Transit News

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who prefers to travel around on two wheels, this is a very good week to be you! No matter your reason for riding, there’s something interesting happening in the next few days. Biking is a great way to experience great places: it gets us out in the open air, moving at a speed that allows us to appreciate our surroundings. Below, we’ve rounded up some events going on around the country this week that give you a great excuse to get out and bike your city or town!

For the itinerant bicyclist: Are you always looking for somewhere new to go on your bike? Do you prefer to roll even when traveling just a couple of blocks, for the sheer joy of it? The folks behind WalkScore have just released BikeScore, a set of maps that show how “bikable” 10 major US cities are based on bike infrastructure, topography, and the density of attractions and amenities in various neighborhoods. Now, you can figure out exactly which parts of town are best for living life in the foam saddle.

For the thrifty bicyclist: This Wednesday, May 16th, marks the end of the earlybird registration period for September’s Pro Walk / Pro Bike conference in Long Beach, which will focus on the theme “Pro Place.” Over the course of the week, conference-goers will be able to learn about how to strengthen their cities by and network with other bicyclists (and pedestrians!) from around the country. You can save big on registration for one more day, so don’t dawdle!

For the activist bicyclist: Also on Wednesday, you can show solidarity with fallen bicyclists by taking part in the 10th Annual Ride of Silence. The Ride’s mission is to “HONOR those who have been injured or killed, RAISE AWARENESS that we are here, and ask that we all SHARE THE ROAD.” As far as bicycling has come in the past few years, it’s important to remember that hundreds of people are killed while riding in the US every year, and there is still important work to do to create safer streets for everyone.

For the workaday bicyclist: The League of American Bicyclists is promoting May 14-18 as “National Bike to Work Week,” with a big push toward Friday’s nationwide Bike to Work Day. So throw the dress shoes in a backpack, put on your sneakers, and grab a comb to counteract any instances of helmet hair: this is the week to bike to work! You can also find a full listing of events happening during May as part of the LAB’s Bike Month on their website.

An iconic scene from Woody Allen's 1979 classic "Manhattan"

According to the @UrbanismAvenger, interviewed recently by The Atlantic Cities editor Sommer Mathis, “There are ALWAYS urbanist themes in movies, if you look. Cities themselves are often heroes, or at least key characters, in the story. Whether the city is New York or Asgard, cities in movies can inspire us to be better urbanists!”

We agree wholeheartedly, and have been thrilled by the response to our post a few weeks ago about films that demonstrate Placemaking principles. Folks have made a lot of great suggestions, and we’ve culled eight of our favorites below. Keep ‘em coming!

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Rear Window (1954; director, Alfred Hitchcock)
Cindy FrewenWuellner suggests several Hitchcock films, our favorite of which is this classic featuring Jimmy Stewart as a man with a unique view of the life of his neighborhood. Eyes on the street! (Or the courtyard, as the case may be).

A Thousand Clowns (1965; director, Fred Coe)
According to Rob Sadowsky, the key moment for Placemakers here is a scene featuring Jason Robards giving a tour of NYC by bicycle, “because it’s the best way to see the world.”

Manhattan (1979; director, Woody Allen)
Commenter Dbpankratz nominated Woody Allen’s classic, considered by many (including at least one person here at PPS HQ) to be one of the “greatest love letters to New York” ever made for the silver screen. The film beautifully illustrates the intimate link between place and identity.

Blade Runner (1982; director, Ridley Scott)
Adrian Riley likes the dystopian urbanism of Scott’s sci-fi classic, which contrasts “the world the underclass are forced to inhabit” with wealthy residents cloistered in gleaming towers. The city is “dirty, wet, crumbling and constantly being adapted, but also grittily exciting in a way few science fiction film environments are.”

Lisbon Story (1994; director, Wim Wenders)
Wenders’ film-about-a-filmmaker shows how intoxicating the power of Place can truly be. Tiago Oliveira loves it for its portrayal of “the soul of a City and the wonder of its People and Places.”

Before Sunrise & Before Sunset (1995 & 2004; director, Richard Linklater)
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s decade-long romance starts with a chance encounter on a train, and features the two lovebirds walking the streets of Prague and Paris. Both of these films, suggested by two commenters. Julieta and Todd, highlight the ability of human-scaled cities to create a feeling of comfort that promotes public affection.

Be Kind Rewind (2008; director, Michael Gondry)
Highlighted by Plantanbanda, this flick focuses on two video store clerks who accidentally erase every tape in the store. (Remember tapes?) In their quest to re-shoot the entire cinematic inventory, they enlist the help of the entire neighborhood.

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

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

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

People chatting at their local bike share station in Melbourne, Australia / Photo: Planetgordon.com via Flickr

With yesterday’s big announcement from the NYC DOT, bike shares are in the news again. Here in New York, we’re getting excited about the possibilities on the horizon as hundreds of bike share stations start popping up all over town. These stations don’t just improve mobility and transportation options–they’re also wonderful tools for activating public spaces. In fact, bike share stations are ideal for engendering what we call Triangulation, which Holly Whyte explained as “the process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other.”

Here are three reasons that bike share stations are ideal triangulators:

1. They’re natural conversation-starters: You can’t participate in bike share without visiting a bike share station. Stations bring people together around a common interest, giving them an opportunity and a reason to communicate with people they might not otherwise meet. Being that they serve as nodes in a transportation system, these stations also have a moderate sense of urgency to them: everyone there is trying to get somewhere else. This lowers the barrier-to-entry for casual social interaction for people on the shyer end of the spectrum, since it’s easy to smile and say “Nice helmet!” or “It’s a great day for a ride!” to someone as you both hop on bikes. Since instances of social interaction lead to a desire for greater contact, bike share stations make for happier, more social public spaces overall.
2. They attract a stream of diverse users at all times of day & night: A truly great place facilitates a mix of uses over time; if there’s nothing to keep a space active at night, it can create uncomfortable or even unsafe conditions for passersby, and detract from the entire community. Bike share stations ensure a steady flow of people through a space even after dark, keeping “eyes on the street” and making other constructive after-hours uses more likely. This extends the usefulness of a place as a social hub for the surrounding community.
3. They act as casual landmarks that concentrate activity: Bike share stations, with their colorful bikes and signage, help to make a place more comfortable and navigable for people who might not be familiar with a neighborhood. Think of the relief you felt the last time you were walking around, lost, and stumbled onto a subway or bus station; transit nodes help to re-orient us when we get turned around, chipping away at the sense of alienation that sometimes accompanies visiting a new place. The visual impact of these stations is also great for surrounding businesses and attractions, as the identifying signage and maps often highlight nearby points of interest.

Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper activities can help determine how a space can be best used in the future / Photo: 1hr photo via Flickr

In a post yesterday at Design Observer, Alexandra Lange voiced concern over the growing phenomenon of “Kickstarter urbanism.” Lange contrasts a recent Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource the construction of a prototype skylight, to be used in the proposed “Low Line” underground park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with a campaign to bring a ping pong table to nearby Gulick Park. The Low Line team raised $155,186–103% of its target–from 3,300 individual backers; the Gulick Park ping pong table only pulled in $2,145 from 19 people, meaning that it went completely unfunded since Kickstarter campaigns must hit their target in order for any money to change hands.

