Practical Green Infrastructure Solution to Alleviate Nation’s Water Woes

by GBE FACTS

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NRDC analysis illustrates the potential for billions of gallons of rainwater falling on eight U.S. cities to be harvested every year

As America’s expanding urban areas struggle with major water supply shortages and runoff pollution problems, capturing rainwater from rooftops provides a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase water supply and improve water quality, according to a recent analysis on “Capturing Rainwater from Rooftops” by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

In its report, NRDC demonstrates the benefits and potential of rooftop rainwater capture, a “green infrastructure” practice that can be used to retain stormwater runoff on-site, by analyzing ways in which eight diverse U.S. cities could incorporate this simple water collection approach. By comparing annual rainfall totals to rooftop coverage, NRDC determined that opportunities exist in each city to capture hundreds of millions of gallons of rainfall every year for reuse. By doing so, residents of these communities would obtain inexpensive onsite water supplies for non-potable uses, such as yard watering and toilet flushing; reduce runoff pollution; and would lower energy costs associated with treating and delivering drinkable-quality water.

“Our analysis shows that solutions to one of America’s biggest urban challenges are right in front of us – in this case, literally falling from the sky,” said Noah Garrison, lead author of the report and NRDC water policy analyst. “The potential exists for cities throughout the U.S. to capture hundreds of millions or even billions of gallons of rainwater each year from urban rooftops. We encourage policymakers to look closely at the bottom-line benefits of rooftop rainwater harvesting, and consider implementing policies and incentives that generate more momentum for rainwater collection while making the practice more accessible as well.”

Specifically, NRDC’s report illustrates opportunities for capturing, treating and supplying harvested rainwater for non-potable purposes in Atlanta, Ga.; Austin, Texas; Chicago, Ill.; Denver, Colo.; Fort Myers, Fla.; Kansas City, Mo.; Madison, Wisc.; and Washington, D.C. Several success stories also demonstrate the effectiveness of rooftop rainwater capture for new construction in New York, N.Y., and redeveloped buildings in Santa Monica, Calif. The total annual volume of rainwater falling on rooftops in these cities alone, if captured in its entirety, would be enough to meet the water supply needs of at least 21 percent to as much as 75 percent of each city’s population.

The report comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of updating its national standards for controlling runoff pollution from new development and existing paved areas. NRDC encourages the agency to adopt national standards for on-site stormwater retention that will increase green infrastructure approaches such as rainwater harvesting. As a result, communities can effectively transform polluted runoff flowing to our waterways into captured rooftop rainwater used as an on-site water supply resource.

“Urban areas struggling with water supply issues and runoff pollution should look to this report for ideas and encouragement,” said Jon Devine, senior attorney in NRDC’s water program.

NRDC encourages cities and states to develop policy options and incentives to encourage more rainwater harvesting. These include:

• Adopt storm water pollution control standards that require on-site volume retention.
• Adopt standards that require or promote rainwater harvesting and/or water efficiency.
• Review building, health and plumbing codes for barriers to reusing rainwater.
• Provide incentives for decreasing storm water runoff and promoting water conservation.
• Require use of rainwater harvesting on all public properties.

The complete NRDC report is available HERE.
For more information on rooftop rainwater capture, please see Noah Garrison’s blog.
Photo: Steve Crane

Source: http://greenbuildingelements.com/2012/02/14/capturing-rainwater-from-rooftops-report-spotlights-practical-green-infrastructure-solution-to-alleviate-nations-water-woe

• http://www.sustainablecitiescollective.com/grmeyers/35605/capturing-rainwater-rooftops-report-spotlights-practical-green-infrastructure-solutio

What's the Secret of Making a Happy City?

Ancient Athens shows what to do. Rome shows what not to do.

Two questions to ask:  What are cities for? Who owns them?

“What are cities for?” and “Who owns them?” These are two of the questions addressed by award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery in his book, Happy City.  As the title of his book suggests, Montgomery ties these two questions to the issue of happiness.  If the pursuit of happiness is something important to us, he says, the way we build and live in our cities should reflect our idea of what happiness is.

Montgomery tells the story of two ancient cities – Athens and Rome -- to illustrate differing views of happiness as expressed in the design of each city.  Athens in ancient Greece was designed around the idea of “eudaimonia” – a term introduced by Socrates to mean a state of human flourishing or the state of having a good in-dwelling spirit.  For the people of Athens, the city was more than a place to live and work.  It was also a concept about how to live.

The people of Athens loved the city for the way it supported a rich cultural and civic life.  For them, happiness meant so much more than good fortune and material wealth.  It embodied both thinking and acting, and necessarily included active civic engagement.  In their way of thinking, active participation in public life made an individual become whole.  Unfortunately, certain groups of people were excluded from active participation in the civic life of the city.  These groups included women, children, slaves, and foreigners living in Athens.

The ancient city of Athens was designed to accommodate and encourage active participation.  The agora – or large plaza – was the heart of ancient Athens.  Here, people could stroll, shop, and gather for public discourse.  It was in the agora where democracy and civic engagement flourished.  It was also in the agora that Socrates and other orators of the time held discussions on such philosophical issues as the meaning of happiness.

Ancient, Rome, on the other hand, reflected different ideas about the meaning of happiness.  While initially designed to reflect more spiritual values, Rome shifted over time to focus more on power and individual glory than on the common good.  Huge monuments were constructed in honor of the Roman elite.  Public space and the well-being of the majority of the people suffered gross neglect.  The city became an unpleasant place to be; and many, who could afford it, retreated to the countryside.  City life had become too disgusting.

So what can we learn from this tale of two ancient cities in relation to the pursuit of happiness?  We can start by defining what we mean by happiness.  Do we think happiness is all about individual success and well-being or do we see individual happiness as being tied to the well-being of a larger society?  In other words, can we be happy in a miserable society?  Can we be happy if we aren’t involved in shaping the well-being of society?  It’s only when we’re clear about what happiness means to us will we be able to design our cities in a way that reflects and supports our idea of happiness.

