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.

Candice Davenport is a nurse who works on improving public [...]]]>

Meet Candice!

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.

Candice Davenport is a nurse who works on improving public health in the Township of Maplewood, New Jersey, and who understands deeply the importance of place in creating healthy communities. One of her recent initiatives, the Gratitude Graffiti Project, turned dozens of storefronts along several of the town’s commercial streets into a place where neighbors could share things that they were grateful for by writing them directly on store windows. Simultaneously they collaborated with their local library system to create a library themed gratitude graffiti wall to also collect thoughts of gratitude.  The project started shortly before Hurricane Sandy last fall; after the storm, it proved to be an important part of the community’s recovery process, as it gave everyone a way to work through the storm’s aftermath together while maintaining a positive, forward-thinking outlook in a very tough time. We spoke with Candice recently about how she bridges health and place in her work.

Why it is that you are interested in Placemaking, as a public health nurse and health educator?

My background is in nursing. My mom was a nurse, and I read about Florence Nightingale and how a person’s environment affects their recovery, and how a healthy environment creates a healthy person and vice versa. The importance of where we live, work, play—that’s a big mantra of public health, and a huge mantra for nursing if you look at the person from a holistic perspective.

I have a bachelors degree in nursing from UPenn, and a masters degree in public health and community health education from NYU. I’m a first generation American; talk about place! My parents both immigrated to the US from the Philippines, became citizens, and raised me and my siblings here, so there was a very clear definition early on: this is your place. How are you going to define your place and make your mark? Those were things we grew up understanding.

And now you’re making that mark through the Gratitude Graffiti Project. What was the inspiration for that project?

I work as a nurse for the health department in my town, Maplewood. I wanted to focus on wellness at our adult health clinics, and approach it in a positive way. I met up with another mom from my kids’ school, Lucila McElroy, a wellness coach and a dharma practitioner, to brainstorm. We hadn’t met before, but we hit it off brilliantly. Right as she was about to leave, she said “You know, I’ve always wanted to do something about gratitude. We all talk about happiness, but we don’t know how to get there, and gratitude is the first step, and an easy step, to get to a place of happiness. No matter what happens around you can still always be grateful and therefore always be happy with your circumstance.”

A quick sidebar: I’m originally from Flushing, Queens, and I grew up with a lot of graffiti around me. A lot of people look at it negatively, as just tagging. From a child’s eye, I always looked at it as art. Now, as an adult, I lead a children’s group at my church, and I lead a stained glass window tour for kids, and I tell them ‘look at how the windows affect us, and how light shines through it.’ These windows are not just works of art, they were originally created as instructional pieces back when most people couldn’t read biblical text. So the use of natural light and color and graphics on windows to express something has always been inspiring to me.

So when Lucila was talking about doing something to encourage more gratitude, and doing it in a way that would reach a lot of people, I threw out using windows. I said, “We could do graffiti!” As an artist, when you have a thought that you have to get out, you have to face that inspiration and get it out of your system and physically move it. I figured, if people have these thoughts of gratitude trapped inside of them or they just have never manifested it before, why don’t we give them a way to express that, in a way that allows them to be really present, physically, in the community?

I’ve lived in Maplewood for about twelve years now, and she’s lived here for six, so it was easy for us to go into the stores that we frequent most often, talk to a store owner that we knew, and say look, you’ve got these great windows, and we’ve got this great idea, and it’s only going to be up for 40 days. Any of your patrons can write down one thing that makes them happy that they can be grateful for.

“We love Maplewood because this is the kind of community we have, where people do stuff like this.” / Photo: Gratitude Graffiti Project

Did you have to do any convincing, or were the store owners pretty receptive to your idea?

Many people were receptive. We said just let us use your window; we’ll even provide the marker. Just put up a little sign explaining that this is the Gratitude Graffiti Project, which we printed out on our printer. It was so bare-bones. We had no supplies. Everything we did, we paid for out of pocket. We didn’t mind doing it because we thought how many stores could this be, four, five? It turned out 25 stores participated. Not only did it increase foot traffic into the participating stores, it increased foot traffic around the town; most importantly, it increased the feeling of community connectedness among the stores, our libraries, and the residents. People who have watched the video have come up to us and said “We love Maplewood because this is the kind of community we have, where people do stuff like this.”

People really like the interactivity of it; you are both the artist and the spectator. Not only did everyone feel cool that someone’s reading what they wrote…everyone loves to tweet, so this is sort of like an old-school way of doing that, right? And you get to be in the present moment and write down something that you are truly grateful for, that you might not otherwise have acknowledged about your day. You walk away happier with your life. Likewise, writing on a public window allows for other people to be changed by what another person wrote. One of our store owners told me a story of a woman, whom she didn’t even know, who called her store one day. The woman was riding a bus that stopped in front of her hair salon and read what people wrote on the store windows. She called just to tell her that reading the notes of gratitude from so many people changed her perspective for the rest of the day. It’s the biggest gift that we could give to anybody, and that they can give to other people.

There was a difference between what was written before and after Hurricane Sandy. People started off writing things like I’m thankful for my kids, for my coffee, whatever. Then afterward it became I’m thankful that my house didn’t fall down, grateful for electricity, thankful for a neighbor, or I’m thankful that I can call my mom. It really put things in perspective for people. Many of us had no power for nine days, and yet we were still able to be grateful.

You’re also working on getting a walking school bus started in your town with Camilla Zelevansky (who’s been working with us at PPS on our image database).

Maplewood is a very walkable community. Tuscan Elementary School, where my kids go, was built to be a walkable school, but we’re finding that a lot of kids are driven—mine included, but we stop and walk from a couple of blocks away. I think it’s just a mindset in our culture now, to think that kids need to be dropped off right in front of school, because it’s not safe to walk. So in addition to kids having so many issues relating to obesity and lack of exercise, we’re also getting kids who are not confident in their environment. They don’t know basic place markers, they don’t know directions, they don’t know basic street crossing safety guidelines and they don’t know who their neighbors are. That’s something we need to change, because the only way you get to know your environment is by being in it, and when you’re in a car you’re not really engaging with your environment or with your own body.