That means the Low Line’s campaign was so successful that the extra funds alone could have financed ping pong table outright, with plenty of extra cash left over (which the Friends of Gulick Park promised on their campaign site would “go to maintenance of the table and a supply of extra paddles and balls.”) As Lange points out:

If you are part of the physical community, you would be able to see the fruits of your donation [for the ping pong table] within months. [A donation to the Low Line campaign] is seed money for seed money. If the designers build a better skylight, then they might be able to attract more backers, then they might be able to make a deal with the city, and then they might be able to create whatever it is…The timeline for urban projects, the real-life approvals and the massive construction costs, are ill-suited for the Kickstarter approach.

But the success of major, long-term public space projects and immediate, short-term improvements doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, using Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies to enliven a public space in the short term can be an extraordinarily effective way to build community support for bigger projects. LQC improvements are a great way to test out different uses for a space and get people to see the potential for change. There’s a huge difference between saying “We’re going to build a park on that lot over there,” versus setting out some potted trees, folding chairs and tables, and organizing a few street games for local kids. It’s showing versus telling–and it’s much easier to build a movement by doing the former.

One of the eye-catching renderings that propelled the Low Line's Kickstarter campaign to success / Photo: Delancey Underground

In the case of the Low Line, doing LQC interventions on the site (an abandoned trolley terminal under Delancey Street) would be difficult, if not impossible. Dazzling renderings helped get the prototype funded by the design-savvy Kickstarter crowd, but once that work is complete and it comes time to build on-the-ground community support, locals will start asking serious questions about how they’ll actually be able to use the park. At that point, beautiful images fall back into the role of telling; to show members of the community how the park might improve their lives, the project’s organizers would do well to take a more hands-on approach.

Low Line co-founder Dan Barasch has been quoted as saying that “Some of the best design is to create a beautiful space and then allow the uses to come after it’s built.” While we are big proponents of creating flexible public spaces, we also believe that thinking about how a space will be used before the design process begins is essential to creating a great Place. In addition to getting people excited about a project by inviting them to participate, LQC interventions have the added benefit of allowing designers to see how the local community uses its public spaces in a low-impact way that requires little capital. If something doesn’t work, it’s infinitely easier to revise a design on paper than to go in and try to undo a defunct idea that’s already been cast in concrete.

The proposed site of the Low Line is to the left in blue; Gulick Park is to the right, in pink. The two sites are less than a quarter-mile apart. / Photo: Google Maps

This brings us to the power of the ping pong table. Gulick Park is one of the closest existing public spaces to the Low Line’s proposed site, making it an ideal “staging area” to test out various potential uses to see what residents want to be able to do. While the Friends of Gulick Park’s original Kickstarter campaign was for a permanent table, why not partner with the Low Line team to bring in a few inexpensive, impermanent tables? Test out the use, and see if it gets people excited.

Extending that idea, a series of LQC experiments–a farmer’s market, a pop-up cafe, a tai chi class, an over-sized chess set–would provide the FoGP with a much larger base of potential donors for future Kickstarter campaigns to fund permanent improvements. Beyond that, these experiments could inform the design of the nearby Low Line and build a broad, engaged base of community support that will be invaluable when it comes time to start navigating the city bureaucracy to turn a trolley terminal into a public space. The end result would be a network of high-quality public spaces for the neighborhood.

“Kickstarter urbanism” is something that can effect change at multiple levels, but it’s important to take the long view, even on smaller projects. This week’s episode of the 99% Invisible radio show looks at how “bigness,” in architecture and urban design, only “pays off when it it uplifts people, gives them a sense of grandeur and purpose.” People want to be a part of big projects that inspire them, and crowdfunding can help them feel like they have ownership in major initiatives in their city. But let’s not forget: sometimes the best way to go big is to start small.

For more examples of crowdfunding sites for urbanists, check out Nate Berg’s response to Lange’s article at The Atlantic Cities blog.

Says commenter Suzan Hampton of Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, which is in the Architecture of Place Hall of Shame: "It feels like being in an airport terminal in there." / Photo: heyskinny via Flickr

Over the past couple of months, we have written several times about the need to move toward an Architecture of Place, creating design that makes people feel empowered, important, and excited to be in the places they inhabit in their daily lives. Two blog posts generated some lively discussion around the subject, which has led to new insight about how those of us concerned with the current direction that architecture is headed in can steer things onto a more productive track.

One of the principal challenges facing architecture today seems to be the lack of understanding of how people relate to the context of a site. Words like “community” and “stakeholders” have been bandied around so much that they have become abstract, and the need for individuals to have agency and a sense of ownership of their surroundings is lost in the mix. Commenter Richard Kooyman, for example, argues that:

It’s a fad today to say that everyone is ‘creative’ or to use terms like  ‘stakeholders’ as if by doing so we are now all empowered to make the changes society needs. The reality is that not everyone is equipped or even cares to be creative and real stakeholders are still those that hold the purse strings of projects.

The idea behind good Placemaking, and using a Place-centered approach when designing a building or public space, is not that each individual within a given community is the expert on what that space should look like, but that the community, as a group, has an important expertise about how that space is used, and how the people most likely to enliven it on a day-to-day basis (themselves) are most likely to do so. Another commenter, Gil, makes this case quite well:

At the end of the day it is people’s perceptions of how great, or not so great, their places are that matters most…I have yet to attend a public hearing on a proposed project where anything resembling “community attachment” has emerged in the dialogue that emanates from the planners, or engineers, or architects, or those that interpret the rules.

There is a misconception of how community knowledge should be integrated into the design process that we have encountered often in our work around the world. The idea is not that the pen and paper should be handed over to community members to create a final design, but that their needs and concerns be treated as contextual factors that are just as important as the shape of the site, the surrounding buildings, or the site’s location within a city. People make a space into a place–or, as Cindy Frewen writes:

When integrated and understanding place and people, design can mean thoughtfully imagined, beautiful, remarkable, moving…Design can help place, if we understand the need to be relevant and connected.

Commenter Cindy Frewen cites Kansas City's River Market as an example of a "place based, grassroots, emergent" design process. / Photo: Scott Unrein via Flickr

A good designer is someone who thinks creatively about how to develop the most efficient and attractive solution possible to a given problem. For architects, this means creating places that are not just visually appealing, but that are also responsive to the needs that the people who will use those places–not the needs that the architect thinks those people want addressed. When design is responsive (not enslaved) to local needs, it’s better for everyone involved: the people who use a place, and the architects, who can point to a well-used and loved place rather than a pristine object. It is our belief that, if more architects were to take a Place-centered approach in their work, it would create a much broader constituency for their work.

It’s also important to acknowledge, though, that non-designers are part of the problem, too. Decades of top-down decision-making have led large chunks of the vocal public to be distrusting of architects and urban planners today. In some cities, this has created a culture where any change is seen as bad change, and community involvement can be, for designers, a headache at best. As The Overhead Wire writes, about San Francisco:

When there is an open piece of land, often times people don’t think it should be anything.  It’s kind of crazy, especially with housing costs so high.

While NIMBYism won’t disappear overnight, architects and designers can begin to counteract this knee-jerk fear of change by treating the communities that surround a project site as part of the context that informs the building or public space they are trying to create. It’s important to remember that, as Ben Brown writes in a recent post on the Better! Cities & Towns blog, most people are “driven by intuition first, reason second.” People are very good at intuiting whether or not a new addition to their neighborhood is saying “come visit” or “keep away!”