More than half of the human population now lives in urban areas.  It’s incumbent upon us to ask, “Are these happy places?  Do our cities support our individual and collective well-being?  If not, how can we make them so?”  That’s where Montgomery’s questions come in to play: “What are cities for?” and “Who owns them?”  A close look at many cities suggests that their purpose is to house people, serve commerce, and move people and goods from one place to another.  Some cities also erect monuments to the glory of historical people and events.

The second question is about who owns the city.  Who owns the streets, the sidewalks, and the monuments?  Who gets to decide how cities will be used, what activities will take place in the city square, and where cars may and may not go?

The people of ancient Athens had no trouble answering these two questions.  They knew they owned the city and they went about making the city a place where happiness could flourish.  We, on the other hand, seem to be lost in a state of confusion.  We claim a right to the pursuit of happiness, but then allow our cities to become entities inconsistent with what we think we’re pursuing.

Look at a map or an aerial view of almost any city.  Is there any doubt that cars have taken over ownership of our cities?  Does this reflect our idea of happiness?   Most of us love our cars and the convenience they provide in getting us almost anywhere we might want to go.  Yet we see that city life built around the use of cars has actually diminished our enjoyment of the city.  We get stuck in traffic jams, use valuable city space to construct parking lots and parking garages, make walking and biking dangerous and unpleasant, and become increasingly isolated from the world of nature and from other people in our community.  Montgomery studied cities around the world and came to the conclusion that cities – especially the streets of cities – can be friendly to people or friendly to cars, but not to both. 

So what are we to do?  Our cities are already built, the streets laid out in concrete.  But that doesn’t mean we’re stuck.  We might look to another tale of two cities for inspiration – this one, the story by Charles Dickens.  Most of us are familiar with the opening lines:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . .”   While Dickens’ novel is set in the 1700’s, these dramatic lines might be applied to conditions of today, as well.  Dicken’s story in A Tale of Two Cities is about duality and revolution, but it’s also about resurrection.

The idea of resurrection might help us redefine and redesign our cities to make them more consistent with our view of happiness.  We don’t have to accept cities for the way they are.  We can resurrect the idea of the city as a place that nurtures our wholeness and that brings us together.  We can take back ownership of our cities by becoming more involved in civic life, and we can insist that our cities serve as a means to a desired way of life, not just a backdrop to life.  We might start by using potted plants, benches, and picnic tables to block cars from entering the streets at the heart of our cities.  We can then convert the space cars once dominated to make room for pedestrians and bicyclists, for people to gather, and for community to grow.  We can welcome the idea that we have a common duty to participate in civic life and, in that participation, discover what true happiness is all about.

Healthy Streets for Children

By Lamine Mahdjoubi

Lamine Mahdjoubi, Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of the West of England challenged the audience: “A lot of people say that a livable city is one that is livable for children. But as I am going to show, in cities around the world, children are disappearing from our urban environment. I will share with you some of the work we have been doing in looking at the link between child play, health and the built environment. 

“The Good Child Enquiry by the Children Society asked thousands of children throughout the UK “What is your definition of a good life?” The first thing is friendship. Socializing is a very powerful measure of a “good life” for children. The second important thing is play. Play is a powerful catalyst for children to socialize, exercise, etc.” The study also showed that children have fewer friends than before, said Lamine, so there are fewer opportunities for them to socialize. They are spending less time playing out of doors, and more time sitting indoors. Nearly twenty percent of children play outside less than one hour per week.

“Children used to play close to home on the street, so the rise of the car has had the biggest impact on children’s play. And we seem to have become obsessed with the idea that children have to play in ghettoized playgrounds. But our work at the University of the West of England has found that children find playgrounds boring.” Lamine examines the recent changes in patterns of child play nationally, where economic resources are going, and the various barriers to children’s play, including parental attitudes. He then presents his research that compares play in formal playgrounds, with informal play in the street.

He concludes that we have to find a way to make our streets safer and more attractive for children, to entice them back to the street, because this is where children’s health can benefit most from extensive physical activity, and where children can experience the most rewarding social interaction with their friends.

 

Source: http://www.livablecities.org/blog/healthy-streets-children-lamine-mahdjoubi

Copenhagen – Beyond Green

The city of Copenhagen is well known for being a green city. Through strategic urban planning and a history of environmental ambitions, Copenhagen has created swarms of cyclists, large recreational areas, a high share of renewable energy, clean water in its harbor, and a world class system of district heating and integrated public transportation.

What is not as well known about being a green city are the social and economic benefits. The study documents that Copenhagen’s green city strategy has not only brought great reductions in the CO2 emissions, decreased pollution, created several green jobs and produced annual growth rates of an impressive 12 percent in the green sector. The city’s green ambitions have also triggered a great improvement of the quality of life for the citizens of Copenhagen and created growth, export and job opportunities throughout the entire economy of the city – not just in the clean-tech sector.

The mission of Green Growth Leaders is to examine the evidence of green growth and document the benefits. It is from this starting point we set out to examine the economic and social benefits of green initiatives in Copenhagen. What we have learned is that urban green investments offer benefits far beyond environmental. What we have found is evidence of how sustainable life can be more fun, more profitable, and healthier, than ordinary life.

You can download the study here

Source: http://greengrowthleaders.org/uncategorized/copenhagen-beyond-green-2/

Children should be at the heart of future cities

by Duncan Jefferies

“Get these cars out of the way, we want to play!” a child chants through a loudhailer, as he and his young comrades march down a street in the Pijp area of Amsterdam. This remarkable scene comes from a 1972 documentary, which follows a group of inner-city Dutch children as they attempt to turn a busy through-road outside their homes into a play street. Adults in the area are both supportive and dismissive of the children’s plans. “All these cars are unbearable”, says one small boy, in an effort to explain their actions. “There is no space left. Thousands die in accidents and air pollution increases. Everything is devoted to parking. Why don’t we all ride bicycles?”

