on the site today.

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This postcard gives some sense of the Wallabout Market’s size; it went on for several blocks / Photo: David K. O’Neil

This historic photo is mis-labeled as the Gansevoort Market in Manhattan. Today, Gansevoort is home to the upscale Meatpacking District, while Wallabout’s site is occupied by Brooklyn Navy Yard facilities / Photo: David K. O’Neil

Wallabout Market, Brooklyn, NY

North of Flushing Avenue, between Washington Ave and Ryerson Street

Built in 1894, the Wallabout Market was a spacious and more convenient location for Long Island farmers who preferred not to travel all the way to the Gansevoort or Harlem Markets in Manhattan. Designed in the Flemish Revival style by architect William Tubby, the Wallabout Market was a series of gabled buildings with a large open area for farmers to sell from their wagons. As urban development accelerated in the early 20^th century, the number of farms in King County (Brooklyn) plunged from a high of 10,000 in 1890 to less than 200 by 1944. The market’s demise was made final when the Navy Yard took over the market property in 1941.

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Today, of course, New York (particularly in north Brooklyn) is one of many American cities experiencing a market revival. We’ll be visiting several new markets within a stone’s throw of the old Wallabout site during the How to Create Successful Markets training workshop that we are organizing this May 31st and June 1st, including the Fort Greene Greemarket, the Brooklyn Flea, and Smorgasburg. Interested in attending? Click here to learn more and register today!

As citizen-driven urban action becomes increasingly potent and well-disseminated, the tension between spontaneous, bottom-up improvements and top-down planning and policy is thrown into higher and higher relief. As often as that tension might manifest through loud, messy confrontations, a great deal of it simply takes the form of confusion. The bottom-ups and the [...]]]>

As citizen-driven urban action becomes increasingly potent and well-disseminated, the tension between spontaneous, bottom-up improvements and top-down planning and policy is thrown into higher and higher relief. As often as that tension might manifest through loud, messy confrontations, a great deal of it simply takes the form of confusion. The bottom-ups and the top-downs aren’t quite sure what to do with each other, so the future of cities remains cloudy. How we get from here to a more harmonious future seems anybody’s guess.

“[Citizen-led] urban renewal instruments might take an important role,” opines Istanbul-based planner Erhan Demirdizen in the new book Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models, “but only if the local authorities can turn these applications into local development programs.” In other words, policymakers need to figure out better ways to facilitate and channel the energy of engaged citizens, in order for their cities to reach their full potential.

While its tone can, at times, be a bit aloof (read: academic) given the informality of the subject matter, Handmade Urbanism is a significant contribution to those who are trying to figure out how to adapt governance structures to ease the tension between citizens and officials and encourage more action at the grassroots level. The book’s unique format presents diagrams and statistics illustrating three transformative, citizen-driven interventions in five rapidly developing cities and analyzes their impact and meaning through interviews with local activists, designers, and academics. The result is something of a hybrid between a guidebook and a handbook.

The case studies, all of which were selected through the Urban Age program, highlight a wide variety of interventions in slums and favelas in Mexico City, Istanbul, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Mumbai. Presented together, they lead the reader on a journey through a potential place: a city where public spaces truly belong to the public, and everyone is encouraged to contribute. The analysis of these projects looks at each city through a five distinctly different lenses, discussing the role of citizen-led projects with community actors, government officials, academics, artists, and intermediaries, defined by the editors as “those operating at the middle level (between top-down and bottom-up interventions) intermediating scales, and different layers of knowledge and action.”

One of the book’s many detailed diagrams / Photo: Jovis

Unsurprisingly, given this staunchly multidisciplinary approach, there is a heavy focus on the role of partnerships in driving success with bottom-up projects. The success of any public space relies heavily on a strong network of partners, from individuals to organizations. This is especially true of citizen-led projects because unsanctioned improvements often require substantial public support to avoid being dismantled for any number of bureaucratic reasons once they are discovered. Thus, almost every case study presented in Handmade Urbanism involves some interesting examples of people from different constituencies working together. More importantly, several illustrate the power of partnerships and collaboration to transform and expand the reach of the groups that participate.

