You
know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all
different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. / Photo: PPS
Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’
creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be
extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places
where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved
and
build shared wealth
in their communities. “Placemaking, applied correctly, can show us new
ways to help cultures emerge where openness is not so scary,” notes
Dr. Katherine Loflin, the lead project consultant for the Knight Foundation’s groundbreaking
Soul of the Community
study, which showed a significant correlation between community
attachment and economic growth. “We could find with consistency over
time that it was the softer side of place—social offerings, openness,
and aesthetics—that really seem to drive peoples’ attachment to their
place. It wasn’t necessarily basic services: how well potholes got paved
over. It wasn’t even necessarily for peoples’ personal economic
circumstances.”
The study’s other key finding was that there is an empirical
relationship between higher levels of attachment and cities’ GDP growth.
This is important because, in Loflin’s words, “We have not recognized,
as a society, the importance of [place]. Studies like Soul of the
Community are helping to give us all permission to spend some time
working on this stuff—and not in a kumbaya way, but an economic way.”
Placemaking, in other words, is a vital part of economic development.
And yet, there has long been criticism that calls into question whether
or not this process is actually helping communities to develop their
local economies, or merely accelerating the process of gentrification in
formerly-maligned urban core neighborhoods. We believe that this is
largely
due to confusion
over what Placemaking is, and who “gets” to be involved. If Placemaking
is project-led, development-led, design-led or artist-led, then it does
likely lead to gentrification and a more limited set of community
outcomes.
Who is the community, and what is their role?
The key question right now seems to be about ownership and belonging,
in regard to who has a right to participate when a Placemaking process
is underway. In an article for
Next City last fall, Neeraj Mehta started a great deal of chatter after raising this very issue
when he asked:
“Which people do we want to gather, visit and live in
vibrant places? Is it just some people? Is it already well-off people?
It is traditionally excluded people? Is it poor people? New people?
People of color?”
This builds on a common frustration among people who work in
community development and related fields: oversimplification of what we
mean when we talk about “the community.” Places are almost never the
product of a singular, evenly-connected community, but the intersection
and overlapping of multiple or many diverse groups. “The community”
often includes people who never speak to each other, or may not even
notice each other, depending on the quality and availability of
welcoming public spaces in which to connect.
Places are almost never the product of a singular, evenly-connected community / Photo: PPS
This is the very problem that Placemaking aims to address. The
most
important tenet is that the process must be open and welcoming to all
who want to participate. This is not to say that everyone will get what
they want out of Placemaking. The point is that there will be an
opportunity for people not just to share what
they want, but
also to listen to their neighbors’ ideas, and to be part of the process
of shaping the public spaces that they share with those neighbors. The
end result should be a space that’s flexible enough to
make room for many different communities, and encourage connections between them.
What role do artists play?
Perhaps one of the most significant changes that has taken place in
the public dialog around Placemaking, over the past several years, has
been the rise of the “creative” modifier. Creative Placemaking’s
proponents (including the Knight Foundation-supported
ArtPlace) have contributed substantially to the public awareness of the importance of public space, and
the role of public art in creating great places,
by positioning artists at the center of the Placemaking process.
Unfortunately, this privileging of one type of activity over others also
seems to be the source of many of the recent questions around who
benefits, and who is allowed at the table.
Whether we like it or not, “creativity” has come to mean something
quite specific over the past decade or so. Dr. Richard Florida’s
movement-sparking book,
The Rise of the Creative Class, was
boiled down into sound bites so frequently and consistently after its
publication, that the idea of “creativity” became the purview of a
specific group of people. Suddenly everyone was talking about “creative
types,” and scheming to build more coffee shops and bike trails in order
to lure young people with liberal arts degrees to their city to create
design blogs and tech start-ups. The idea, perversely, and in
contradiction of what Florida was actually arguing, became that a
certain kind of person with a certain kind of creativity was most
valuable to local economic development, and cities should try to be
more like
the places that were already attracting that kind of person in order to
steal them away—rather than fostering the creativity of people who were
already living in a given place.
The
sidewalk cafes so often cited as indicators of gentrification can be a
great way to enliven some public spaces–but only in response to an
existing need within the neighborhood / Photo: PPS
Roberto Bedoya hits the nail on the head in a
provocative post originally published shortly before Mehta’s:
“What I’ve witnessed in the discussions and practices
associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a
meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment, e.g., artists
live-work spaces, cultural districts, spatial landscapes. And this
meaning, which operates inside the policy frame of urban planning and
economic development, is ok but that is not the complete picture. Its
insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong.
Before there is the vibrant street one needs an understanding of the
social dynamics on that street – the politics of belonging and
dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.”
In other words, while the intentions of Creative Placemaking’s
proponents are undoubtedly good, and their work very frequently
wonderful, the fact that a lot of people just don’t consider themselves
to be “creative types” limits the potential outcomes. No doubt, part of
the drive is to expand creativity and the arts to impact community
development and open the arts up to more people, but to start off by
limiting the Placemaking process to a certain set of outcomes from the
get-go is not the way to go about it.
Every place can be vibrant. Vibrancy is people.