It’s a lament that many children could still voice today. Their need for space, for the freedom to play and socialise within their local environment, is often overlooked or ignored by city planners. Parental fears about their safety – both legitimate and exaggerated – can also lead to them spending the majority of their time indoors, unable to explore independently and develop the skills that will help them become healthy, well-adjusted members of society. Instead, many children are spending up to eight hours a day staring at a screen, according to some studies.

To prevent this from happening, and ensure that safe, healthy and well-educated children are a key part of urban governance, UNICEF launched its Child Friendly Cities Initiative in 1996. However, as its report ‘The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World’ highlights, almost 20 years on, city planning still doesn’t take enough account of children’s needs. A number of other projects, such as the EU’s Cities for Children, also aim to highlight best practice and guide local government towards child-friendly urban planning. The focus on cities makes sense: every year the world’s urban population increases by about 60 million, and by 2050 around 70% of people will live in cities and towns. Cities, in other words, are the frontline in the war against childhood poverty, disease and restricted opportunity.

Crucially, a child-friendly city doesn’t just benefit the youngest inhabitants. As Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, has said: “Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.” Consider, say, the benefits of Peñalosa’s own efforts to transform Bogotá: while in office he helped create over 186 miles of bikeways, 1,200 new parks and playgrounds and the Bus Rapid Transit system that carries half a million passengers a day. It’s now a safer, cleaner, greener city for children and adults alike. As UNICEF director Anthony Lake has rightly said, it’s also important to remember that “when society fails to extend to urban children the services and protection that would enable them to develop as productive and creative individuals, it loses the social, cultural and economic contributions they could have made”.

In the West, the development of child-friendly cities tends to focus on the creation of parks and green spaces, safe and easily navigable streets, well-proportioned family homes and improved child services. But in the developing world, where one-in-three city dwellers live in overcrowded, polluted and unhygienic slum conditions, children’s lives can be vastly improved by access to health, sanitation and education services. Nevertheless, Kerry Constabile, an urban planning specialist at UNICEF, makes the point that cities also have much in common, regardless of where they are in the world. “In terms of child survival rates, it’s usually not about what city you live in, but where in the city you live.”

In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, for example, 57% of children live in poverty – a greater proportion than in any other borough in England. The £7 million regeneration of the Borough’s Brownfield Estate is part of a wider plan to improve life for people in the area. It was recently commended in a survey by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and illustrates how both children and adults can benefit from child-friendly planning. The mostused routes on the estate have been turned into ‘green grids’, lined with grass and trees. The parking system has been revamped to make the streets easier for pedestrians of all ages to navigate. And several new play areas have been created, including a courtyard where children can play informally and mingle with other members of the community.

This last element – a traffic-free square or courtyard at the heart of a village-type neighbourhood – is a crucial part of any child-friendly environment, according to Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, Founder and Director of the International Making Cities Livable Conferences, and a consultant to cities in the US and Europe on child-friendly communities and public space design. “There are three things that children need in their normal everyday world”, she says: “faceto- face social interaction with a community of all ages; direct interaction with nature; and the chance to develop independence at every age.”

Pedestrian-friendly streets, protected bike routes and good public transport links make it easier for children (and the elderly) to get around independently. Street trees, as well as neighbourhood parks and gardens within a ten-minute walk of where children live, are also vital for their development, and have the added benefit of improving urban air quality. Ideally, outdoor spaces should include a rich variety of natural features, such as streams, ponds and climbable trees. “Interaction with nature is important for physical exercise and health”, says Crowhurst Lennard, “but it also opens the senses, it sharpens them – hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch and so on. So it’s very important for developmental tasks, and also for cognitive development [for instance, through learning the names of trees, plants, animals, etc]”.

Opportunities to play safely outdoors with other children have never been more in need. The RIBA survey also found that in Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Birmingham and London more than one in five children are now obese. While in the US, around one-third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese, greatly increasing their chances of developing diabetes and other medical conditions in later life. Without regular exercise and contact with nature, children are also more likely to suffer from metal health problems, as well as have trouble sleeping or concentrating at school.

In the past “we’ve done a better job of building [cities] for cars than people”, says David Driskell, Executive Director of Community Planning and Sustainability for Boulder, Colorado, and former chair of UNESCO’s ‘Growing Up In Cities’ project. But like the children of Pijp, many child-friendly schemes are reclaiming the streets for play. Playing Out Bristol, for example, is a community interest company that aims to promote after-school street play sessions – wheelie bins and road closure signs keep the traffic out for a few hours, with local residents acting as stewards. A community-led movement in the US known as Intersection Repair brings children and adults together to paint intersections, with the aim of making drivers more cautious; the bright, playful artwork on the surface of a road makes them question their ownership of the space, and whether children might be at play nearby. And in the Netherlands, special ‘woonerf’ (recreation) streets even give pedestrians and cyclists legal priority over motorists.

Such schemes run hand-in-hand with efforts to return inner-city neighbourhoods to more mixed functions, with low densities of family-friendly houses and flats situated alongside schools, child care centres, workplaces and leisure space. As well as making life easier for families by reducing the time it takes to transport children to good schools or care facilities, the hope is that this will prevent the ‘dead zones’ found in many urban centres outside of normal working hours. Driskell believes that there is “still a lot of work to do to recreate some of that family supportive infrastructure”, but says “some cities have really been at the forefront of trying to do that”, including his own hometown of Boulder, which has set up a project called Growing Up Boulder to ensure young people’s views on local transportation issues, child-friendly housing and even a youth-friendly farmer’s market are included in planning decisions.

Rotterdam is also worthy of a place on any child-friendly city list. Its own scheme saw housing corporations, project developers, district councils, parents and children collaborate to create more child-friendly housing (with a room for each child in the family), extended school activity programmes, and pavements with a minimum 10ft width on one side to encourage play. Containers full of roller skates, skipping ropes and go-karts were also placed in some neighbourhoods for children to borrow.

As with other child-friendly cities initiatives in Melbourne, Vancouver, Liverpool and Amman, children’s views were central to the development of the scheme. This ties in with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children should have the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, through any media they choose.