When you walk, you create the opportunity for these moments where a child can dream, and learn, and notice and think about that blossoming flower that yesterday didn’t have a bloom and now does. It’s an opportunity to create wonder. I’m inspired by opportunities to create places of wonder, because every day is a gift, and every day is wonderful, but only if we engage in it. Only if we allow for the beauty of the community to come out and for us as individuals to soak it in.

Storefront windows in Maplewood village were transformed into opportunities for neighbors to share their gratitude with each other / Photo: Gratitude Graffiti Project

As a public health nurse, do you think there’s an actual effect on peoples’ health when they get involved in their communities?

We’re human beings who are, by nature, social creatures. We’ll always be that way. No matter what technology bridges communities within the online spectrum, we’ll still need to engage in sunlight, with eye contact, and touch, and smell, and with our senses. How a person looks at and thinks about their environment, subconsciously is a reflection on how an individual thinks about themselves and their health condition. A healthy community is a thriving community and people are drawn to environments where they can be productive citizens and grow; to be able to make change and to be changed for the better. This, I think, is what we as human beings all seek in a community to live in and call home.

What advice would you give to people who aren’t happy with the current state of things in their community, and are trying to change it?

One thing that both the Gratitude Graffiti Project and the walking school bus have taught me is that you can’t do it alone. You need a group of people who also believe in what you’re doing, and believe that this is true and possible. You need that momentum behind you, and that’s where the power of people comes in.

Another thing is that you actually do have to have a vision. You have to have the self worth to know that you and others like you deserve a clean and healthy environment to thrive, and deserve to be inspired by that environment. In my experience, even in the least desirable of conditions, we can still be moved by inspiration if we always have a sense of appreciation and wonder about the world around us, if we imagine the creative possibilities and if we commit to being mindful of our place. But we must be engaged and present in our relationship with our environment and surroundings if we want to be moved and take action on its behalf.

Because in the end, I believe that the relationship between a person and their environment is a symbiotic one. If the environment is a positive, healthy one, the person will grow to have the healthy belief that they have the power to change or protect their environment and be stewards of positive change in how they live their life. I suppose that is the lesson I would like to pass down to my children; so hopefully, I’m doing my part.

Recently, we spoke with Ed Klugman, an advocate for inter-generational [...]]]>

Meet Edgar!

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.

Recently, we spoke with Ed Klugman, an advocate for inter-generational play and learning with more than six decades of experience with early childhood education. Ed lives in the Boston metropolitan area, where he works with various organizations to create places that build social capital by connecting people across generations.

How did you come to be an advocate for inter-generational learning and play? What motivates you to do this work?

I was born in Nuernberg, Germany, and lived under Hitler. When I was 13, the Nazis destroyed our apartment. I wound up in the UK via the Children’s Transport, and after that I came to the United States to reunite with my family. So I experienced the US as an immigrant; this is where I learned about Democracy. What stands out in my mind today are the Four Freedoms—the freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear; that impressed me, because that wasn’t part of my history. Where I came from, you didn’t talk, you hid. Experiencing that kind of freedom felt wild.  So I have always enjoyed learning, and especially learning with people. I enjoy learning with children; that’s part of why I became a teacher. Wherever I am, if I am learning, I’m having fun. And when I’m teaching, I’m always learning from the children. There are so many benefits to learning together, but in our society today we layer things—toddlers over here, teens over there, adults farther off. Take a look at how play areas are organized in the US in public spaces; that tells you a lot about how we think about our society.

We talk about that a lot at PPS–the idea that so much of our society is siloed. City agencies, activities, destinations–all of these things exist in many thick-walled silos. How does focusing on inter-generational learning and play help with “silo-busting”?

As I’ve uncovered in my own personal research and experience, play is really part of learning throughout the life cycle. Even after 65, you keep learning if you’re open to it! We get and give energy throughout the life cycle, and by training and encouraging people to recognize that, we can create communities where sharing and collaborating are core values. Our public spaces are shared space, and right now they are suffering because we have not been acculturated into living and learning together at the very local level. Inter-generational play in public spaces, for instance, teaches us how to communicate with people who are different from ourselves, and who have very different viewpoints. Children learn from grandparents, grandparents learn from teenagers, teenagers learn from children; it’s reciprocal. This teaches us to become responsible not just for ourselves, but for our larger communities.

What do you think an ideal inter-generational play area looks and feels like?

When you’re trying to get people across three, four, five generations to play and learn together, the key is to give people opportunities to share and learn from each others’ different perspectives. You need to create an environment where they have many loose, flexible activities in a seamless environment. A picnic is one thing. Watching is another thing. Comparing what they see, that’s the key. It’s not just doing, it’s inventing. A place that encourages this kind of sharing is a place that really leads you toward communication with one another, rather than layering you, and separating your activities.

And these places shouldn’t be siloed, themselves, of course. How do you see inter-generational public spaces fitting into larger communities?

Look at the way that we do housing, today. A lot of housing is layered, just like our play spaces. People who are married live in one area, the single people in another area. People who have children and are married in yet a third area. God forbid you have all the people in that same setting! Our communities tend to be set up to perform one goal: housing. Not collaboration, talk, etc. When we talk about inter-generational activities and places and spaces, it is critical that we take a holistic approach, rather than the fragmented approach that’s so common today. Public spaces are just one part of the larger communities that we share.

Having contact or knowing about a person and their life’s journey leaves an indelible kind of legacy. It’s something to draw on, something to respect. The Jews who were driven out of Nuernberg, for instance, have an annual gathering in the Catskills that I’m hoping to take my children and grandchildren to soon. An activity like that can expose them to the fact that there are others from whom you can benefit and they become part of your overall network. We do it in Facebook, but it’s impersonal. It becomes personal once you really make contact, live together, exchange on a face to face basis, rather than in a virtual world.

What are you doing in your own work to create more of these places out in the real world?