So how do we communicate the value of understanding people as a fundamental part of a site’s context–both to architects who would choose to operate as “lone geniuses,” and to members of the public who would rather fight development than try to improve it? As commenter Greg cautions:

I don’t think the argument [for an Architecture of Place] will be broadly persuasive until we find a way to take it out of the purely subjective. Because others can and will respond “but that building doesn’t make me feel that way,” and then there is an impasse.

Thorbjoern Mann, shortly thereafter, suggests that scale is the critical issue to be addressed:

The disconnect between ‘high architecture’ and the life of places can be traced to several factors. One is the habit of making decisions about projects looking at scale models of the proposed buildings. The larger the building, the more the viewer’s attention is drawn to its overall shape, form, geometry, and away from what happens at the ground level where people interact with it.

Says The Alley Project's Erik Howard: "The best design is built around people." / Photo: youngnation.us via The Huffington Post

And Graig Donnelly points to an article on the Huffington Post about The Alley Project (TAP) in Detroit that beautifully illustrates how a participatory design process–especially one that builds off of existing community efforts–can create a more powerful sense of place than any of the buildings listed in our Architecture of Place Hall of Shame. Explains TAP’s Erik Howard: “Good design speaks to activities and people. Then those get translated into design solutions. The best design is built around people.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Wanna go for a walk? / Photo: JaneJacobsWalk.org

The annual Jane’s Walk Weekend is just around the corner! On Saturday, May 5th, and Sunday, May 6th, hundreds of free walking tours will take place in cities around the world. We were going to try to round up the best walks for people interested in Placemaking but, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Jane was the doyenne of human-scaled urbanism, it’s pretty much impossible to find a tour that isn’t great in that regard. Instead, we sifted through all of the listings to find some of the most original and offbeat tours on the roster.

We highly encourage you to visit the two main websites with listings of walks around the world, JaneJacobsWalk.org and JanesWalk.net, to see what’s going on in your city or town, whether it involves unicycles and ugly houses, or a good old fashioned exploration of the history, people, and architecture of a unique place.

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City of Labyrinths Project (Toronto, Ontario)
Toronto, where Jane lived during the latter half of her life, will be the setting for more walks than any other city during the weekend; still, several stand out. This walk ont he 5th, organized by a group that aims “to place a semi-permanent labyrinth within walking distance of every Torontonian,” celebrates the city’s existing sidewalk mazes, and explores the history of labyrinth design.

Cityscape/Soundscape (Toronto, Ontario)
Most walking tours tend to rely more on what we see than what we hear, but Toronto will play host to a “soundwalk” on the 5th. This tour will “show how Toronto’s diverse downtown spaces can be distinguished by their own characteristic soundscapes.” Sounds cool enough already, but take a look at the photo–it seems this walk will even include blindfolds to heighten your hearing!

Food Foraging (Flesherton, Ontario)
For a thoroughly rural ramble (say that five times fast), head to Flesherton on the 6th to learn all about what can and can’t be eaten during a walk in the woods. Organizer David Turner “will also point out plants, roots, barks and leaves that can be used for tinctures, salves and teas.”

IRUBNY Celebrates Gramercy Park (New York, New York)
Artist Carol Caputo will lead participants in New York on a walk around Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood on the 5th, armed with paper and crayons to create rubbings of the architectural details that define this historic district.

Levee Disaster Bike Tour (New Orleans, Louisiana)
Led by an organization lobbying for safer levees to protect New Orleans (sad that we even need sustained advocacy for that), this bike tour on the 6th will visit the sites of two levee breaches that flooded the Crescent City shortly after Hurricane Katrina blew through town.

Not a Cakewalk (Toronto, Ontario)
There are a number of food-related tours scheduled during the weekend, but only one will focus specifically on the design of bakeries, and “illuminates the relationship between emotions and desire with architecture.” The walk will take place in Toronto’s West End neighborhood on the 5th.

Seersucker Ride (Sacramento, California)
If you’re the kind of person who regrets not being born during the Victorian Era, you’re in luck! On the 6th, the group Sacramento Tweed will lead an olde-fashioned bike tour of the historic city core “that encourages period dress and a more relaxed style of riding.”

Silent Midnight Walk (Regina, Saskatchewan)
If the Cityscape/Soundscape walk in Toronto sounded fun but a bit too easterly, you can experience another soundwalk in Regina on the evening of the 5th. During this one-hour traipse, “participants may choose to practice walking meditation or to simply allow their senses to take over.” Tranquil or spooky, depending on your perspective, it certainly sounds like an interesting experience!

Ugly Houses (Karlskrona, Sweden)
There’s not much information available about this walk on the website, but the title suggests that, if you happen to be in Karlskrona on the 6th, this walk has potential to be very entertaining!

Unicycling for Change (Bozeman, Montana)
While Jane’s Walk Weekend will feature several biking tours, we only found one that will be conducted via unicycle! If you’re a fan of transportation of the one-wheeled variety, head out to Montana on the 5th to help promote the cause! (Don’t worry, the route includes several breaks for weary legs).

All Photos: JaneJacobsWalk.org

Click to view the Table of Contents / Photo: Princeton Architectural Press

As Placemaking Blog readers already know, we’re in the midst of launching a public conversation about the need for an Architecture of Place. In researching the current state of architectural criticism, we came across design critic Alexandra Lange’s brand new book, Writing About Architecture, which serendipitously provides an in-depth look at how to write effectively about the very subject we were arguing needs to be written more effectively about!

Lange, who teaches criticism at New York University and the School of Visual Arts, has created a hybrid that is part anthology, part handbook. Writing About Architecture presents six essays by well-known critics, including Lewis Mumford, Michael Sorkin, and Jane Jacobs, using them to illustrate various aspects of successful and effective criticism. I recently had the opportunity to chat with the author via email about activist criticism, improving communication between citizens and designers, and how the democratization of media is opening up this field to new voices.

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Brendan Crain: You devote a good deal of ink in Writing About Architecture to activist criticism, focusing (necessarily) on specific examples. Thinking more broadly, what would you say is the state of activist criticism today? Can you think of people who are doing a particularly good job with this kind of writing? And if there are any, what are some of the broader goals of contemporary activist design criticism?

Alexandra Lange: In the last chapter of my book I discuss Jane Jacobs, and how she might have reacted to the Atlantic Yards project. I think it needed a Jane Jacobs to stop it — an advocate as eloquent about the costs, and the alternatives, as those seductive Gehry renderings — and for whatever reason, one did not appear. But the activist spirit was by no means dead. It just got diffused into activist non-profits and activist blogs and activist essays. The diffused media landscape made it easier to follow the saga week by week, but perhaps made it harder for any one person to become the voice.

Activist criticism now is less likely to be on the pages of a major media outlet and more likely to be on a purpose-built blog. Jane Jacobs and Michael Sorkin had the Village Voice; today, I think of Aaron Naparstek and Streetsblog, which he founded but has now become a larger, multi-writer entity. He built his own platform for what the New York Times would not cover. That’s incredibly exciting but also potentially limiting — what if you have activist thoughts about other topics? Preservation is another area where I think critics can be effective, but I wouldn’t want to write about modernist preservation all the time.