Children typically provide their opinions and ideas for improvements to their environment through drawings, walking interviews, photographs and by taking part in children’s councils. Like Boulder, Vancouver also operates an online site, vancouveryouth.ca, digitally engaging young residents in municipal decisions which affect their communities. By participating in this way, children don’t just benefit from an improved urban environment; they also grow as people and form strong bonds with their home city. As Driskell says: “It builds the kind of social capital and community that is part of a child-friendly city, and the feeling that they can make a change in the world they live in, be a steward of the environment, and work together with other people.”

In order to foster these kinds of opportunities in the developing world, UNICEF helped create Ureport, a social monitoring tool based on SMS messages, for young Ugandans. Uganda has the world’s youngest population, with more than half of its population under the age of 18. The tool aims to strengthen community-led development and citizen engagement by helping young people speak out on what’s happening in their communities, amplifying their voices through local and national media, and alerting local politicians about the issues their constituents face. Useful information is fed back to ‘Ureporters’, empowering them to improve their areas themselves.

In Kibera, Nairobi, where around two-thirds of the population live in crowded informal settlements, UNICEF is working with Map Kibera, by Open Street Map, on a youth-led digital mapping pilot program. A group of volunteers helped young people – particularly young women and girls – to create a digital map of their area, identifying vulnerabilities related to their health and protection. This kind of data is vitally important for bridging gaps in childhood equality, and ensuring no child is left behind.

“Really, the more desegregated data we are able to obtain on how children are living, in terms of the wide breadth of things such as respiratory health, water and sanitation access, but also play spaces and mental health, the better we’ll be able facilitate these things”, says Constabile.

The value of such projects is backed up by research from the UK Economic and Social Research Council, which has found that children are adept at driving sustainability projects, often contributing valuable insights and opinions that adults may overlook. Its 2009 study ‘Exploring the role of schools in developing sustainable communities’ claimed that children are keen to take on wider roles and responsibilities, helping to shape and improve their communities. “With their dynamism, energy and new ideas, children demonstrate considerable potential as agents of change”, says Dr Percy- Smith, a member of the research team at the time of the study’s release. “But as a society we neither encourage nor harness that energy and creativity. We have too little respect for the abilities of children and too many people feel that children either can’t or shouldn’t take a lead on change.”

Hopefully, in future, their opinions will be sought on an increasing range of subjects – not least the cities where many of them will one day raise their own children.

 

UNICEF says a child-friendly city guarantees the right of every young citizen to:

• influence decisions about their city
• express their opinions on the city they want
• participate in family, community and social life
• receive basic services such as health care, education, and shelter
• drink safe water and have access to proper sanitation
• be protected from exploitation, violence and abuse
• walk safely in the streets on their own
• meet friends and play
• have green spaces for plants and animals
• live in an unpolluted environment
• participate in cultural and social events
• be equal citizens of their city with access to every service, regardless of ethnic origin, religion, income, gender or ability

Source: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/greenfutures/articles/children-should-be-heart-future-cities

Series on transformative Placemaking

By Project for Public Spaces

1. All Placemaking is Creative: How a Shared Focus on Place Builds Vibrant Destinations

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.

2. Stronger Citizens, Stronger Cities: Changing Governance Through a Focus on Place

“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.

3. How to Be a Citizen Placemaker: Think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper

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.

 

Freiburg: City of Vision

• http://www.livablecities.org/articles/freiburg-city-vision

The City of Freiburg is often called Germany's "ecological capital" and has been recognized internationally as one of the world’s most livable, sustainable and child-friendly cities. In 1993, IMCL awarded the City of Freiburg the IMCL City of Vision Award. Since then, Freiburg has received numerous awards for its leadership in sustainable transportation planning, promotion of walking and biking, traffic calming mechanisms, human scale mixed-use development, renewable energy, protection of nature, and sustainability.

Today, we are proud to work with the City of Freiburg to further disseminate the innovations and improvements in livability and sustainability the City has achieved in recent years by organizing the 2013 City of Vision Study Tour. For more information, vist the Study Tour's page.

Not only retaining and enhancing the beauty, walkability, mixed use and vibrancy of its historic city, Freiburg planning over the last 40 years has emphasized biking, walking and public transit, traffic calming, and mixed-use human-scale development to create a “city of short distances”. Numerous sustainability measures such as regional heating, recycling, and low-energy buildings have been implemented. Regional planning has focused development within city boundaries, and thus prevented sprawl. Historic castles, villages and towns have been protected. A strong emphasis is placed by Germany, Switzerland and France on ensuring ecological standards and protecting the diversity of vineyards, orchards and farms that produce the region’s renowned specialty items.

Situated on the edge of the Black Forest close to Switzerland and France, Freiburg has a cheerful character. Blessed by a warm climate, a young population (it has a large university interwoven throughout the city), excellent wines, and a festive tradition, Freiburg is a delightful city to study for all those concerned with city livability. Cities around the world have much to learn from details such as Freiburg’s “city carpet” (paving throughout the pedestrian zone); bicycle network planning and bike services; public transit design and linking policies; principles for developing new urban neighborhoods; traffic calming details (Wohnstrasse, Verkehrsberuhigung), etc.

Freiburg[i] is a medieval university city with a population of 220,000 situated on the southwestern edge of the Black Forest. At the heart of the city is the magnificent red sandstone cathedral, completed in 1513, with a fine filigree stone spire. Among other medieval buildings that survive are the old town hall “Gerichtslaube” from 1303, and the painted red sandstone Historic Merchants’ Hall, “Historisches Kaufhaus” facing the cathedral.

Albert Ludwig University, with 24,000 students, is one of the oldest in Germany, having been founded in 1457. With many of the university buildings in the center of the city, university students and faculty play an important role in the everyday life of the city, and account, in part, for the city’s lively spirit.

Freiburg’s location at a major crossing point of north-south and east-west trading routes made the city an important market center in the middle ages. This accounted for the broad market street, Kaiser Johann Strasse, and several smaller market squares, such as the Potato Market, “Kartoffel Markt”.