I’m working, at the moment, on a committee in Cambridge, that focuses on inter-generational activity here. A few weeks ago, we hosted an event along the Charles River, where we tried to create the kind of environment described above. We wanted to encourage people to experience and imagine what it would be like to have more of these places where multiple generations could go together to play, and to learn. I also belong to the Early Childhood World Forum. We have a group of architects and designers who are working on determining how design can help shape places and encourage inter-generational communication and sharing. They’re meeting in Berkeley right now, to have an interdisciplinary discussion about this very subject; I wasn’t able to attend, but I worked with the co-chair of that conference to help shape the questions that will be asked. So at the moment, I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

Sarah Ordover is the founder of the NewBo City [...]]]>

Sarah Ordover speaks at the opening of the NewBo City Market; to her right sit Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett / Photo: Sarah Ordover

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.

Sarah Ordover is the founder of the NewBo City Market, a new public market that opened October 27th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We worked with Sarah on a feasiblity and site selection plan for NewBo, and checked back in with her recently to chat about her experience with getting the market up and running, and how food is helping small towns like Cedar Rapids to re-establish a sense of place.

Why don’t we start off by talking a bit about the community of Cedar Rapids?

Well, I’m originally from New York, and my background is in marketing. I moved to Iowa in 1989 for a job, and I didn’t know a soul. My first night in Cedar Rapids was a beautiful Saturday in August, and I decided to go out and explore, looking for nightlife, someplace where people hang out. I didn’t know the first thing about the city, but there’s a riverfront, and I thought, ‘I’ll just go down to the river, there’s always something going on by the river.’

So, I started driving up and down the river looking for signs of life, and there was nothing going on. I went back to my hotel and I thought, ‘Ok, I’ll try again tomorrow.’ I spent the next couple of weeks trying to find the center of town and find where life happened. Eventually, I realized that Cedar Rapids is a wonderful community, but that it was missing a central congregating spot, the place someone like me could go to meet people and find camaraderie.

That’s a story that a lot of people are familiar with, where they’re in a town and there’s no there there, as the saying goes. What inspired you to actually get involved in changing that?

In 2008, Cedar Rapids had a big flood. Before that, there had been the beginnings of an arts district called New Bohemia along the riverfront. New Bohemia was in the very early stages of development, but then the neighborhood was wrecked by the flood. At the same time, one of the concerns that people who are interested in healthy eating, like myself, had was that there was little year-round access to healthy or specialty foods. If you wanted to get anything other than regular supermarket fare, you had to go to a food co-op in Iowa City, which is about 25 miles away.

Shortly after the flood, some girlfriends and I were having our standard conversation: “When are we going to get a Trader Joe’s? Will the New Pioneer food coop ever move to Cedar Rapids? Etc.” As a marketing person, I understood that our demographics weren’t such that we’d be at the top of anybody’s list for expansion. But Cedar Rapids did already have a fantastic farmer’s market downtown, with 150-200 vendors of all different kinds; food, arts, crafts, and 15,000-20,000 visitors each Saturday it was held.

My friends and I started talking about the downtown farmers market, and how fun that was, but that it was really needed in the middle of January when people were looking for things to do. It operates on eight Saturdays in the summer. There had been a proposal for the riverfront, River Run, that had included a year-round farmers market, and the conclusion of the conversation with these girlfriends was, “Hey, Sarah, why don’t you go see who’s working on the year-round farmers market?” I figured I’d make some phone calls, see who’s working on it, and get on whatever committee it was. Well, it turned out there was nobody working on it.

Is that something that you are prone to do? To see that something’s not happening and to just say, “You know what, no one’s running this, I’m going to step up and do it”?

Yes; I’m an entrepreneurial person. I love starting businesses, but I had never done anything like this before. I’d been on nonprofit boards, but I’d never started a nonprofit or done any fundraising. And I’d never worked with governments before. But sometimes, ignorance is the best way to go forward, because you don’t have any preconceived notions about how something should be done, or whether it can even be done or not.

“In Iowa, the idea of a Public Market is new; it’s not a museum, it’s not the symphony, it’s not a theater.” / Photo: Amber

Do you have advice for people who are interested in getting more involved in their communities, but don’t have that same entrepreneurial spirit?

One of the things I have to say that I did pretty well was learn, and listen to people. I just went to everybody I could think of for advice, help, mentoring. One person would introduce me to somebody else. A number of influencers got excited about the idea, people within the community who had clout. I, of course, had no clout. I was not a community insider. But they were able to help point me in the direction of the first few steps and use their own influence to open doors. There was a guy who was running a nonprofit that was looking at how to redevelop the New Bohemia neighborhood, who introduced me to his board, and they introduced me to people, so it just becomes this exponential power, if you’re willing to be open and make those connections.

The other thing is that I put together a board of directors that represented all of the different organizations that were necessary to be a coalition that would legitimize the idea. I find that a lot of people who are in the food movement, or who are involved with Placemaking, get very insular with who they’re talking to. As a business person, some of the first people I sought out were from our Downtown District organization, the Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitors Bureau. I understood that, if this was going to be accepted, it had to be accepted by a broad swath of the business, government, and nonprofit community, not just people within my own cohort. So the board of directors represented the chamber, the CVB, the city council and other key decision makers.

Building the coalition happened incrementally. I used third party endorsement. My strategy was that if I could get somebody from the Convention and Visitors Bureau to say yes, then I could get somebody from the Chamber to say yes, then from the Downtown District, and so on. In Iowa, the idea of a public market is new; it’s not a museum, it’s not the symphony, it’s not a theater. And I was an unknown, so building a coalition from the stakeholder community was essential to our success.

You just listed off a couple of examples of more familiar revitalization ideas, and they were all “old-school” cultural institutions. Do you see the NewBo City Market as a new kind of cultural center?

You know, when I started with this idea, I got a lot of push back that the market wouldn’t work here. New Pioneer, a food co-op from Iowa City, where the University of Iowa is based, tried opening a branch in Cedar Rapids 20 years ago, and that failed, so conventional wisdom was that we didn’t have the population to support the concept. But what folks didn’t realize about Cedar Rapids was that peoples’ consciousness about food and eating has really changed. People of every stripe are interested in food these days. You have the Food Network, and tons of cooking shows. Being a foodie is no longer only limited to those interested in organic cooking.

Food is a cross-demographic link, a common interest that does not know boundaries of age, income, gender or race. Everybody eats. Add to that the rising obesity rate in Linn County and surrounding areas, and there’s a real opportunity to create an environment where we can educate them about better eating habits, while making good food more accessible in a non-institutional way.