In terms of broader goals, I can think of three areas that seem to attract activism: public space (like PPS), preservation (like DOCOMOMO, Landmarks West!) and transportation (Transportation Alternatives, Streetsblog). But more people get their news about the city from places like Curbed and other real estate blogs, and I am still always hoping that those sites will get more critical, and put their readership to use. It isn’t really in their personality profile, but I’m an optimist.

BC: That raises the question of why, at a time when architecture is purportedly paying more attention to social issues, the audience for writing about it seems to be shrinking, with the “death of architecture criticism” meme making the blog-rounds over the past few months. Groups that are particularly well-organized online–bicycling advocates, urban gardeners, transportation wonks, and even real estate gawkers–seem to dominate the conversation about cities. Discussions about architecture seem much more insular. How might the conversation about the built environment be opened up to appeal to a wider audience?

AL: I’m not sure I think the “death of architecture criticism” meme is real. I am sad when publications that have longstanding critic positions decide they don’t need them anymore, but I wonder if the real story isn’t architecture criticism exploring the new media landscape. TV criticism went through a tremendous transition, embracing the recap, rejecting the recap, making a case for itself as the central cultural critique of our day. It could be amazing if architecture criticism made a similar transition and came out stronger.

For that to happen, I think criticism needs to take more forms: not just appear in the culture section, but in news and opinion; appear on Twitter, in conversations with other fields; point out how it is central to questions of development, and environmentalism, and even television, that people are already engaged with. Readers need to recognize that it doesn’t have a single personality. Unfortunately, the first people critics need to convince are the editors, and I know from experience that can be tough.

BC: In addition to diversifying the ways in which critical writing is being disseminated, does the scope of what what’s being written about need to widen? In the book, you’ve included “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” an essay by Charles Moore that contrasts architectural with social monumentality. You note that, by Moore’s definition, a place as simple and unadorned as a meadow can be considered monument if that meadow resonates with the surrounding communities — “people make monuments.” Do you think writing about more ordinary elements of the city could be helpful in broadening the audience for criticism?

AL: Moore’s essay is one of my all time favorites, and I constantly refer to it in my thinking about public space and the way we make cities. ‘Who is paying’ and ‘How are we paying’ are questions relevant to almost any public space. In that chapter I even review, in a sense, the Urban Meadow in my Brooklyn neighborhood as a monument. So yes, I do think critics need to widen their scope, but I also think people need to notice that they’ve already done that, and have been doing it. Justin Davidson has a piece in this week’s New York magazine about Times Square, and he’s written about it at least one other time. Michael Kimmelman is making the architects mad by writing about planning and not architecture for the Times. Karrie Jacobs has been doing this all along. There was a tendency to starchitecture criticism, but it wasn’t forever and it wasn’t everyone.

BC: Due to the technological changes that you spoke of earlier, it’s easy now for anyone with an interest in architecture and design to participate in the public discussion about these topics. Blogging and tweeting are to media, in a way, what “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” interventions are to design. In the book, you refer to Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities as “a primary document for a ground-up, deinstitutionalized form of architectural criticism.” Are there other books, essays, blogs, etc. that you think are particularly instructive for people who, like Jacobs, aren’t trained as designers or architects, but who want to write about how design affects their communities?

AL: I like the approach Alissa Walker takes on her own blog, Gelatobaby, as well in her freelance work (she now has a column at LA Weekly). I like the kind of events the Design Trust for Public Space organizes, creating social interactions in unusual parts of the city. I think Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City is well worth reading, even though it is dated, because his mental mapping project, and the five elements of the city he identifies (path, edge, district, node, landmark), remain useful in trying to figure out what’s missing. If you want to read more Lewis Mumford, I recommend the collection From the Ground Up, which has a lot about cars, housing and streets. I just read an essay on architecture and urban development in Kazakhstan by Andrew Kovacs, soon to be published in PIDGIN, that I found fascinating. Sometimes just reading an account of what it is like to walk around in a strange place is enough, and that’s a great place for the non-designer to start. Get out the AIA Guide and go explore.

BC: Getting out and observing how a place works is something we highly recommend! But sometimes people can sense things intuitively about a place that they may not be able to articulate in a way that design professionals respond to. We conducted one of our How to Turn a Place Around training workshops at the PPS offices in New York last week, and one of the attendees said that she was participating because she would like “for designers to think more like citizens, and for citizens to think more like designers.” You’ve included a bunch of great exercises in Writing About Architecture to help readers put lessons learned from the various essays into action. Can you think of one or two exercises that could help citizens to communicate their concerns more effectively to designers–and vice versa?

AL: I think for the non-designer, getting specific is really helpful. Achieving a higher level of noticing. Do you always trip on that step? Why do you take the stairs rather than the ramp? Is it just too hot in the park? Think about the height, the materials, the lighting level, the plants and try to figure out what it is that isn’t working. No one likes to hear, “I just don’t like it…” and I think making the problem as concrete as you can helps designers to hear you. Also, if you are in a place that isn’t working, try to think of a similar one that you do like. What does that one have that this one doesn’t? Compare and contrast is really effective.

As for the designers, I’m with the anti-archispeak contingent. Architects have to get specific too, and not talk about landscape elements rather than plants, etc. It is a kind of shorthand, but it is off-putting. More important, though, is to discuss the narrative of a project: why you chose this material rather than that, how it is supposed to make citizens (not users!) feel and act, what’s the point. Everyone wants places that work, but there are so many different ways to get there.

Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" beautifully illustrates the mix of uses and resulting social vibrancy at Paris' now-demolished Gare Montparnasse / Photo: Paramount Pictures

When you’re watching a movie, how much attention do you pay to the setting? While the best way to learn about what makes a great place is often to get out and observe how public spaces work first-hand, there are films that illustrate Placemaking principles quite beautifully. We’ve collected ten of our favorites here, with explanations of why we think they tell great stories about place. Take a look, and let us know if you have a favorite Placemaking-related movie or two (or three!) that we should add to our Netflix queues!

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Ikiru (1962; director, Akira Kurosawa)
A bureaucrat who learns he is dying of stomach cancer unexpectedly finds a sense of purpose in his life by cutting through red tape to get a park built for neighborhood children.

Thieves’ Highway (1949; director Jules Dassin)
A feud among corrupt produce dealers at the San Francisco market comes alive because of the location footage. A wonderfully pulpy film noir thoroughly grounded in a very specific place.

Mon Oncle (1958; director, Jacques Tati)
An eccentric uncle comes to visit family in an absurdly well-ordered and well-groomed suburb. Accustomed to the joy and texture of city life, he is utterly unable to adapt. Tati is a brilliant physical comedian who once said, “”Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables” (“geometrical lines do not produce likeable people”). Watch him be hilariously confounded by a kitchen full of “convenient” modern appliances.

Play Time (1967; director, Jacques Tati)
Tati’s signature character, M. Hulot, is trapped in the linear, slick, modernist environment of 1960s Paris. There is almost no dialogue. It is all about sight and sound gags. You will have to watch this four times to get them all. And you will want to watch it four times.

La Bête Humaine (1938; director, Jean Renoir)
About trains and train conductors and cheating wives. The most beautiful footage of trains and rail yards ever filmed.

Brazil (1985; director, Terry Gilliam)
Wonderful to watch for its humorous takedown of bureaucracy and top-down institutions, and its praise for zealous nuts.

Hugo (2011; director, Martin Scorsese)
The balletic interplay of people in Hugo’s grand train station – travelers, shopkeepers, musicians, lovers – is a thrill to watch. Scorsese has created a place so vibrant, and so real, that you long to step into the screen and inhabit it yourself.