Take, for instance, Mumbai’s Triratna Prerana Mandal (TPM), which started out as a group of boys who gathered in an underused space to play cricket. They eventually began to take some ownership of the site, cleaning it regularly. This activity led to the site’s selection for a new toilet facility constructed through a World Bank/SPARC program. TPM was charged with maintaining the facility, and smartly capitalized on the centrality of this sanitation space within peoples’ daily routines by relocating their office on-site. Once there, they continued to care for and improve the space, eventually working with the community to create public cultural and educational programming. Their efforts have now been expanded into adjacent abandoned buildings, illustrating “how even basic infrastructure…can provide an impetus for much wider community activism and urban change” when woven into existing social networks.

The capacity for bottom-up projects to drive more systemic change is another key theme seen throughout Handmade Urbanism. Strong partnerships create the kind of productive bustle and vitality that spills over into the streets surrounding a public space, creating what the book’s editors refer to as a “ripple effect.” A case study from Istanbul, Music for Peace, illustrates this particularly well. The group set out to organize a music school and, taking a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper-style approach, worked to improve surrounding buildings and public spaces “to create a proper spatial environment” for children to learn music.

They also considered how their activities would change the neighborhood’s social system: music was seen as a way to develop youth role models, and to fill the street with music as a way of enlivening public space. Kids carrying their instruments around the neighborhood affected the tone of the area’s street life. Altogether, this created a self-reinforcing cycle that generated support for and participation in Music for Peace’s programming. Within four years of starting up, the group was building a new music center. In 2012, a school was added. The group transformed their community; in return, the community transformed the group.

So how can the official systems in place today become more flexible and adaptable to allow for more responsive solutions to urban problems? There is, of course, no silver bullet for easing the tension between the bottom-ups and the top-downs. But Handmade Urbanism is a helpful tool for illustrating how collaboration can enhance the work that everyone is doing. Its case studies demonstrate for people at the top how citizen-led initiatives can create more bang for the buck. Through the interviews with policymakers and government officials, the book can also help citizens to better understand how contemporary decision-makers think about and approach this type of work, and what challenges need to be addressed.

Benjamín González, a cultural manager from Mexico City, offers perhaps the most succinct summary of the central message of Handmade Urbanism in his interview. Asked what he thinks the next steps would be for sparking more collaboration between arts and cultural programming and city governments to revitalize communities, González suggests that “[We need] to recognize that cities are also cultural projects, and that any particular initiative is also a cultural project, regardless of the subject, because in all of them we are talking about a change in people’s conception and behavior.”

As surely as we shape and change our cities, our cities shape and change us. Why not make that process as hands-on as possible?

A bustling street in Mumbai, one of the five cities explored in Handmade Urbanism / Photo: Jovis

“It’s Placemaking, not Placemade. It’s a process. You are never finished.”
—Place Governance working group

“Placemaking requires a marathon mindset.”
—Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Goldman Properties

“We work at the invitation of residents, [...]]]>

Placemakers explore Detroit’s iconic Heidelberg Project on a tour of the city during the inaugural meeting of the PLC / Photo: PPS

“Placemaking is community organizing. It’s a campaign.”
—Fred Kent, President of PPS

“It’s Placemaking, not Placemade. It’s a process. You are never finished.”
—Place Governance working group

“Placemaking requires a marathon mindset.”
—Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Goldman Properties

“We work at the invitation of residents, with the understanding that they have a deep understanding not only of the problems facing their community, but of the best solutions.”
—Nupur Chaudhury, Brownsville Partnership

“Don’t think ‘build it and they will come’; find the local leaders and help them build ‘it’ where they already are.”
—Healthy Communities working group

“Government’s role: Be the host, don’t try to be the life of the party.”
—Place Governance working group