Rosenhill farm, located in rural Ekerö, Sweden, is a [...]]]>

Meet Lars!

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.

Rosenhill farm, located in rural Ekerö, Sweden, is a place that combines food, culture, and community. Located about nine miles west of central Stockholm on the city’s rural fringe, the farm is a calm but bustling destination for people in the surrounding area. It’s relaxed atmosphere and focus on organic food and connection to the land offer a refreshing retreat just a half an hour’s drive from the city. The farm’s proprieters, Lars and Emilia, exemplify the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper philosophy in their approach to creating a great place that draws people back again & again. I spoke with Lars recently about his experience with growing a place through an iterative process as organic as the vegetables in its fields.

How did Rosenhill begin? What inspires you to continue running the farm and garden, and how do you hope it will change and grow in coming years? 

Oh, that´s about 100 years ago when Emilia’s grandfather built the barn. For us it has been 20 wonderful and quite intense years of mistakes, learning, disappointments, and miracles. One reason to continue is of course the fact that it is a way to get an income. The other reasons, though, are to do things that other people seem to like, to live in and with nature with its seasons, and to witness all people coming and going. In terms of the future of the farm, it´s hard to say. I’m quite happy with it as it is, but to be able to keep it as a nice playground for me and Emilia (as long as we stay healthy) and others would be perfect. Then to see some others gradually taking more responsibility would also be great. Generally, the biggest visions I’ve had have been along the lines of “It would be nice to have a new weed-wacker,” or “Maybe we should plant some trees there” and so on.

Who comes to Rosenhill? What attracts them to this place?

All kinds of people come, mostly from the Stockholm area but there are also quite a lot of tourists. Hopefully, they find it beautiful and easy-going. We hope to spread an idea of simplicity and playfulness. We serve some good food, and in the autumn the main activity here is to help the Stockholmers make apple juice. I think the rather simple way we solve things, mixing styles, and using whatever we’ve got to make the rooms and garden nice—that inspires a lot of people. It also scares some off completely! We truly have the “everything goes” attitude at Rosenhill, with both people and things. I often hear that our guests and customers feel completely relaxed here.

Visitors to Rosenhill gather for a meal at a picnic table by the wood shed. / Photo: Patra Jongjitirat

What is it that makes Rosenhill a community gathering place? For you, what is most unique about Rosenhill?

The people who come here to live with us through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program—we call them WWOOFers—have the possibility to try different skills and learn that most mistakes are not catastrophes. Another draw is that there is quite a big variety of people from all over.

From May to October every year, we have some smaller and bigger parties of different kinds, with live music, food and beer; that is always popular. On Sundays, we arrange car boot sales. When the weather is nice and sunny, lots of people gather for those. On ordinary days, people just come to have food and chill out on the veranda or in the garden, look at the animals, pick their own vegetables and fruit, and discover small strange pieces of art and craft. Kids usually have no problems roaming around for a few hours finding stuff everywhere.

Are there characteristics of the space that encourage people and strangers to interact with each another?

There are plenty of small strange items around to start a conversation over; it is a good place to explore. Mainly, though, I think it is the relaxed atmosphere that lets people feel comfortable enough to start up talking with other visitors they don’t know. I think that maybe, in a time of expected perfection, we try to show that things can be great in other ways. For instance, that a weed can be beautiful if looked upon from a different perspective. That doesn’t mean we don´t try to get rid of weeds in the cultivation beds, of course! But we appreciate things for what they are.

Simple, colorful hammocks transform the edge of the woods into a relaxing hangout spot. / Photo: Patra Jongjitirat

Can you expand on your idea of not expecting perfection? How did this idea give you more freedom to build the farm?

Probably it is less of an idea than just stinginess. I don´t like to spend money if I can avoid it, and particularly try to avoid taking out loans and spending money I don’t already have. As a result, we’ve always tried to reuse old stuff when building and furnishing. This has certainly made it possible to build more for less money, and people seem to like this style, of doing more with less in creative ways.

We had some tougher years in the beginning when we couldn’t really live only from this place, so we let it grow slowly and didn’t really have a plan that this or that should be achieved within a few years. Day by day, year by year, things came to be out of necessity or joy. When we got to know about WWOOF and started to receive volunteers, things really changed. Things have worked out, even if not always in the way we thought.

This time around, we chatted Nina Simon (@ninaksimon) who, [...]]]>

Meet Nina!

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.

This time around, we chatted Nina Simon (@ninaksimon) who, after working with many of the world’s great museums as a consultant on participatory exhibit design, stepped into the director role at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California, last spring. Charged with (among other things) repositioning the MAH as “a thriving, central gathering place” for the community, Nina and her team have been hard at work over the past year, re-thinking how the building’s public areas are used.

Can you start off by talking a bit about what you’ve been doing to make MAH’s lobby more of an engaging public space and draw people in off the street?

At this point, it’s all about short-term experiments and events. I came into this organization at a time of extreme financial stress. I knew we had to dramatically reposition our institution relative to the community, but we had no money to do anything to the infrastructure…plus, that tends to be a lengthy process with slow results. Instead, we activated the space with the best engagement tool possible: people.

Last summer, we created Makers at the MAH, a program series in which makers of all kinds–boat-builders, clothing designers, sculptors, chalk painters–take over the lobby for a Saturday and do their work in our space. We’ve moved many family art workshops out of the classroom and into the lobby. When outside groups want to perform or hold workshops or erect a crazy sculpture or hand out free plants, we say yes. Over time, we’ve made more permanent physical changes, but we prioritize keeping the space flexible enough for programming. We try to have flowers around, and the doors open, and smiling people who greet you warmly. The people are the key.

Adopting a “just say yes” strategy can be a big change for museums, where curating is such a fundamental part of what you do. How does openness change the way a cultural organization operates?

We don’t say yes indiscriminately–we say yes with a conversation about values and what we mutually hope to achieve. We have a strong vision for the type of experiences we want to promote and support here, both for individuals and as a social space. We use those as our guide, and then we try to be as open as possible in figuring out whether a proposed project meets those goals.