Appropriate Architecture

In 1944 most of Freiburg was destroyed in an air raid. Only a few buildings remained. The cathedral, fortunately, was untouched, surrounded by rubble. After the war, the decision was made to rebuild the city on the medieval street plan, maintaining the irregular narrow streets, and to reconstruct buildings as far as possible to retain the medieval scale and feeling of the old city. In this way, Freiburg’s decision was atypical for European cities, most of which chose to follow modern planning concepts, widening and straightening streets to accommodate cars.

Only a few of the most significant historic buildings, such as the city hall (Rathaus) and grain storehouse were rebuilt as they had been before. All others were built on the original building lines and within the original building envelope, not as replicas, but as modern buildings in the spirit of the medieval city. Some buildings constructed in 1952 preserved the city’s historic character so well that they are already placed under preservation law.

The economic boom of the ‘60s, which changed the face of so many German cities with high-rise buildings, the attempts to preserve the historic feeling of the city gave way to an attitude of modernism. Some very inappropriate, glass and steel department stores, and parking garages were built at this time, with flat roofs and horizontal strip windows.

City regulations were able to prevent high-rise buildings in the old city, and to prevent the use of steel, glass and concrete facades for most large department stores. Gradually, the city was able to compromise with architects to obtain facades that reflected the historic structure of the city by breaking a large façade into smaller units, adding window apertures in the wall surface, and a pitched roof.

In the '70s design guidelines were drawn up. By and large, these were accepted. New designs were asked to conform to the traditional building type: the roof should be as steeply pitched as the original building on that site, with roof ridge parallel to the street; the eaves should be very clearly defined, as they were in the medieval buildings; windows should be apertures within the solid wall surface, and they should be openable. Dormer windows were permitted to utilize the considerable space beneath the roof. Greater flexibility was permitted in the design of rear facades, in order to permit balconies and roof terraces.

At the end of the '60s a major program was initiated to maintain and increase the residential population in the inner city. The area of Konviktstrasse is particularly interesting. The street has been largely rebuilt, but the scale and character of the medieval street still remains. A prototype of appropriate urban renewal was carried out. The city did not permit amalgamation of the small building lots, but bought the properties and sold each lot to a different individual, with the injunction that they must build and live in the buildings themselves, and that each owner must employ a different architect.

It was assumed that these houses would not be built exactly as before but that they should be clearly new buildings, varied in style, but following the principles of Freiburg's traditional architecture. The various architectural designs had to be considerate of their neighboring buildings. Each architect was required to submit drawings and a model, and these were compiled to see how the ensemble would look.

The street became such a popular place to live that by the end of the '70s architects were competing with each other to design a unique facade. Nevertheless, the designs balance each other, and the ensemble is very pleasing.

Parking was one of the chief problems for residents and business people. The area behind Konviktstrasse, which had previously been the site of the city wall and some additional housing, was therefore used to provide parking. The city constructed a three story garage with six hundred spaces. On top of the stepped roof of the garage the city identified twenty-two sites for townhouses, each with its own garden area. Each of these sites was also sold to different individuals, who were also required to hire different architects to design appropriate dwellings following the traditional principles. From Konviktstrasse, one would not guess that a parking garage exists; the houses appear to have been built on the slopes of the Schlossberg hill. Indeed, from these row houses one steps across a bridge and is directly on a trail that connects through the Schlossberg woods to the rest of the Black Forest.

Development of Pedestrian Zone

Freiburg was one of the first German cities to close the city center to traffic. As early as 1949 cars were banned from five small side streets off Kaiser Joseph Strasse, the main shopping street, but it was not until l971, after the construction of a ring road around the city center, that the city undertook a very careful evaluation of goals and priorities for the future of the city.

In Freiburg, as in many other cities in the '60s, families were moving out to the suburbs, shopping centers were being developed around the periphery, and traffic in the city center had become a major problem, threatening the quality of life for those living in, and visiting the city center.

It was decided that "the attempt should, and had to be made to put a stop to the impending depopulation of the city center". It was agreed that the city must be livable for the community. Residential accommodations, and workshops had to be increased. The historic and cultural significance of the city had to be restored. These goals included improvements in Freiburg's market function, and streetscape.

In order to make the city center the unquestionable focus of economic and business life in the region, and to improve the quality of life for everyone who lived, worked, visited or enjoyed themselves in the city, it was decided that the center should become a traffic free zone. The pedestrian zone, the Freiburgers decided, should encourage promenading and social life. It should provide for meetings, and exchanges of opinions and ideas. That is the life of the city; for that, the heart of the city must offer ideal settings.

This important definition of goals and priorities prepared the way for the City Council's decision in 1972 to close Kaiser Joseph Strasse to traffic. Until then, this street was used as the major north-south traffic route and carried 22,000 vehicles per day. Finally, in 1973, after much preparatory redesign and repaving, all the main streets and almost all the side streets in the city center were closed to traffic.

The pedestrianized city center was intended in 1972 to be an experiment. Most citizens were always in favor of the idea, but some business groups opposed it. It was not until 1986 that the "experiment" concluded, when a consensus in favor of the pedestrian zone had clearly emerged.

The streets were repaved, for the most part, with natural stone. Trees, fountains, seats, lamps and art objects were installed. Commercial elements, such as showcases and kiosks, which were common in pedestrian zones created in other cities during the '60s, were not wanted here.

The city paid very special attention to the repaving of the streets and squares. Kerbs and asphalt were removed from all streets, and natural stone paving - reddish quartzite, black basalt, granite, red porphyry, and pebbles from the river Rhein - were used almost without exception in the medieval city center.

Indeed, the floor of the city has been treated as the city's "carpet". It is a work of art, and exhibits fine craftsmanship. Geometric and flower designs, historic, cultural and business symbols, executed by traditional artisans working with the different colored stones, pebbles and mosaics emphasize the unique character of each street, stimulate a sense of history, and prompt fantasy and imagination.