The Sandlot (1993; director, David M. Evans)
This film about a neighborhood baseball field recalls a time when a kid could walk (or as was often shown in the film, run) to the neighborhood ballfield, and stay there all day, every day, unsupervised. The only time he was expected at home was for dinner.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946; director Frank Capra)
Perhaps the ultimate American love song to community wisdom, with a walkable downtown to beat the band.

High Noon (1952; director, Fred Zinnemann)
Talk about a sense of place. All the drama in the world is contained on High Noon’s Main Street.

The Village of Cheshire's master plan was developed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

I had the unique opportunity to participate in a “Smart Growth” bus tour of communities in North Carolina, organized last year by the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute and the Local Government Commission. We visited a variety of neighborhoods, from low-density to high, pre-car to newly developed, to learn how livable and sustainable principles can help a wide range of communities to adapt to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

Important lessons can be learned from each of the communities we visited. None were perfect, but as Joel Garreau pointed out in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, now-revered places like Venice and London were pieced together over centuries; flaws were frequently pointed out by critics, and fixed over time. Flaws in these places will be addressed over time as well. What is critical about each location is that they are testing out new ideas of what a sustainable future could look like. The neighborhoods that had the best sense of place were those that were created over a hundred years, and they serve as great models for how to take Traditional Neighborhood Development, Form Based Codes and other contemporary planning strategies to the next level.

My observations from the experience are below. You can click here to download my full report on the trip, which includes more detailed information on each of the communities that we visited across the state: Charlotte, Belmont, Kannapolis, Cornelius, Davidson, Black Mountain, and Asheville.

1.) Urbanism can be scaled to fit all types of development, from big city to rural: One of the major misconceptions holding back the acceptance of livability and sustainability policies across a broad spectrum of American communities is that urbanism is anti-suburb, and holds no answers for rural areas. The variety of communities seen on the North Carolina Smart Growth Tour proves otherwise. Urbanism has improved livability in communities ranging from small towns like Black Mountain; to once-rural villages like Cornelius, Belmont, and Kannapolis that are struggling to avoid losing their identity as they are being absorbed by modern auto-oriented development; all the way up to larger cities like Asheville and Charlotte that are looking to repair damage inflicted by post-WWII retrofits implemented to make way for cars.

Residential development at the Bland Street Station in Charlotte’s South End / Photo: Gary Toth

True, urbanism reaches is fullest value at higher densities. But the social benefits of having a small center where one can walk to eat breakfast, grab a quart of milk, or hang out and chat with others around a cup of coffee can be achieved even in application of urbanism principles in small – and new – rural villages. While residents of places like Black Mountain and Cornelius will probably not be able to ditch their cars entirely, these places have the potential to reduce the daily auto trip load from the average of 12-14 daily trips per household. While this may not seem significant, reducing daily trips from 14 to 12 represents a 14% decrease – a significant contraction.

The clustering around a center offered by Cornelius and Black Mountain also dramatically increases the feasibility of a transit provider offering service. Typical suburban communities are too spread out to make transit stops efficient. Even a town as small as Black Mountain creates a focal point for passengers waiting for transit service to hang out, grab a cup of coffee, and perhaps even do some business.

More importantly, creation of urbanist developments in these traditional rural areas creates a sense of place, a sense of community, and better livability.

2.) Placemaking, New Urbanism, and Smart Growth can help protect rural communities from losing their identity to suburbanism. Communities such as Davidson, Cornelius, Belmont and Kannapolis have recognized that the biggest threat to their rural landscapes is NOT livability and New Urbanism; it is business-as-usual suburban sprawl. The latter, by leading to formula-driven housing, commercial and office developments that look the same whether in New Mexico, New Jersey, or North Carolina, erodes the sense of community that preceded its arrival. Beginning in 1996, Belmont, Davidson and Cornelius adopted form based codes to help stem the tide of suburbanism emanating out from Charlotte as its metropolitan area boomed.

3.) The production line efficiency of stamping out off-the-rack buildings limits the value of New Urbanism. The Town of Belmont’s clustering of new development into small pods with connected, properly-sized streets and alleys is an important step in the right direction. However, when compared to the Antiquity at Cornelius development, where a series of building styles varies from building to building, Belmont pales. While Cornelius does not exhibit an infinite variety of architectural styles from house to house, even a mild variety in housing types here makes a dramatic difference in the sense of place. It chips away at the “Disney-esque” feeling that New Urbanism is sometimes accused of creating.

4.) Pods of New Urbanist residential development need to be within walking distance of activity centers. Not to pick on Belmont, but their dozen or so New Urbanist pods are isolated and are a mile or two from commercial activity. Belmont does have a quaint, mixed-use Main Street, but shopping options are limited and in tough competition with auto-oriented strip development located along State Route 74, with a particular concentration at the interchange with Interstate 85. Compare this to Antiquity at Cornelius, where a small town center is being built right in the midst of new residential neighborhoods; or Davidson, which has recognized the importance of its historic downtown, surrounded by hundreds of residential units adjacent to and within easy walking distance of downtown. Antiquity, Davidson and even Black Mountain offer the potential to eliminate at least one round trip a day by car. Isolated pods do not.

5.) Livable street design is equally important in all residential places, regardless of population density. Complete streets create the engineering foundation for a great street; Placemaking completes the job. On destination streets, multi-modal activity is fostered by triangulating multiple destinations within easy walking distance. Buildings are located to create the “walls” of an outdoor living room, and ground floor uses engage people on the street. This is as true in the two-story buildings in downtown Belmont as it is with the multi-story buildings on Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte. The street cross sections tame traffic and provide comfortable settings for activity; the speed of cars does not intimidate. A street does not need to have been created 100 years ago to establish the destination street feel, as the developers of Biltmore Park Town Square have proven.

6.) Malls don’t have to be totally auto-dependent, surrounded by seas of parking. Biltmore Park Town Square in Asheville proves that mall can move back towards a more sustainable form, centered on a Main Street and with office and residential mixed in.

7.) New development may need to age gracefully like a fine wine; Placemaking layered on top of modern planning can accelerate the creation of attractive patinas. New Urbanist principles such as Smart Codes, Form Based Codes, Complete Streets, and Mixed-Use Destinations create the bones for sustainable communities. However, while newly-created developments like Antiquity and Biltmore Square, there is some of that “Disney-esque” feel mentioned above. Older downtowns in Asheville and Davidson, by contrast, felt more natural and comfortable, the result of gradual informal Placemaking over the years.

Antiquity at Cornelius / Photo: Gary Toth

Click here to download the full report.

In March, PPS’s Fred Kent and Gary Toth both presented at the Destination Creation conference held in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. While you may have already read about the How to Turn a Place Around training workshops that they conducted while in town, we’re excited to be able to share Fred and Gary’s conference presentations with you, as well.

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

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

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

Photo: Clickr.com

Looking north from the corner (Click to Enlarge) / Photo: Brendan Crain

In her 1958 essay “Downtown is for People,” republished online by Fortune late last year, Jane Jacobs noted the presence of a Park Avenue block that had been razed in anticipation of an office building for which the developer was struggling to raise capital. Jacobs (who had been invited to write the essay by none other than Holly Whyte) called the site “New York’s Mystery Plaza,” noting wistfully that “in the meantime, sidewalk planners can design some wonderful plazas.”