“Placemaking is more of a circular, iterative process than just something that happens from the bottom-up.”
—Multi-Use Destinations working group

“We can build systems to engage people, but until we figure out why they aren’t engaged and using the public spaces that they already have today, nothing will change.”
—Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on low-income communities & public space

“We want to transform our sidewalks not only into places where you can walk, but where you can live.”
—Jeniffer Heeman, Curativos Urbanos

“Serendipity is not an accident.”
—Neil McInroy, Center for Local Economic Strategies (CLES)

And a bonus from Saturday’s bus tour of the host city’s public space, with special thanks to Jeanette, our tour amazing guide:

“Why Detroit? Because it’s big enough to matter in the world, but small enough that you can matter in it.”
—Jeanette Pierce, D:hive

A break-out group discusses Placemaking in low-income communities at the inaugural PLC meeting in Detroit / Photo: PPS

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It’s hard for me to [...]]]>

A guest post by Dr. Katherine Loflin

Today, as the inaugural meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council kicks off in Detroit, Michigan, we are thrilled to bring you this special guest post by Dr. Katherine Loflin, a powerful advocate for the importance of place to local economies, and one of the event’s keynote speakers.

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It’s hard for me to believe that, just six years ago, I had never even heard the word “Placemaking.” I’ve been a community practitioner all of my life, trained as a macro-practitioner with a Masters and Ph.D. in Social Work and a dissertation on civic engagement and social capital. I believed there were certain characteristics that inherently enabled places to identify and solve their own problems, and I believed that some of the answers related to civic engagement and social capital. Still, I was haunted by the thought that there was more to it: pieces of the puzzle that hadn’t been placed yet.

Then, in 2007, I found myself the Lead Consultant on Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. Soul was created by Knight and the Gallup organization to study communities in a new way. It is important to note that, from the outset, Soul was very open in terms of outcomes. The study was not attempt to justify the field of Placemaking. We had no preconceived notions about what we would discover. Today, I think that fact contributes to the power of the findings, insofar as they support this burgeoning field. The basic research questions were simple yet profound, yet they’d never been asked before: What makes people love where they live? And why does it matter?

We were in for a shock…and a steep learning curve. The Knight Soul of the Community study investigated community attachment—a multidimensional construct that went beyond measuring just satisfaction to also look at community pride, community optimism, and other emotional feelings about place. Attachment is not the traditional idea of engagement that is usually studied in places, but a separate construct. Understanding residents’ emotional bonds to place represented by attachment took our examination beyond the outward behaviors of traditional engagement and gave new insights into the dynamics of how place affects people. That, alone, was a significant contribution to understanding place success that had basically gone unmeasured.

The shock came as the results poured in: from 2008-2010, we received responses from 43,000 people in 26 communities across the US, in cities large and small. What we saw were findings, year after year, that for many seemed counter-intuitive—even radical at times. We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

Knight Soul of the Community found out that the “softer sides” of place matter to economic development / Photo: Lafayette College via Flickr

These findings seemed like a messaging nightmare at first, because they were so groundbreaking and surprising—but as I considered how to use this new information to spread the word, make the case, and translate the findings into on-the-ground action, the nightmare became great opportunity. The Soul findings forced me to reexamine what I thought I knew about what made places tick. Eventually, I realized that this was the missing piece of the puzzle that I had been searching for.

Here are the primary findings of Soul of the Community, from 2008-2010:

• There is an important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth. What this means is that the more people love their town, the more economically vital that place will be. In an economy still deep in recession, that got some attention and raised some eyebrows. How is this possible? It seems that, when people love where they live, they spend more time there and invite others to do the same. They may choose to stay-cation versus travel. They are also more productive at work and more satisfied in their jobs. They are more likely to buy a house. There are so many little ways in which a love of place can translate to economic impacts, and these all add up.
• What most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place. It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way. Little did we still know, at first, that Soul had just empirically justified some of the core principles long advocated for by Placemaking advocates.