On the square outside the town hall are pebble mosaics representing the emblems of Freiburg's sister cities, Besançon, France; Guildford, United Kingdom; Innsbruck, Austria; Padua, Italy; Madison, Wisconsin; Lwow, Ukraine; and Matsuyama, Japan. Institutions, commercial buildings and churches are invited to sponsor a pebble mosaic in the pavement at their entrance; a bakery may be identified by a pretzel, a pharmacy by a pestle and mortar, a cafe by a cup and saucer, a tailor by a pair of scissors. In this way, the business reaches out into the street and extends its jurisdiction into what, in other cities, is a no-man's land. The pavement becomes personalized.

These pavement designs demonstrate that the Freiburgers value artistic craftsmanship, and that imagination, patience, humor, and the ability to create something that will last for generations are qualities that are highly valued. The sense of civic pride and responsibility are very strong in Freiburg.

During the pedestrianization process, Freiburg took the opportunity to reopen the "Bächle", the little streams that run off the mountains through the streets of the old city. These streams had provided the drainage system dating from the fourteenth century, but had been covered up to make the streets accessible for vehicles.

On hot days these tiny rivulets are very refreshing: many people paddle to cool hot feet; and children find the swift flowing water irresistible for all kinds of games. The pedestrian zone has proved immensely popular, and economically very healthy. Indeed, the pedestrian streets are so successful that some shopkeepers and residents on streets with traffic also demand to become traffic free.

Transportation Planning

Closing the center of the city to private vehicles made public transportation by tramway and bus much more attractive. The tramway system runs through the main shopping streets and, without the delays caused by private vehicles, the trams are able to run much more efficiently. As a result of pedestrianization, therefore, more people began using public transportation because it could take them quickly and comfortably into, and across the city center. As a result of this increased use, it became possible to further improve the service and extend the routes.

In Freiburg, transportation planning aims to reduce motorized traffic by means of integrating urban development and transportation planning to achieve a “city of short distances”. The goal is to reduce automobile traffic by increasing use of the more healthy and sustainable modes of transportation, walking, biking and public transit. While it is recognized that use of the automobile is necessary in some circumstances, it is carefully regulated in an environmentally and urban-friendly manner.

Transportation planners make use of five mechanisms to encourage healthy and sustainable transportation modes: 1. Extension of the public transportation network; 2. Traffic restraint; 3. Channeling individual motorized vehicle traffic; 4. Parking space management; and 5. Promotion of cycling.

Early plans had proposed moving public transportation into tunnels beneath the pedestrian streets. These plans were abandoned for cost reasons, and it is now thought that the visibility of trams and busses on the main street also keeps public transportation more attractive. They are relatively noiseless, and limited to a maximum speed of 25 kilometers per hour.

In 1984 a new philosophy for local public transportation was developed. An "urban environmental protection ticket" was introduced. This was a monthly season ticket, usable on all busses and trams, and was offered at 25% discount to everyone. When the number of passengers rose it became possible for new streetcar lines to be opened and new equipment to be installed.

In 2012, the streetcar (Strassenbahn) extends 19 miles (30 km) from Kaiser Joseph Strasse at the heart of the pedestrian zone to eight different destinations in surrounding neighborhoods. They provide a regular service every 7.5 minutes at rush hours and carry 70% of public transit users. An additional four new lines are proposed to provide greater interconnectivity. The regional light rail service runs every 30 minutes from the city center to surrounding towns. This connects to the national train system and bus system at the main train station.

Freiburg's public transportation company joined with all the public transportation companies in the region to form a single transportation company. It is now possible to purchase a monthly ticket for unlimited use on all regional busses and trams, including trains and busses of the national system "Bundesbahn". This has made it as easy to travel by public transportation to the surrounding mountains and lakes of the Black Forest as it is to go shopping. Fifty-six bus routes and eight railway lines are included in the system. The ticket is transferable, and can be used by several passengers simultaneously. This ticket is called the "Regional environmental protection ticket" or the "Green ticket", and is intended to encourage as many people as possible to leave the car at home and travel by the much more ecological public transportation system.

It was decided in Freiburg that bicycles would be too disruptive to pedestrians within the main pedestrian areas. Riding bicycles, therefore, is not allowed on Kaiser Joseph Strasse, Münsterplatz, Augustinerplatz, or Rathausplatz. Bicyclists are permitted to ride on some pedestrian streets, but not others, and sometimes they are only permitted in one direction.

Within the pedestrian zone, there are 50 bike parking lots. Bicycle parking is provided at primary, elementary and high schools as well as at all university buildings. Safe bike parking places are provided in the surrounding neighborhoods at streetcar, local railway and bus stops, often with protective roofs. At the main railway station, a large three story bicycle station has been constructed, providing bike parking, maintenance and rental services. Throughout Freiburg, it was estimated in 2009 that 60,000 bike parking spaces were available.

An extensive network (450 kilometers) of bicycle paths has been created. At first, paths to surrounding villages were intended for both bicyclists and pedestrians. It became clear that the speed of bicycles made these paths unsafe for pedestrians, to now, wherever possible, separate paths have been created for both. These routes run along the banks of the river Dreisam, around fields, through woods, and beside roads. Within the city, separate bike paths are often created next to sidewalks, protected from traffic by planting strips where space allows.

Bicycle lanes have also been created on the road, clearly marked with solid white lines and bike symbols. At intersections, special care is taken to bring bicyclists to the front in “bike boxes”, permitting them to cross before motorized vehicles. Occasionally, in order to complete and connect the bicycle network, quiet streets have been designated as “Cycle Streets” the give priority to bicyclists.

Use of the automobile has been made less attractive by parking space management. Within the center city, parking garages cost almost $3 per hour (Euros 2.20). In immediately adjacent neighborhoods, parking costs $2 per house (Euros 1.60). Neighborhoods where residents are required to obtain parking permits are being extended.