There’s a similarly ephemeral and provocative moment that one can experience in New York right now, a bit further downtown: for the time being, the block bounded by Astor Place, East 9th Street, and 3rd and 4th Avenues is sans structure. While this was once the site of Cooper Union’s unassuming Engineering Building, is now home to a dirt pit and a couple of backhoes. The adjacent jumble of intersecting streets creates a number of thin triangular traffic islands that have long subbed in for a coordinated public space, with defiant success. In spite of the auto-centric planning so clearly on display, there are people here: coming and going, talking, performing.

This is a place where the buildings have never towered too tall, and the streets have never felt too narrow. And yet, the fact that there is additional open space feels even more pronounced here than it might in vertical Midtown, where the predominance of office towers can camouflage absence.

The aforementioned dirt pit will be filled by a particularly egregious office block soon enough. Designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, it will feature an immense facade of dark glass that will glare out over Astor Place, gobbling up more of the sky than its predecessor. But for the time being, there is a palpable sense of possibility here. The vaguely European 6 train entrance and Tony Rosenthal’s accidentally iconic Alamo sculpture appear enhanced, now seeming like hints of a grand public square in the making, backed by so much blue sky.

The same site, seen from the northeast corner (Click to Enlarge) / Photo: Brendan Crain

The buildings surrounding the site are of varying heights and colors, and with their facades open and turned toward each other across the open block, they look as if they were always meant to be seen this way, like friends chatting around the table. Even the “Sculpture for Living” is less standoffish within the context of a larger urban tableau, reading more like a comedic foil to the dignified Wanamaker block, and less like a caged peacock.

Like Jacobs’ original, this mystery plaza provides ample fodder for “sidewalk planners.” Perhaps it is a side effect of the frenetic density of its surroundings, but the block almost demands that passers-by imagine an alternate use here. It feels as if the grid itself is saying “Do you see this? I clearly intended for this to be a square.”

"New York's Mystery Plaza" in 1958 / Photo: Fortune

The mystery plaza at Astor Place will be gone soon. Long before Maki’s “Death Star” is occupied, its frame will zip the space back up. But as the city moves forward with plans to pedestrianize some of the surrounding blocks to create a more deliberate public gathering place, let’s hope that the sudden, bewitching openness created by the construction process inspires people to imagine not just what the site could have been, but how the adjacent spaces could better serve the people who use them–and to speak up. As Jacobs argued in Fortune, “planners and architects have a vital contribution to make, but the citizen has a more vital one. It is his city, after all.”

We’ll be talking more about Astor Place and its environs in the coming weeks as part of our ongoing discussion about moving towards an Architecture of Place. There is a great need, today, for more inclusive, flexible public squares and plazas that can serve as social hubs for the surrounding communities–spaces that strengthen neighborhoods and provide a rich context for architects and designers who use a place-based approach in their work. Stay tuned…

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

From the FHWA’s website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View How To Turn Dun Laoghaire Around in a larger map

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

Meet Matt!

In our new Citizen Placemaker series, we’ll be chatting with some of the folks we meet in our travels and through our online interactions to learn about the amazing and inspiring work that they do, and to see how creating great places goes far beyond the physical spaces that make up our cities.

This brings us to Matt Lechel (@mlechs), a community change agent in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Matt is one of the founding board members of the IDEA Association, a non-profit that works to create structures that improve community health. On the clock, he works as the executive director of Kalamazoo Collective Housing (an affordable housing cooperative that works to develop neighborhood leaders and engaged citizens) and as an event manager for Volunteer Kalamazoo, where he organizes community days of service, specifically focusing on neighborhood safety initiatives. We met Matt on Twitter, and were impressed by his deep level of community involvement. So now, without further ado…

What is it about your place (city/neighborhood/block/etc) that inspires you to do the work that you do?
Kalamazoo is filled with incredible art, bright music, a growing and somewhat progressive downtown, and for the most part, people who seem to genuinely care about making the place they live better. Kalamazoo is also filled with some fascinating juxtapositions. The city is home to award-winning innovators in the field of anti-racism training and yet some neighborhoods are still so racially segregated that, at times, I wonder how much progress we’ve really made since the Civil Rights Movement. Kalamazoo is a community of truly amazing philanthropy and community investment, yet a huge chunk of that wealth was made through extremely negligent pollution of the Kalamazoo River. My motivation and curiosity stems from a desire to understand why these conflicting truths exist, and what we can do differently or better to fix them.

Probably wherever I called home, I would still have an insatiable desire to work in whatever small ways I can. But I do think Kalamazoo offered some special inspiration to me, particularly in terms of its cultural and political community.  As I began my journey to understand and know Kalamazoo (which is ongoing and mostly a learning experience), the real inspiration came from the people I met. I found people at the end of nearly every discovery or realization I made waiting for me with open arms, saying, “Glad you’re up to speed Matt, we could use your help, dig in.” In a town like Kalamazoo, it feels like every door is open; it just depends on if you want to step through it or not.

It sounds like your route to community involvement was very organic. Can you say a bit about what kinds of things you saw happening around Kalamazoo that led to the creation of the IDEA Association?
There was a coffee shop in Kalamazoo called the Strutt that likened itself to a public cafeteria—and it wasn’t that far off. People flocked to The Strutt: artists, bohemians, poets, weirdos, hipsters, square dancers; it was such a vibrant cultural hub. As someone who works in the nonprofit/social entrepreneurship field, I started to think about the impact this place was having. This bar was a haven for artistic expression, group planning meetings, drawings and poetry—it was probably one of the most important places that existed for some locals. That’s an important and empowering realization: that “Places” don’t have to be formal, long-standing institutions; in fact, sometimes the best places are ones that sprout up out of nothing and lack traditional forms of structure or policy.

IDEA Association was created in an attempt to help fill the gap between art, culture, and social progress—and support the creation of organizations that improved Kalamazoo while operating outside of those traditional structures. We started organizing these weird, unique events all over Kalamazoo where we would have live music, participatory community art projects, and we would survey attendees, asking all sorts of questions about what the most important relevant social issues were to them, and what solutions they knew of or imagined.

The Open Roads Bike Program was created by neighbors who saw a problem on their street and wanted to make a difference. / Photo: IDEA Association

You describe what IDEA does as “participatory project design.” What exactly is that, and how has it worked in past projects?
Strengthening connections between cultural experiences and social problem-solving was only one part of the work we wanted to do. We wanted to accomplish something tangible. For the first few years, we batted around lots of ideas about  how participatory project design would manifest itself. Eventually, through our work with the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and O.N.E. Place, we realized that there are many people seeking to do amazing work in our community who lack 501(c)3 status, and are thus ineligible to receive even small grants. On top of that, many nascent groups struggle with communication and organizational development issues—some of the very same issues IDEA had worked through. As a result, we began to serve as a fiscal sponsor to emerging grassroots projects in town.

An early success project is the Open Roads Bike Program. Open Roads was started 36 months ago by Ethan Alexander and a couple of neighbors who saw a problem on their street in Kalamazoo’s Edison neighborhood and wanted to make a difference. They started hosting weekly “Fixapaloozas” in Ethan’s garage. Pretty soon, kids and parents alike were coming to check it out, neighbors started to donate bikes, and by the end of the summer every single kid on the street had their own bike—and the skills to fix it themselves. Open Roads considered becoming their own 501(c)3 nonprofit, but decided they’d rather focus on doing what they love: working with kids, fixing bikes. This past summer, through fiscal sponsorship with IDEA, Open Roads got a significant grant from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation that took their program citywide.