It was in looking for some framework that could help to organize the findings in a useable way that I stumbled across the Project for Public Spaces’ website. Serendipitously, this happened right around the time they were catching wind of Soul’s first-year findings. They gave me an organizing framework, and Soul gave them empirical justification for things that they had learned and known intuitively for years.

Of course, we’re only just getting started. The Soul findings have had significant implications for the Placemaking field, and in so doing have opened up whole new avenues for research, learning, and practice. Below are nine of the key lessons learned so far, which also represent some of the most interesting topics for future examination and discussion:

1.) Optimizing place. The thing about Soul of the Community is that it allows places to be who they are—just optimized—and that was incredibly welcomed by civic leaders. Instead of changing who your community is, it’s about being the best version of yourself that you can be. This means that no place is left behind. All cities can take advantage of this information. Places have to know their narratives: what constitutes their unique identity? If that is unknown, Soul can help places to discover that. The important point of this is: communities don’t have to try to be something that they’re not, but each must capitalize on its own distinct identity.

2.) Lead with strengths. Places often know chapter and verse what they are not good at. And that deficit-based start can be an immobilizing when talking about the future. The Soul findings allowed me to walk into any of the 26 communities that we were studying and lead off the conversation by talking about their strengths. The most powerful path to change for people and places is to leverage strengths to address challenges. Any community intervention should lead with strengths, and Placemaking leads by example.

Optimism about a place’s future plays a big part in local resilience. / Photo: Daniel Horacio Agostini via Flickr

3.) Place optimism matters. Optimism is empirically linked to attachment. That means that the more optimistic people feel about the future of their city, the more likely they are going to be attached to it today. We have seen places in the Soul findings where attachment increased even when the local economy worsened. Optimism about the place’s future seems to be a big part of that resilience. In 2008, Biloxi, MS, was the second-most attached place that we studied, even though they were still in the throes of Katrina recovery. In 2009, there was a meaningful increase in optimism in Detroit. Why does this matter? Because it is with this spirit, commitment and dedication that community turnarounds begin. This speaks to the importance of public messages and leadership to cultivate optimism and then follow through with sound leadership to realize that optimism.

4.) Young talent is leading the place renaissance. According to the Soul findings, young talent is consistently perceived as the least welcomed group in a place. Yet in other polls, Gallup was finding increasingly that young talent was choosing a place to live first, and then finding a job. The fact that people are now prioritizing place before deciding what jobs to pursue has to change the way communities are imagined if places are to succeed. Optimizing place has to be moved to the front burner as an economic imperative, immediately. Place has clearly earned a seat at the economic development table.

5.) The corporate world gets this. They may have not had an empirical model to use until now, but many corporations had already noticed that, to attract and retain the best talent, they had to be able to successfully sell the place where the job is located. As a result, they want to be in places that sell themselves. This was all reinforced by the Soul finding that there’s an empirical relationship between job satisfaction and community attachment. Not surprisingly, the business community is now interested in applying Placemaking not only to their corporate giving, but also to their business models.

6.) A solution on the “growth” tug of war that immobilizes many places. Placemaking often allows residents to finally put their finger on what had kept them stuck. For many, this was the fact that, while the ‘growth’ people are saying if we don’t stay modern and provide the place people want to live we are economically in trouble, the ‘anti-growth’ residents are really worried that growth for growth’s sake would cause them to lose who they were as a place—that they’d become generic. The Placemaking framework enables these folks to re-frame the issue by saying: We will cherish our unique narrative as a place as we continue to grow in a smart and sustainable way.

7.) You’ll see impact sooner. Because Soul of the Community found a relationship between social offerings, openness, and aesthetics, and resident attachment, if you change public perception of one of those things you can see same-year differences in attachment. We saw this happen in places like Detroit and St. Paul…and I have to say: Wow. This makes Placemaking a very attractive framework, especially in places that need quick wins to restore some optimism and fuel additional social change efforts. This core strength of the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” approach to places is one that few other models can claim.