For example, one of our key goals are encouraging active participation. That means we’re not interested in passive audience experiences at the MAH. When an artist comes to us with a desire to make a performance or some other kind of traditional presentation, we challenge her to work with us to make it something that visitors can actively co-create. This goal also refocuses us away from artistic type or quality and towards visitor engagement. When a local reskilling group came to us seeking a home for their Seed Library (a cabinet where people can freely take and share seeds to grow food), it fit our participatory goal completely–and thus it was easy to say yes, even though a Seed Library is not a traditional museum lobby fixture.

Visitors interact with a sculpture by Daniel Wenger in the MAH lobby. / Photo: Museum of Art and History

One of our 11 Placemaking Principles is that people will always say “it can’t be done” when you try to do something new in a public space. Have you encountered any opposition in pursuing MAH’s mission to become more of a community gathering place?

Yes, but much less than you’d expect. The vast majority of people, both new to the museum and traditional supporters, are ecstatic that the MAH is becoming an active cultural hub for the community. That said, there have been pockets of discomfort with our evolution. There are a few artists and supporters who feel that our interactive and participatory approach does a disservice to the pure contemplation of art, and that our inclusion of amateur participants diminishes the overall quality of the experience. Some people think that our welcoming, comfortable spaces are too funky or casual for a museum setting. But the results–100% increase in attendance, 30% increase in membership, new donors–make us confident that we are on the right track.

Our team is constantly working to be as transparent as possible about why we do the things we do so that we can communicate openly about this strategy. We are very intentional about having chairs in the elevator. We take our post-its seriously. The more we can convey the goals and effects of these changes, the more people understand what we’re doing–even if they don’t like it personally.

You wrote recently on your blog about being struck by how “Santa Cruz” a lot of the museum’s story is. How does your city inspire and inform what you do?

Santa Cruz is a small community, but it’s known around the world as a beautiful, energizing place with a rare blend of support for individual expression and progressive collective action. It’s not unusual to hear an artist say, “I’m all about the community,” or for a non-artist to talk about the value of creativity in his/her life. Visitors to the MAH are excited to have the opportunity to share their thoughts, make a collage, or hug a stranger. I’ve never seen a museum with a higher level of participation per visitor.

Santa Cruz County also has some core challenges that the MAH is trying to help tackle. People here are earnestly engaged in trying to make the community a better place, but there are some serious social divisions beneath our progressive personae. For the MAH, this means actively developing and pursuing partnerships and programs that focus on “social bridging.” One of our primary objectives is to bring people together from different backgrounds around shared learning and cultural experiences. Our hope is that by doing so, we can contribute towards creating a more cohesive, civic society.

Families get involved with a participatory lobby project led by dancer Andrew Purchin and collage artist Lisa Hochstein. / Photo: Museum of Art and History

“Placemaker Profiles” highlights the individuals who have captured our imagination about the need to create great places in every community. By bringing together their valuable stories, key insights, and compelling visions, we hope to share their wisdom with our readers, honor their accomplishments, and acknowledge their profound influence on the Placemaking [...]]]>

“Placemaker Profiles” highlights the individuals who have captured our imagination about the need to create great places in every community. By bringing together their valuable stories, key insights, and compelling visions, we hope to share their wisdom with our readers, honor their accomplishments, and acknowledge their profound influence on the Placemaking movement.

For more Placemaker Profiles, click here.

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ALAN BARBER

“Greenspace networks are not the space left over after planning, or the spaces between buildings. They are a vital component of ever-larger urban settlements in all developed countries. We neglect them at our peril.”

Alan Barber is an advocate, activist, and critic who has worked tirelessly on behalf of Britain’s public parks and greenspaces for decades. Barber’s efforts at all levels – within communities, through university teaching, and in local and national government positions – has made real and lasting change in the way public parks are managed and prioritized in the United Kingdom. Barber is unfailingly passionate and unafraid to speak his mind. His recent appointment as a member of the Order of the British Empire stands in testament to his years of devotion and commitment to Britain’s public parks.

Biography

Alan Barber was born in Lancashire, UK, in 1942. His love of greenspace was cultivated at an early age; he apprenticed with a local parks department at age 16, and at 21 he began a two-year term of study at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Throughout the rest of his twenties, Barber learned about parks management by working “on the ground” jobs in Lancashire and Manchester.

Barber then became Parks Manager for the city of Bristol, UK. Working in this position, he came to hold many of his current positions on parks management and the role of parks in urban social life. In this role, he founded important and lasting public-private partnerships, increased parks programming, and introduced goal-based management systems imported from industry.

Barber repeatedly witnessed budget cuts leading to the ruin of parks programs and historic greenspaces. This inspired him to begin campaigning and consulting nationally for dedicated parks funding and management. In this role, he served as President of the Institute of Leisure and Amenity Management. In 1996, Barber co-wrote a position paper for Lord Rothschild that spurred the creation of a new grant-making parks initiative, funded by the national lottery, that became the largest investment in public parks in the UK; to date, over £300 million has been invested in revitalizing public greenspaces.

Barber went on to help found GreenSpace, a charity devoted to improving parks and involving communities in their care. He also has held several advocacy and teaching positions within government and universities, all devoted to better parks management and preservation.

In 1998, a House of Commons Select Committee – akin to a Congressional investigative hearing – met to consider the plight of public parks in the UK. Barber, who considered this a “real breakthrough,” served as a special advisor to the inquiry, and later to the government Urban Green Spaces Taskforce formed as a result. Barber helped to persuade both these bodies of the need for a national agency devoted to parks issues; in 2003, CABE Space – an addition to the UK’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) – was formed, and Barber was appointed a member of the Commission.

On April 7, 2009, Alan Barber was appointed a member of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen in recognition of his decades of advocacy on behalf of public parks. Upon receiving the prestigious award, Barber noted that: “I am still campaigning and writing about urban parks because I believe they are so important to the life of towns and cities. Their neglect in recent years has been scandalous, especially when they can do so much to encourage healthier lifestyles.”

Barber believes the biggest remaining challenge for greenspaces in the UK is “to reverse the steady decline in budgets for maintaining park systems in our towns and cities. Democracy is a much weaker force in the UK than in the USA. So much is dictated by Whitehall bureaucracy, rather than the wishes of local people. The silo-mentality in Whitehall means that nobody can link the welfare of children, which is a priority, to the care of the environment which children inhabit. A bit more attention to the latter and many of our serious problems with childcare would be reduced.”