We’ve found that there are so many people just like the Open Roads crew, who are outrageously talented and simply want to make an impact. They just need some of the community’s resources pointed in their direction. We help them identify and go after those resources.

"Kalamazoo feels like a small enough place that you can literally get to know every single person in it if you try hard enough." / Photo: Paladin27 via Flickr

One of our key Placemaking Principles is that “you can’t do it alone.” How important is collaboration in your efforts to improve Kalamazoo?
For me, collaboration is just a way of life. When someone brings me a new idea, the first thing I want to do is connect them to everyone in town who cares about similar issues. And Kalamazoo feels like a small enough place that you can literally get to know every single person in it if you try hard enough.

While collaboration can feel forced these days as it becomes a mantra for foundations and funders, when it happens organically and cooperatively, it’s so obvious and simple. IDEA’s fiscal sponsorship work is collaborative by its very nature. There are these really fantastic Zen-like moments when we’re meeting with various partner organizations. We’ll have 10 people in a room, all of whom have these grand visions, but only $1,000 in seed funding. People start to realize the immense amount of resources it will take to achieve the impacts that match their visions, and finally someone will speak up and say something like, “Hey, all of our resources are so limited…shouldn’t we be asking ourselves what investments we can make together that serve all of our collective needs?” And then they create these masterful program collaborations that incorporate several emerging grassroots projects instead of just one.

If you could give one piece of advice to people who are interested in tackling challenges in their communities but aren’t sure where to start, what would it be?
Start today. Just show up. Start showing up and don’t stop showing up at community events, neighborhood watch meetings, nonprofit board meetings, city commission meetings, art shows, local concerts, political rallies. Volunteer at events related to the things that you are passionate about; sometimes you’ll be invited to participate, sometimes you’ll have to invite yourself. Just remember that there is no one more qualified to impact your community than you.

Says Kent: "Places are people too, my friends." / Photo: Sittingo.com

We’re excited to announce today that PPS is launching a new campaign to extend First Amendment rights to public places.

As the culmination of our long effort to give voice to places around the country, we have filed an Amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging Constitutional recognition of the inherent personhood of Place, ensuring the same right to freedom of speech as human beings. We believe that this follows naturally from the Citizens United vs. FEC Supreme Court Ruling, which gave corporations the same legal rights as people.

In nearly 40 years of work across all 50 states and 42 countries, PPS staff have found incontestable evidence that public spaces have distinct personalities, just the same as people. In fact, public places consistently demonstrate higher rates of cooperation, efficiency and public benefit than corporations and individuals. And like people, they should have the right to express themselves.

Through our online and in-person engagement and evaluation tools, we have been able to give voice to places. This voice should be able to influence elections and defend itself, just as people and corporations can.

The campaign got its start last summer when PPS President Fred Kent, responding to an audience at the Iowa State Fair, declared. “Places are people too, my friends.”

Fred Kent's fertile imagination has helped him appreciate and "listen to" places as if they were real people. Photo: Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

The campaign also advocates the creation of Super PACs (Place Action Committees) to make sure places are well-represented in the public process, without cooperating directly with political campaigns. Some observers predict this effort will lead to a new era of “Place Capitalism,” where the Place is recognized in its role as a means of production and source of resilient wealth.

This legal recognition is further necessitated in light of the fact that automobiles have been getting closer to achieving the same rights as people, and the transportation system that serves these near citizens has been siphoning wealth from Places, perhaps in preparation for this battle.

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Also see other past PPS Faking Places editions that we have produced every year on April 1st – Happy April Fools Day!

Photos: Sittingo.com and Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

When an opportunity to develop a site in your city comes up, what kind of approach do the people leading the process take? Do they treat the site as an independent piece of real estate, to be interpreted by architects and planners first before involving any of the local residents? Or do they reach out to people to find out what needs already exist in the area around that site, and then begin devising a plan with the community?

We call the former of these two a Design-Centered approach, and the latter a Place-Centered approach. One of our 11 Placemaking Principles is that it is critical to remember, in any project, that you are creating a place, not a design. While good design is important to creating great places, it is but one tool in your kit–not the driving force behind good Placemaking. When a community is involved from (or even before) the start of a design process, that process serves the site and the people who will use it, instead of serving the designers’ own interests. This creates places that are accessible, dynamic, and inclusive–the kind of places that are central to building strong neighborhoods and cities.

To move toward an Architecture of Place, we must all advocate for our cities to take a Place-Centered approach to creating new buildings and public spaces. Below, we break down how these two approaches take on various elements of the Placemaking process. Most projects are a mix of the two, and some start with one approach and shift to another part-way through; there’s certainly a lot of gray area, but go take a look below and see if you can divine whether your city is more Design-Centered, or Place-Centered.

Paris Plage: the result of a Place-Centered approach / Photo: Fred Kent

A Place-Centered Approach: 

…is project-driven. The site is treated as an independent pedestal on which a bold, “innovative” building is to be set. Only the needs of the immediate site are considered during the design process. …is place-driven. The current uses of buildings, spaces, and streets surrounding the site are observed and considered before any design work starts. The site is considered as an important node in a larger system. …is discipline-based. References are drawn from within the architecture community. Theoretical ideas are more likely to be applied than any actual input from the people who live and work around the site. …is community-based. Since the people who live and work around the site already know what problems and strengths the area is dealing with, they are the experts, and their knowledge is seen as the most important resource for determining how the site will be shaped. …focuses on architecture as the attraction. The novelty of the finished design is the main reason for people to visit the site. Eventually, the novelty wears off, and the design becomes a white elephant–or worse, a place to avoid, a hole in the urban fabric. …lets attractions shape the architecture. The design highlights what’s great about the buildings and spaces around it, and draws its own strengths from how it enhances its surroundings. …relies on the lone genius (or “Starchitect”) to interpret the site and determine how it should be used. …starts by looking for partners from the community that can provide a basic knowledge of how the site is already used in order to ensure that the design is inclusive and accessible to the people around it. …takes an all-or-nothing approach. Designs are implemented all at once through massive, expensive construction projects. Once the project is complete, if the new design doesn’t work, it’s an automatic boondoggle. …starts small and builds up through an iterative process. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategies are deployed to test ideas out before they’re writ large in stone and steel. …relishes in the glory of the grand opening. Critics rush to laud or lampoon the new design, local news teams jostle for a good shot for the evening news, and tourists flock to snap photos of the shiny new thing. …accepts that the design of a successful place is never really finished. Communities change, uses shift, and places need constant attention in order to stay useful, relevant, and attractive to the people who use them. Remember that Placemaking is 80-90% about good management. …creates places where the “look but don’t touch” mentality is in force. In order to maintain a space that is “neat, clean, and empty,” excessive rules are implemented to protect the design, which ironically leaves them pockmarked with “Please Don’t…” signage. …creates places that are accessible and inclusive. Form supports function, so creating a “cutting edge” design is secondary to ensuring that the site will actually serve the people who use it. People who do use the space feel a sense of ownership, which leads to self-managed and self-programmed spaces.