The core strength of the “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” approach is that it can change minds & turn things around faster than anyone expects / Photo: troistoques via Flickr

8.) It’s totally scalable. One of my favorite things about Placemaking is that it’s totally scalable. You can truly start anywhere and see impact, sooner than you might think. I’ve seen everything from places starting to turn around because they mobilized to get a strip of sidewalk installed where it was missing, to places coming together around crafting and decorating their town’s trees with lit balls of fashioned chicken wire. Sometimes, it’s all about reminding people of the greatness of their place by helping them to rediscover what’s already there. The best ideas often come from the residents themselves, who are really the true keepers of the soul of their community.

9.) The power of place. Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply. Everyone has a personal relationship with their place and people can see themselves and their communities in the Soul findings.

Because of this journey, today I am forever changed. And we’re all on this journey together. That our disparate disciplines have brought us together around the cause of Placemaking is also one of the unique strengths of our practice: a key advantage that we must leverage in this critical time. We have an economic, social and human responsibility to do so—and now, we have a much-needed piece of the puzzle in place.

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

A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is [...]]]> This is the second of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part three, click here.

“If vibrancy is people, then the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them.” / Photo: PPS

A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them. Today, in the first of a two-part follow up, we will explore how Placemaking, by positioning public spaces at the heart of action-oriented community dialog, makes room both physically and philosophically by re-framing citizenship as an on-going, creative collaboration between neighbors. The result is not merely vibrancy, but equity.

In equitable places, individual citizens feel (first) that they are welcome, and (second) that it is within their power to change those places through their own actions. “The huge problem with citizenship today is that people don’t take it very seriously,” says Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College. “The two dominant frameworks for citizenship in political theory,” he explains, “are the liberal framework, where citizens are voters and consumers of goods, and the communitarian framework, where citizens are volunteers and members of communities. In other words, for most people, citizenship is doing good deeds, or it’s voting and getting things. We need to develop the idea of civic agency, where citizens are co-creators of democracy and the democratic way of life.”

It is bewildering, when you take a step back, to realize how far we’ve gotten away from that last statement. We have completely divorced governance from citizenship, and built thick silo walls around government by creating an opaque, discipline-driven approach to problem-solving. Busting those silo walls is imperative to creating more equitable communities. Rather than trying, haplessly, to solve transportation, housing, or health problems separately, as if they exist within a vacuum, government should be focused on building stronger place.

a new citizen-centered model has also begun to emerge, that we’ve come to call Place Governance.” / Photo: Andy Castro via Flickr

Revitalizing citizenship through Place Governance: Why we need a Copernican revolution

As the link between bustling public spaces and economic development has grown stronger, some government officials have started advocating for change in this arena. After so many decades of top-down thinking, the learning curve is steep, and many officials are trying to solve human problems with design solutions. But a new citizen-centered model has also begun to emerge, that we’ve come to call Place Governance.

In Place Governance, officials endeavor to draw more people into the civic decision-making process. When dealing with a dysfunctional street, for instance, answers aren’t only sought from transportation engineers—they’re sought from merchants who own businesses along the street, non-profit organizations working in the surrounding community, teachers and administrators at the school where buses queue, etc. The fundamental actors in a Place Governance structure are not official agencies that deal with specific slices of the pie, but the people who use the area in question and are most intimately acquainted with its challenges. Officials who strive to implement this type of governance structure do so because they understand that the best solutions don’t come from within narrow disciplines, but from the points where people of different backgrounds come together.

One of the key strengths of Place Governance is that it meets people where they are, and makes it easier for them to engage in shaping their communities. We have seen the willingness to collaborate more and more frequently in our work with local government agencies. Speaking about a recent workshop in Pasadena, CA, PPS President Fred Kent noted that “The Mayor and City Manager there fully realize and support the idea that if the people, lead they [the government] will follow. They recognize that they need leadership coming from their citizens to create the change that will sustain and build the special qualities that give Pasadena a sense of place.”