Many streets have been traffic calmed by removing some parking areas to make way for trees and plants, seating areas, and outdoor restaurants. Throughout most of the city, a 30 kilometer per hour speed limit is in place, and many short streets and small neighborhoods have been designated as “Play Streets” or “Living Streets” (Wohnstrasse). In these streets, speed limit is reduced to walking speed, and only residents or delivery vehicles are permitted to park.

Farmers' Market

Freiburg has one of the most extensive and successful farmers' markets in Europe, which takes place on the large Münsterplatz that encircles the cathedral. At least half of the market, on the north side of the cathedral, consists of local farmers and gardeners selling their own produce.

While the market takes place every morning from 7:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m., Saturday is the busiest day, when the square is filled to overflowing. Around the edge of the Münsterplatz are many outdoor cafes, inns and restaurants which, from mid-morning on, provide light refreshment and traditional fare. By noon during fine weather every table and chair is occupied. Many have been shopping, others come because this is the liveliest place to meet friends.

The market has a very festive spirit, with its colorful umbrellas and overflowing baskets of fruit, flowers and vegetables. For the Freiburg citizens, this is an important weekly social ritual, an opportunity not only to buy the best and freshest produce of the region, but more significantly, to meet friends and acquaintances. Many people, including city officials, business people, university professors and students can regularly be found at the Saturday market. This farmers' market plays a very important role in Freiburg's social life.

Festivals and Street Entertainers

Celebration and festivity are cherished in Freiburg. Hardly a week goes by without some festival in the center of town or in one of the neighborhoods. The annual carnival celebration, "Fasnet" revives a centuries old tradition of masked and costumed performances in the streets. Thirty-three fools' guilds take part in the celebrations, and there is a "Hemdglunker" procession, which leads to the storming of city hall.

Many new festivals were introduced during the '70s: in 1973 a Christmas market was inaugurated on the Rathausplatz in front of city hall; in 1970 the wine growers' cooperative societies began a festival called "Freiburg Wine Days" for the last weekend in June on the Münsterplatz; in mid-August there are nine days of Wine Tasting, "Weinkost" of all the wines grown within the boundaries of Freiburg. In addition there is an Old City Festival, a Beer Festival, the "Oberlinden Hock", and various neighborhood festivals.

Street entertainers are welcomed in Freiburg. Saturday afternoons are especially lively, when music of all kinds, from medieval and baroque music, classical Spanish guitar and Indian sitar music, to folk music from Ireland, America and Peru, jazz and rock music, as well as clowns, acrobats, and other performers fill the streets and squares of the old city.

Renewable energy, solar industry, photo-voltaics, and water quality

Spurred by research at the University, and a population eager to put into practice principles of ecology and sustainability, Freiburg has become a leader in innovative sustainable energy, with solar, wind and hydro-power industries, co-generation and district energy systems.

Water quality has long been a focus of planning, with extensive use of permeable ground surfaces (rather than asphalt), bioswales, and green roofs. To encourage permeable ground surfaces, property owners are charged a stormwater fee according to the percentage of their land that is permeable.

The two new urban neighborhoods, Rieselfeld and Vauban have been built using low energy construction and passive and active solar design methods, as well as a strong community participation process in the planning.

Design of a New Urban Neighborhood, 'Rieselfeld'

The population of Freiburg increased rapidly in the '90s, largely due to the migration from former East German States. Freiburg's response was to plan a complete new city quarter, called Rieselfeld, for a population of 12,000 on seventy-eight hectares at Freiburg's western edge. The city wanted to ensure that this new neighborhood would be designed on the most advanced ecological principles.

The land had originally been used as the municipal sewage farm, but was closed in 1980 when the sewage system was connected to a regional treatment system. At that time, the intention was to protect the landscape and ecology of the area. However, the need for housing was so great that the city decided to use one quarter of the area for the new neighborhood, and to maintain the rest as a nature conservancy area.

The city wanted to avoid the social problems often associated with large scale housing developments, and to ensure that they did not repeat the planning mistakes made in the adjacent district of Weingarten. Here, modern planning principles had been used in the construction of a predominantly social housing district of high-rise apartment blocks. The combination of poor planning principles, absence of urban texture, and ghettoization of lower income families had created a neighborhood with distinct social problems.

The city paid much attention to defining equitable and sustainable planning principles to form the basis for Rieselfeld. They invited experts in planning, social sciences, transportation, ecological planning, energy, housing, and other fields to advise them and to help shape the guidelines for the conceptual plan competition.

Seven principles were considered of prime importance:[ii]

Human Scale: In its architecture, and urban space design, the new neighborhood should be built to a human scale. There should be a clear differentiation between public, semi-public and private spaces. Public spaces should be defined by continuous urban fabric - shop/houses or terraced houses - along the street to a maximum of five or six stories.

Identity: Since the social stability of a district depends on residents identifying with their neighborhood, the neighborhood must have a good image, with its own unique and consistent character.

Social structure: From the beginning the neighborhood must have a balanced social structure. This means that while social housing is an important element, it must be balanced by market rate housing.

Infrastructure: For the neighborhood to have it's own identity it must contain all the essential infrastructure. Shops, schools, kindergarten, health care and senior services, work places, restaurants, churches, sports and other facilities must all be included.

Transportation: It is of the highest priority to encourage use of public transportation; the new district must be connected to the city center and other parts of Freiburg by tramway and bus.

Ecology: Ecological principles must influence architectural design and urban design. Buildings should make use of passive solar energy, solar collectors and photo-voltaics.

Community participation: It is important to develop a process of community participation in the planning and building designs for the new neighborhood.

In 1992 a competition for the conceptual plan was held. The first prize winner, a planning firm from Freiburg, worked with the City of Freiburg to further refine the plan to reflect as closely as possible the city's planning principles.

The street layout is roughly orthogonal with the main street carrying the Strassenbahn connection to the city center running down the middle of the site. The main street contains most of the commercial activities, with a large supermarket at either end, and a diversity of smaller shops, cafes and restaurants between them. It has wide sidewalks, separate bike lanes, vehicle lanes, and the Strassenbahn running down the middle along a green sward.