Perspectives

The Role(s) and Management of Greenspace

Barber sees public parks and greenspaces as inherently multifunctional, and believes that their management must (but too often doesn’t) acknowledge this characteristic. He views parks as part of a larger ecological, cultural, social, and educational system.

This understanding of parks’ multifunctionality leads to Barber’s CLERE model for parks management. The model highlights what Barber sees as the five key interrelated functions of urban greenspace – its role in Community development and education; as a Landscape with conservation requirements; as an Ecosystem that provides natural services to a city; as a resource for Recreation; and finally, as a contributor to the local Economy. Each of these functions implies an accompanying set of management issues and goals, all of which must be addressed holistically for the greenspace to achieve its fullest potential.

The proper management of urban greenspace has farther-reaching benefits, as well. It contributes positively to national and global problems, including environmental issues like climate change and air quality, human well-being, and economic prosperity. Moreover, quality public space fosters and supports civic engagement and community spirit. If citizens feel alienated from their public spaces and institutions, they are less likely to participate (formally or informally) in governance of their communities. Thus, careful stewardship of public space is integral for guaranteeing meaningful democratic participation. This is a cyclical pattern: the less democratic the governing bodies, the more institutionally dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and self-interested the government – and in turn, a government of this sort won’t be a good steward of green space.

The Design Profession

Barber considers the landscape design profession to have “lost the plot,” in his words; he thinks landscape architecture education must refocus on natural and ecological features, rather than cold, sterile architectural elements. He says he “would remove all [landscape architects’] paving catalogues and replace them with plant catalogues. I would ask them to contemplate a world of beautiful colours, of three dimensions and with no geometrical shapes.”

With characteristic wit, Barber describes the need for design professionals to truly listen to the public that will use these spaces, and (echoing William H. Whyte) to have a role in arranging their own spatial experience: “I must have read a thousand articles on seats in public places but I never once read that anyone had asked people which they liked to sit on. I like Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg because visitors are given a choice of seat, and how they are arranged. In English public places immovable benches are always placed next to trash bins because the architect presumes the public like to sit next to stale food and wasps.”

Design and Management

Barber argues in favor of a closer, more collaborative working relationship between designers and managers of public spaces, and finds that design too often occurs without consideration of how people will actually use the space. Parks, in particular, must be well-maintained and well-programmed to live up to their potential as useful public spaces. He says: “Design and management have to be brought much closer together. I have found good design solutions to management problems but only where designers and managers speak the same language and where they can both communicate with people.”

Good management gives public parks the ability to adapt in response to changing user needs. Fixed architectural elements are not easily adaptable and are “incapable of self-renewal,” in Barber’s words; however, parks can be continuously renewed when managers intervene in an informed, thoughtful, publicly-minded manner.

“People-Power”

Rather than depending on government to make necessary changes to public space, Barber puts his faith in grassroots “people-power” movements. He notes the importance of local community groups (often “friends of the parks” organizations) in influencing the political agenda and engaging with public space. Barber also extols tools like PPS’s Place Game and CABE’s Spaceshaper, both of which involve communities in critically appraising their own local spaces.

Architecture

Though Barber’s writings and work focus primarily on public parks and greenspace, he commends recent architectural innovations like green roofs and walls, noting that “[t]here are few modern buildings in the world that wouldn’t look better covered in plants.” Barber also praises Prince Charles and his views on architecture: “He has a real understanding of the subject, much greater than many of his architect critics. I wish he would champion parks and public places more often. His interventions are well judged and very influential.”

Quotable

“I love public parks; the best seem to effortlessly capture the essence of civilized living in modern urban society.”

“Nothing repays its investment as well as a good public park.”

“In my writing, I am often found campaigning and confrontational, mostly towards an establishment, which does not seem to care.”

“Campaigning for better public parks is my life and I don’t intend to stop until I collapse in a heap.”

Selected Publications

Around the World in Twenty-One Parks. This annotated collection of films of Barber’s favorite parks provides wonderful insight into what makes parks work.

Green Future. Greenspace, 2005.

Time to Bite the Bullet. Green Places, March 2009.

How Green is My Eco-Town? Green Places, November 2008 (with Junfang Xie).

The Final Assessment. Green Places, March 2008.

See also Sarah Jackson’s excellent profile of Alan Barber in Parks and Gardens UK, on which the Biography section of this Placemaker Profile draws.

Contact Info

Alan Barber may be reached at: alan.barber@blueyonder.co.uk. He particularly welcomes contact from students.

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–written by Karen Levy

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

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.

Photo Source: San Jose/Guerrero Coalition to Save Our Streets

San Jose Avenue and Guerrero Street in San Francisco have been transformed over the years through the the efforts of the San Jose/Guerrero Coalition to Save Our [...]]]>

The city, which has been struggling with population loss and economic [...]]]>

Portions of Buffalo's waterfront are being revived

Back in the summer of 2008, Rochester native Alan Oberst contributed an article to Buffalo Rising – a local news format blog — that analyzed both Hertel and Elmwood Avenues using PPS’ Ten Qualities of a Great Street.

The city, which has been struggling with population loss and economic downturn since the mid-1950s, is now home to a dedicated segment of the local population working to revitalize city streets and connect important downtown destinations.  As it turned out, I was headed upstate the following week for a family wedding and the folks at Buffalo Rising quickly made time in their busy schedules to invite me to their offices and give me a tour of Buffalo’s waterfront.

The organization’s offices, located in the newly-designated cobblestone district (volunteers removed the bricks one by one to log and then replaced them!), were once used as an ice house to store winter ice from adjacent Lake Erie each winter.  Down the street, a former truck terminal has been repurposed as a coffee shop, restaurant and bar.  Across the cobblestone street, a massive (empty) parking lot fills a city block’s worth of space.  Changes here have not been sweeping, but are happening in small, meaningful ways.

Buffalo Rising’s founder, Newell Nussbaumer, grew up downtown.  In 1993, he returned from college and opened a shop on then-struggling Elmwood Avenue.  The street is now one of the city’s prime location for local businesses, artisans and street festivals.