Also problematic is the fact that so much debate has centered on a flawed definition of “
vibrancy” that further limits the Placemaking process’ capacity for transforming communities. Ann Markusen, who co-authored the
original paper on Creative Placemaking
for the NEA, highlights this problem
in an essay that she wrote for arts management hub Create Equity, questioning the movement’s early evolution. Markusen asks:
“Just what does vibrancy mean? Let’s try to unpack the term. ArtPlace’s definition:
‘we define vibrancy as places with an unusual scale and intensity of
specific kinds of human interaction.’ Pretty vague and…vibrancy are
places? Unusual scale? Scale meaning extensive, intensive? Of specific
kinds? What kinds?”
This definition is not just vague, it’s unnecessarily limiting. If
vibrancy is defined explicitly as an “unusual” condition, it furthers
the idea that Placemaking is geared toward the production of specific
kinds of spaces and amenities, rather than toward the enabling of
citizens to use their public spaces to highlight their neighborhood’s
unique strengths, and effectively address distinct challenges. We may
have come to think of vibrancy as a finite quality after seeing our
cities stripped of their dense social networks through decades of
freeway-building and suburbanization, but that is a misconception.
Vibrancy does not need to be limited to a few ‘unusual’ areas; vibrancy is people / Photo: PPS
Every neighborhood—every plaza, square, park, waterfront, market, and
street—can be vibrant, but if people don’t feel like they can
contribute to shaping their places, vibrancy can’t exist. Period.
Gentrification, which is often blamed on honest attempts to create more
vibrant, livable places, is what happens when we forget that
vibrancy is people; that it cannot be built or installed, but must be inspired and cultivated.
Says
DC-based community organizer Sylvia Robinson: “I consider
gentrification an attitude. It’s the idea that you are coming in as a
planner, developer, or city agency and looking at a neighborhood as if
it’s a blank slate. You impose development and different economic models
and say that in order for this neighborhood to thrive you need to build
this much housing, this much retail.”
Cities’ “soft” sides matter—and so does how we talk about them.
When Placemaking is perceived to be geared toward a specific set of
outcomes, it undermines the work that everyone in the field is doing,
and leads to the kind of criticism that we saw from Thomas Frank, whose
blistering
takedown of Placemaking in
The Baffler should make even the most seasoned Placemaking advocate wince. Frank writes:
“Let us propose a working hypothesis of what makes up the
vibrant. Putting aside such outliers as the foundation that thinks
vibrancy equals poverty-remediation and the car rental company that
believes it means having lots of parks, it’s easy to figure out what the
foundations believe the vibrant to be. Vibrant is a quality you find in
cities or neighborhoods where there is an arts or music ‘scene,’ lots
of restaurants and food markets of a certain highbrow type, trophy
architecture to memorialize the scene’s otherwise transient life, and an
audience of prosperous people who are interested in all these things.”
And then, toward the end of the article, the clincher:
“Let’s say that the foundations successfully persuade
Akron to enter into a vibrancy arms race with Indianapolis. Let’s say
both cities blow millions on building cool neighborhoods and encouraging
private art galleries. But let’s say Akron wins…What then? Is the
nation better served now that those businesses are located in Akron
rather than in Indianapolis? Or would it have been more productive to
spend those millions on bridges, railroads, highways—hell, on lobbyists
to demand better oversight for banks?”
This is a straw man argument that many of us are tired of hearing:
that focusing on the ‘soft’ side of cities, the very things the Soul of
the Community study found most important, is a waste of money when
cities should be focusing on hard infrastructure. But if we allow
Placemaking to be framed (or even worse, practiced) in a way that leaves
people feeling unwelcome or excluded, we’re setting ourselves up for
exactly that sort of criticism.
Better communication between the people who share rapidly-changing
neighborhoods is vital to the future success of our cities—and,
considering the fact that 70% of the world’s population will be urban by
2050, to the future of global society. That is what we advocate for
when we advocate for Placemaking. We do not work for better public
spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and eat gelato; we do
it so that they will have somewhere to sit and talk with their
neighbors. Whether or not that conversation is about art (or politics,
or food, or education, or sports…) is beside the point.
You know that you’re in a great place when you’re surrounded by all
different sorts of people, but still feel like you belong. When people
feel encouraged to participate in shaping the life of a space, it
creates the kind of open atmosphere that attracts more and more people.
In their inclusiveness, our greatest places mirror the dynamics of a
truly democratic society. As we
put it in our introduction to the
Guide to Neighborhood Placemaking in Chicago (written
for the Metropolitan Planning Council), “Placemaking allows communities
to see how their insight and knowledge fits into the broader process of
making change. It allows them to become proactive vs. reactive, and
positive vs. negative.
Simply put, Placemaking allows regular people to make extraordinary improvements, big or small, in their communities.”
Over the next few weeks, as we prepare for the first meeting of the
Placemaking Leadership Council
in Detroit on April 11th and 12th, we will be exploring the
relationship between individuals and the Placemaking process in further
detail. More to come soon.
We work for better public spaces so that people will have somewhere to sit and talk with their neighbors / Photo: PPS
This is the first of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part two, 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.
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.
Republished with permission. Annie Leonard wrote this article for 
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