While the emphasis is placed on public transit, walking and biking, the automobile has not been banned from Rieselfeld. Almost all apartment buildings and condos have underground parking; row houses and townhouses have parking in adjacent alleys.

“Wohnstrasse” abound throughout the area. In these streets, traffic can go no faster than a pedestrian. There are no sidewalks because the whole width of the street must be shared by playing children, adults socializing, bikes and cars. This requires all users to be mindful of others in the space. In addition, there are numerous lanes, paths and trails that are for pedestrians and bikes only.

The urban fabric consists primarily of a classical block structure reminiscent of some of Freiburg’s best loved 19^th century neighborhoods (though in a modern style of architecture), and two to four-story town houses. Rieselfeld was the first district in Germany to require stringent energy saving measures for housing construction in the entire district, and builders were encouraged to use passive solar design features. Across the whole neighborhood there is a minimum amount of sealed paving: rainwater seepage is facilitated through natural ground surfaces and a rainwater conservation system.

Much attention was paid to making the streets and outdoor natural areas safe for children to explore and range on their own, and hospitable for children’s play. Green streets, and green spaces within and between the blocks are filled with natural playgrounds, small streams, ponds, community gardens and wild areas. Nature reigns supreme.

The city established a municipal project management team, headed by Klaus Siegl, under the direction of the Erster Bürgermeister Dr. Sven von Ungern-Sternberg to manage the whole development. Since the city owned the land, they were able to sell small parcels to developers, building contractors and individual owners and thereby finance the provision of services.

Major housing construction was not undertaken until the necessary infrastructure was in place. This meant that the tramway was in place, a kindergarten and shops, including a grocery, were completed to coincide with when the first residents moved in. Major community resources at the center of the development now include a grammar school, a media center, and a multi-cultural church that provides many meeting rooms for diverse religious observances. The development broke ground in December 1994. The neighborhood was built in sections and finally completed in July 2010.

Redesign of the Military Barracks: Vauban

In 1992, the French Vauban military barracks were decommissioned. The city of Freiburg bought the land and decided to develop it as a high density neighborhood for a population of 5,000. The land was heavily wooded, and the idea developed to create a “green” neighborhood – a place where residents could live in a park, not in a parking lot.[iii] The barracks were less than 3 kilometers from the city center, with a good bus connection and easily accessible by bike. As with Rieselfeld, it was also decided to connect Vauban to the city center with a new tram line.

The Vauban lands offered several advantages for transformation into a new type of garden suburb, but at a higher density[iv]. It was adjacent to existing city services, and many offices and job locations were easily accessible on foot or by bike. On the south side, it was close to hills and woods attractive for recreation. It was therefore decided to build a new neighborhood at the greatest possible density compatible with ecological and social sustainability.

It was felt that a high standard of livability would only be achieved in such a dense neighborhood if the streets and public spaces were relieved of the burden of automobile traffic. An important criteria, therefore, was to remove the automobile from the neighborhood as much as possible.

Planning for pedestrians and bicyclists took first priority. This meant that shops, services and work places had to be located within walking or biking distance. Bus lines stopped at the entrance to Vauban, and a tramway was constructed along the neighborhood’s main street.

The comfort and safety of children, handicapped persons and elders was prioritized over the comfort of the car driver. Residents were protected from the noise and air pollution caused by cars by the provision of large parking structures at the entrances to Vauban. These ensure parking is available within 300 meters of every home. While there are a small number of parking spaces available throughout the neighborhood, it was emphasized that this neighborhood would be ideal for those who wished to live without a car, or who did not need to have their car parked inside, or in front of their home. In Freiburg, 35 – 40% of households do not own a car. Many of these have consciously chosen a car-free life style, so it was felt that the time was right to create a neighborhood that was, as far as possible, car-free. Delivery and emergency vehicles, of course, have access to every dwelling.

A car-free neighborhood was also considered to offer ecological and economic advantages: residents would walk on the streets more, thus get more exercise and be healthier; without cars, the air would be cleaner, and thus healthier; residents would be more likely to get to see each other, talk, and get to know each other in the public realm; they would develop a stronger connection to their neighborhood and to the community. It was considered especially important to ensure that the street adjacent to the elementary school and Kindergarten should have minimal car traffic. By not providing underground parking for every dwelling, construction costs would also be lower, reducing costs for owners and renters.

It was planned that east of the main street, Merzhauserstrasse, approximately 20% of residents would have parking available near their homes, either underground or in parking structures. West of Merzhauserstrasse, the area is divided into four quadrants, each of which would provide parking for approximately 25% of residents within the quadrant. Other residents would be able to park in the parking structures at the periphery of Vauban.

Since the neighborhood was constructed in phases, planners were able to test out their estimates as to the number of parking places desired near the homes, and adjust their planning as they progressed.

The land was divided into comparatively small parcels, enabling individuals to build for themselves and own their own home. This was a deliberate effort to encourage diversity of architectural forms that would reflect the diversity of the population.

On Merzhauserstrasse a mixed-use solar building was constructed, with shops at street level and south-facing low energy apartments above. Row houses behind this building are constructed on principles of passive solar design. Active solar panels on the roof allow these houses to produce more energy than they need, which is traded back to the energy company.

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[i] This article incorporates sections from: Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, in Livable Cities Observed (1995) by Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard and Henry L. Lennard

[ii] Sven von Ungern-Sternberg. Freiburg-Rieselfeld, in Making Cities Livable: Wege zur menschlichen Stadt. (1997) Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard, Sven von Ungern-Sternberg and Henry L. Lennard (Editors)

[iii] Sven von Ungern-Sternberg and Volker Jeschek, Von der Kaserne zur Gartenstadt Vauban. in Making Cities Livable: Wege zur menschlichen Stadt. (1997) Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard, Sven von Ungern-Sternberg and Henry L. Lennard (Editors)

[iv] Hans Billinger, Freiburg, Vauban-Geländer, in Making Cities Livable: Wege zur menschlichen Stadt. (1997) Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard, Sven von Ungern-Sternberg and Henry L. Lennard (Editors)