Nussbaumer started Buffalo Rising as a print publication in an effort to highlight all of the positive activity happening downtown.  It was initially a reaction to the prominent Buffalo News coverage of downtown crime and suburban news.  Buffalo Rising produces only stories about downtown Buffalo.  If the topic being covered is negative, writers try to offer a positive solution for moving forward.  Today, a volunteer staff works on covering local politics, urban planning and positive community action.

Nussbaumer had been a key player in ensuring sidewalk and curb redesign, starting a local children’s parade, community composting, and a local garden walk where residents open their gardens to the public. Recently, he’s been busy advocating for better bike parking to encourage cycling between downtown destinations.  He has also been at the forefront of “Buffalo Homecoming,” an event designed to bring Buffalo expats back home once a year to remind them about their hometown’s sense of place.

To the west from the roof of the Buffalo Rising building, Nussbaumer points to a rail track filled with light rail trains not in use.  Buffalo’s “subway” currently runs in a straight line down Main Street.  While the rail is heavily used during home hockey games at the HSBC Arena, located at one end of the rail route, there are no transfers to other lines or accessibility to some of Buffalo’s neighborhoods that have recently seen revitalization.  Main Street, closed to cars when the light rail started service, has become a virtual dead zone and the city is readying to retrofit the street and bring the cars back.  Nussbaumer heavily advocates a rail extension, which would allow much improved access to Buffalo’s intriguing waterfront.  This extension might be an easy place to start, as the tracks extend towards the waterfront currently for rail car storage.

Nearby, one is able to catch a glimpse of Buffalo’s inner harbor between the massive buildings that make up the local General Mills plant.  Newell took me to a dead end street where a bridge had been taken out by a large ship some 25 years earlier.

Nussbaumer looks out over the disconnected river

General Mills, however, stood in the way of rebuilding it in the hopes of protecting their privacy and keeping pedestrians away.  The area is now completely cut off from the outer harbor and it only accessible by traveling all the way around the area and across a busy highway.  As our group was looking out over the missing bridge, a cyclist rode up to ask us how to reach the outer harbor.  I assumed it was a friend of Newell’s making a joke, but the cyclist was a stranger, truly looking for a point of access.

A cyclists comes by, unable to access the outer harbor

Nearby, Newell showed me some signs of citizen action, mostly small but significant.  Next to the General Mills plant, locals have built their own mini dock with access to the street, a wooden sign pointing towards Swannie House across the street.  Local blue collar bar Swannie House has become a popular hangout for both factory folk and activists.  Outside, if the wind is right, one gets a whiff of toasted cereal from the nearby plant.  I can’t help but imagine how interesting it would be if the factory opened its doors to tourists, playing on the great cultural role many of their cereals play in the American narrative.

The outer harbor is the site of much current contention.  The Skyway, an elevated highway that looms large and grey between the city and the waterfront, is still a working roadway despite frequent closures during cold, icy weather.  Nussbaumer and Oberst enthusiastically offer creative ideas for the structure (“Paint it red!” “Install windmills!” “Hanging condos!” “Turn it into a high-line-style park!”), but the city has a long way to go before its ready to consider such unconventional solutions.  The highway was recently named in a list of elevated roadways primed for transformation by the Congress for the New Urbanism, indicating its potential for significant evolution.

Along the lake, Route 5 is about to revert back to elevated highway status.  Local advocacy group Buffalo-Niagara Riverkeeper has conducted several traffic studies and created an alternate plan that calls for the transformation of the road into a boulevard that connects the city at large to the waterfront.  Buffalo Rising has been instrumental in circulating information on the project, as well as alternate designs.

More information:

• PPS’s approach to waterfronts [pps.org]
• Buffalo Rising
• PPS’ Placemaker Profiles [pps.org]

Malcolm X once said that “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” And so we found ourselves in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn at the first annual Bedford-Stuyvesant Malcolm X celebration, as guests of the Malcolm X Merchants Association (MXMA). We were there to educate ourselves [...]]]>

Malcolm X once said that “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” And so we found ourselves in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn at the first annual Bedford-Stuyvesant Malcolm X celebration, as guests of the Malcolm X Merchants Association (MXMA). We were there to educate ourselves about the community’s experience using mass transit in their neighborhood, with the intention of improving the transit service in the community by equipping local stakeholders with tools to influence the transit planning process.

When people think of the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Bed-Stuy as it’s better known, transit may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But as with many other urban centers, transit was a key factor in its development, growth, and sustenance.

In 1888, the Fulton Street Elevated line, operated by the Kings County Elevated Railway (KCERy), began operation. It connected the Fulton Ferry with Bed-Stuy. The next large transit infrastructure project was the development of the A subway line, which connected Harlem with Bed-Stuy. The new subway line led to an exodus of African-Americans from overcrowded Harlem to Bed-Stuy. From that point on, the neighborhood has grown into one of the most vibrant in the Brooklyn metropolis.

Bed-Stuy is now served by the A and C subway lines at the Utica Avenue, Kingston-Throop Avenue, and Nostrand Avenue subway stations, the B46 and B25 bus lines, and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). An extensive list of services compared to many other American communities. But is that translating into quality service for the travelers to and from Bed-Stuy?

The statistics tell us that the Utica Ave. subway station, which is at the intersection of Fulton Ave. and Utica Ave., on the A and C lines, carried 4.46 million passengers in 2008, making it the 101st busiest station out of 422 in the City. And although we don’t have a count for how many bus passengers board the B46 at that intersection, we know that the B46 carried 17.3 million riders in 2008, giving it the second highest ridership out of all NYC’s bus lines.  While these numbers are impressive, they don’t tell us the full story of transit service in Bed-Stuy. They don’t explain how and why people use transit, and what improvements could be made to accommodate even more users, and perhaps more importantly, to make the community a better place.

Before we get into the survey process and the results of the survey, I should describe the basis of this project. It is part of a Federal Transit Administration research grant intended to develop tools for public participation in transit-dependent communities. PPS has been working in two pilot study sites, one in LA’s Byzantine Latino Quarter and the other in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Local stakeholders, community activists and merchants have been meeting over the past few months to try out some of these tools. In Bed-Stuy, PPS has worked with the Malcolm X Merchant’s Association and Bridge Street Development Corporation (BSDC) to hold workshops and focus groups that will pilot our public participation tools and, simultaneously, create a community vision for Malcolm X Boulevard and Utica Avenue Plaza.