One of the key principles to remember when trying to create a great public square is that the inner square and outer square must work together. Active edges (sidewalk cafes, museums, shops) feed into the center; in turn, a lively scene at the heart of a square creates a buzz that draws more people to the area, generating more activity for edge uses. It’s symbiotic!

The video above illustrates this principle using imagery from our study of Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, Texas. Home to one of the most iconic buildings in America, the plaza itself is more of a place to stand for a photo op than a place where people linger and enjoy. As you can see, creating a sense of connection and flow between the inner and outer square is key to success.

Photo: Mark Plotz / National Center for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW)

Govern + Invest is a theme that will be explored at Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. A question that will be examined is how bicycling and walking investments can add value to a community by creating economic activity, creating jobs, and improving quality of life.

Already we know that when it comes to jobs created per million dollars, bicycle facilities are one of the most efficient transportation investments. But once the paint dries and the asphalt cools, are there lasting economic effects? Can bicycle infrastructure build bicycle culture that will build a bicycle economy?

The answer seems to be yes — at least in the case of Long Beach, California. More than 20 new bicycle-related or bicycle-inspired businesses have opened at last count. I toured some of these business with Charlie Gandy and Melissa Balmer during a recent trip to Long Beach to meet these entrepreneurs, and prospect for locally-sourced goods and services for our conference. Twenty new businesses is a lot, especially in this economy, so you may be skeptical of these numbers (I was); but after meeting some impressive young people, I can assure you that it’s all real.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Yellow 108
A year-old business that recently relocated to Long Beach after being inspired by the city’s funky bicycle culture, Yellow 108 is a headwear company that produces its hats and accessories from salvaged and recycled materials. I met with co-founder Lauren Lilly, who has grown her business to ten employees and is now branching into bicycle accessories. What Lauren has already accomplished is impressive enough; watch Charlie Gandy’s interview with her, and you’ll see she’s destined for more.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Long Beach Pedaler Society
This pedicab upstart can be found plying the green sharrow lanes of Belmont Shores in search of fares. I spent part of a morning over coffee talking to Jesus Chavez and Joseph Bradley, co-founders of the Pedaler Society. These guys think big; they’re not afraid of risk; and they have clearly thrived thanks to the bike culture milieu in Long Beach. They are expanding into grocery delivery, and are even contemplating locally sourcing the manufacture of their vehicles as they expand their business. Building bikes in the United States? Sign me up. Look for the Pedalers when you make it to Long Beach.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

The Bicycle Stand
One of the newest businesses in Long Beach — and one of its friendliest — Evan Whitener’s shop specializes in refurbished vintage road bikes, and new city/commuter bikes. They were doing a very brisk bicycle restoration business when I stopped by. The Bicycle Stand is part bicycling museum, part fully functioning bike shop. If you worship lugged steel frames, you’ll like their Facebook page (linked above).

Photo: The Academy

The Academy
Have you ever tried to find affordable clothing that’s not made in a sweatshop? It’s nearly impossible; or at least I thought it was, until I walked into The Academy. They sell clothing designed to look good on the street and work well when you’re riding your bike. The Academy utilizes sustainable and reclaimed materials, and you can meet the person who sewed your clothes. If that’s not awesome enough, try the prices: shirts and kakis run about 43 bucks each. Stop by to meet Sam: he may lend you his bike for a roll around Long Beach.

And let’s not forget that Long Beach is also home to the original bicycle-related business: Bikestation!

There is hope and optimism in Long Beach; I hear it when talking to these brave, young entrepreneurs. Each cites Long Beach’s bicycling infrastructure investments, and its emergent bicycling culture as key to sparking, sustaining, and expanding their businesses.

Downtowns can be museums of economic development fads and crackpot schemes all designed to breathe economic life back into blighted areas. The pedestrian malls of the 70s; the aquariums of the 80s; the convention centers and stadiums of the 90s; the creative class coffee shops, wifi hot spots, and lifestyle centers of the 00s — these massive public/private expenditures may have provided an attraction, but they didn’t retain or attract the Laurens, the Jesuses, the Josephs, the Evans, and the Sams who will provide sustainable economic growth. There is a lesson in Long Beach. Let’s hope that walking, bicycling, and place become the new form of Economic Gardening.

See you in Long Beach!

Mark Plotz is the Conference Director for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. Registration for the conference is open now, and special rates apply until May 16, 11:59 pm Eastern. Large group discounts are available. Please contact Mark at (202) 223-3621 or mark@bikewalk.org for more info.

Spring is here at last, and that means it’s time for another round of PPS’s bi-annual Placemaking Training programs. We love doing trainings because, even after 37+ years of working with communities around the world to make great places, we still discover new things while working with each group of attendees, who bring knowledge and insights from their projects in cities all over the world. If you are working on a place-based project or just want to learn more about our placemaking approach, we hope that you will join us on April 19-20 for How to Turn a Place Around, or the following week, on April 25-27, for Placemaking: Making It Happen.

• How to Turn a Place Around
  This course serves as a comprehensive introduction to the practice of placemaking. We’ve learned through our work that placemaking is a sacred community process. People take the shaping of their blocks and neighborhoods very seriously, and have much to offer to planners, architects, designers, and local leaders who are ready to ask the right questions–and to listen. Through the discussion of key case studies like the Perth Cultural Centre’s Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper activation plan, as well as opportunities to get out into the streets of New York City to experiment with tools like the Place Game and Power of 10, attendees develop a deeper understanding of what really makes public spaces function. The course is conducted by PPS president, Fred Kent, along with Kathy Madden, and Phil Myrick, and other PPS staff. For more details about this course, click here.

• Placemaking: Making It Happen
  Making It Happen takes things a step further by teaching people who are ready to take action–especially people who are embarking on a new project–about best practices for developing an effective public space management and implementation strategy. Over the course of three days, we’ll travel around New York City to visit some of its best-managed spaces with the people who helped make them happen. This course will also give participants the opportunity to discuss and get feedback on their individual projects during facilitated, interactive workshop sessions. Kent, and Madden, and Norman Mintz from PPS will all present, and we’ll also be joined by Urban Space Management director Eldon Scott, Alan M. Hantman, FAIA,10th Architect of the US Capitol and former Vice President of Architecture, Construction, and Historic Preservation at Rockefeller Center, and Andy Manshel, the Executive Vice President of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation (GJDC). For the first time, we’ll be expanding the course to take place over three days instead of two, and will include site visits to some of New York City’s best managed public spaces along with a dinner at PPS the first night and a reception the second night and more time for participants to present and get input on their projects.  All of this will also allow for more of the networking and collaborative learning that past participants have found so beneficial to their work.

  We’re thrilled to be welcoming Andy as a new addition to the Making It Happen training team. Before joining the GJDC, Andy served as the Associate Director and Counsel at the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation and General Counsel and Director of Public Amenities to the Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships. He is currently the treasurer of PPS’s board of directors. He will be talking about the practical elements of public space management, successful strategies used in Bryant Park as well as the more challenging environment of Jamaica, and what is generally applicable to other places. To learn more about Andy, and for other details about this course, click here.

Please note that enrollment in all placemaking trainings is limited to 35 participants in order to promote a close-knit environment where participants can learn techniques for implementing and managing public space improvements that are practical, economical and meet the community’s needs. We’re looking forward to working with you to help you discover new ways to make your place great. Click here to register for one of our upcoming trainings now!