Finding ways to help citizens lead is critical to the future of community development and Placemaking, which is exactly why we have been working to form cross-disciplinary coalitions like Livability Solutions, Community Matters, and, most recently, the Placemaking Leadership Council. “Democracy is not a government, it’s a society,” argues Boyte. “We have to develop an idea that democracy is the work of the people. It’s citizen-centered democracy, not state- or government-centered democracy. That doesn’t mean government doesn’t play an important role, but if you think about government as the center of the universe, we need something like a Copernican revolution.”

“We have to develop an idea that democracy is the work of the people. It’s citizen-centered democracy, not state- or government-centered democracy.” / Photo: PPS

Attachment then engagement: Co-creating a culture of citizenship

The engagement of citizens from all walks of life is central to Place Governance, and while a great deal of Placemaking work comes from grassroots activity, we need more change agents working within existing frameworks to pull people in. As the Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community Study has shown for several years running, “soft” aspects like social offerings, openness, and aesthetics are key to creating the attachment to place that leads to economic development and community cohesion. But counter-intuitively, civic engagement and social capital are actually the two least important factors in creating a sense of attachment.

As it turns out, that’s actually not bad news. It’s all in how to read the data. When the SOTC results came out, Katherine Loflin, who served as the lead consultant for Knight on the study, recalls there being a great deal of consternation at the foundation around this surprising result. But SOTC does not measure the factors that are most important to place generally; it measures the factors that are most important in regard to peoples’ attachment to place. Working off of the specificity of that premise, Loflin dug deeper into the data to see if she could find an explanation for the curious lack of correlation between engagement and attachment.

“By the third year of Soul,” Loflin says, “we decided to start testing different variables to see whether civic engagement has to work with something else to inspire attachment. We found that one thing that does seem to matter is one’s feeling of self-efficacy. You need civic engagement plus the belief that you can make a difference in order for it to create greater attachment. We can’t just provide civic engagement opportunities, we also have to create a culture of success around engagement if we want it to translate to feelings of greater attachment to a place.”

Matt Leighninger, the director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (a Community Matters partner) echoes this need when talking about his own work in engaging communities. “The shortcoming of [a lot of community dialog] work,” he says, “is that it is too often set up to address a particular issue, and then once it’s over, it’s over. You would think that people having an experience like that would lead them to seek out opportunities to do it again on other issues, but that often doesn’t happen. Unless there’s a social circle or ecosystem that encourages them and honors their contributions, it’s not likely that they’re going to stay involved.”

“In equitable places, individual citizens feel (first) that they are welcome, and (second) that it is within their power to change those places through their own actions.” / Photo: Jennifer Conley via Flickr

How Placemaking helps citizens see what they can build together

Creating that support system is what Place Governance is all about. In addition to their capacity for creating a sense of attachment to place, great public destinations, through the interactive way in which they are developed and managed, challenge people to think more broadly about what it means to be a citizen. Place Governance relies on the Placemaking process to structure the discussion about how shared spaces should be used in a way that helps people to understand how their own specific knowledge can benefit their community more broadly. “We can set up the conversation, and help move things along,” Kent says, “but once the community’s got it, they’re golden. Just setting the process up for them to perform—that’s what Placemaking is.”

If the dominant framework for understanding citizenship today is passive, with citizens ‘receiving’ government services and being ‘given’ rights, then we need to develop affirmative cultures around citizen action. We should also recognize that elected representatives are citizens, just as surely as we are ourselves. We need officials to focus on creating great places with their communities rather than solving isolated problems for distant constituents. Equitable places are not given, they are made, collaboratively. Everyone has a part to play, from the top down, and from the bottom up. “The default of consumer culture,” Boyte says of this much-needed shift in thinking about citizenship, “is that people ask what they can get, rather than thinking about what they could build, in terms of common resources.”

Governance is social, and citizenship is creative. The only things standing between where we are and where we want to be are those big, thick silo walls.

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

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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.