We went to the Malcolm X festival to gather the type of qualitative information that traffic reports often lack. We set up a table on Malcolm X Avenue, in between a vendor selling homemade earrings, and another vendor selling very random trinkets, with the hope that a few interested people would stop by. We had with us two tools to understand the community’s interpretation of their transit service — one was a short survey regarding the quality of pedestrian journeys, and the other was a large neighborhood aerial for a Destination and Route Mapping exercise. The survey had basic questions that we used to determine people’s destinations, preferred paths, and thoughts on how transit stops could be improved. The map was used to determine positive and negative areas in the community, as well as the paths people chose to get to or avoid those places and why.

Before we knew it, our table was swarmed with community members. The wealth of nuance that they gave us was tremendous. Many of the participants in our research had been living in the community their whole lives and their family histories go back several generations. That’s no small measure in a city as transient as New York City! They described their streets down to the most minor detail, as if they knew them like the back of their hands. “Don’t go down Stuyvesant between Bainbridge and Chauncy after dark because it’s not lit well enough,” one woman said. Another woman spoke of the well-kept landscaping on Decatur between Malcolm X and Patchen. “What about that wine bar opening up on Lewis?” “I don’t like those drug dealers on Fulton,” “There’s Solomon’s Porch on Stuyvesant!” People were blurting out things left and right. Within a few hours our map was filled with green and red dots, and we had 25 completed surveys in our back pocket.

Many community members are not involved in the transit planning process, and as a result, transit service is not catered to their needs. Instead, it is designed to meet the parochial benchmarks of transportation engineers – “level of service” and so on and so forth. But “level of service” isn’t always the best measure for level of service; it doesn’t consider the café down the block that people might want to walk by in the morning to get coffee, or the fact that a vacant block across the bus stop might attract seedy characters. Our pilot project is intended to understand the reality of a community’s transit needs, and equip them with tools to influence transit service to it adapts to that reality – a bottom-up approach, not a top-down approach that we’ve seen far too often.

During our research the community’s main concern regarding their transit experience was safety. Participants mentioned fear of crime in places where certain infrastructure such as lighting was missing. Nevertheless, there was a clear sense of neighborhood pride that people shared. The community spoke with confidence that the streets were theirs, and there was always a glimmer of confidence in their words that they were restoring their community from an era where it suffered greatly from crime, poverty, and political neglect. With the tools that we are helping to develop for Bed-Stuy, and eventually, other transit-dependent communities, we can play a role in empowering them to improve their journey from point A to point B. We want everyone dancing while they wait for the bus, like this gentleman waiting for the B25 in Utica Plaza.

It was only a few months ago that Destination: Savannah Forward, a coalition of Savannah-based public and private institutions, brought PPS President Fred Kent to Savannah.   Last February, Kent and over 300 Savannah citizens met to discuss how to transform the city’s car-oriented streets into pedestrian-friendly destinations, and how to create [...]]]>

It was only a few months ago that Destination: Savannah Forward, a coalition of Savannah-based public and private institutions, brought PPS President Fred Kent to Savannah.   Last February, Kent and over 300 Savannah citizens met to discuss how to transform the city’s car-oriented streets into pedestrian-friendly destinations, and how to create true gathering places in Savannah’s beautiful natural environment and historic squares.

Since then, Savannah’s citizens have taken bold action to begin making these plans reality.  As Theodora Gongaware writes in Savannah Now , Savannians are working energetically to “make each neighborhood a destination by taking advantage of resources that were already in place.  Our community accepted this challenge with style and vigor.”

Among the inspired changes taking place in Savannah are the premiere of the Blue Ocean Film Festival, the creation of a citywide Traffic Calming Task Force, and the first “meet and greet” for a group of citizens and local businesses in downtown Columbia Ward.  That group plans to continue meeting in order to foster dialogue about using their community square creatively and starting a neighborhood watch program.

Public-private partnerships have been a key part of Savannah’s most creative projects.  For example, the county government, the Historic Beach Neighborhood Association, and the Savannah Tree Foundation have teamed up to revitalize and replant a local park.  Plans are also underway to move the historic Mother Matilda Beasley House to the park, upgrade existing ball fields, and build a pavilion to serve as a community gathering place.

Raleigh, North Carolina is one of the fastest growing cities in the south, but until recently, its downtown was largely deserted after 5pm. Now, local leaders are making bold strides to bring new life to the historic city center. At the center of this effort is Fayetteville Street, the once failed pedestrian [...]]]>

City Plaza on opening day. Photo credit: Jonathan Hawkins

Raleigh, North Carolina is one of the fastest growing cities in the south, but until recently, its downtown was largely deserted after 5pm. Now, local leaders are making bold strides to bring new life to the historic city center. At the center of this effort is Fayetteville Street, the once failed pedestrian mall that is now home to a growing number of restaurants, shops and residential buildings.

One of the street’s newest attractions is Raleigh City Plaza, the “public living room” of the city. The plaza features interactive fountains, four LED light towers, retail pavilions and events including ice skating in the winter, a farmers market in the spring, and the annual Raleigh Wide Open festival. PPS was involved in a visioning process for the City Plaza in 2006, when we encouraged stakeholders to plan for a mix of uses that would draw people into the site and encourage them to stay.

Fayetteville Street and City Plaza during Raleigh Winterfest. Photo credit: Jonathan Hawkins

Following the opening of the plaza last fall, we asked a local placemaker to evaluate the site using our Great Public Spaces tool. His initial report is encouraging—the site is well used during the day and draws large crowds during special events. Nightime uses are still limited and contingent on strong programming, as well as greater numbers of residents living downtown. Going forward, the success of City Plaza hinges on strong management to continually reevaluate the space and program it with diverse uses and activities. With the help of committed local stakeholders and a growing number of full-time residents, there is no doubt it will grow and evolve in the future.

To learn more about other happenings in downtown Raleigh, check out local blog The Raleigh Connoisseur.