16 Planning July 2020 

MAKE SMALL PLANS

Then fix as necessary and have patience. By Harold Henderson

THE RESURRECTION OF New York City’s Bryant Park through programming, high-quality maintenance, and attention to detail is only part of this excellent book. The title could be misleading, as Bryant Park is just the starting point, and far from the only kind of place discussed. The author takes on suburban Main Streets, smaller towns and spaces, and economic development, as well as urban places. The book manages to be both sophisticated and compulsively readable. With any luck it will do its bit to bury beyond retrieval the grandiosity of Daniel Burnham and his heirs.

The author discusses how he came to this point: by “making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake.” Placemaking, it turns out, is iterative. “You learn as you go. It is essential in effectively improving public space to take risks—but those risks need to be small, manageable ones, risks you can back out of with minimal damage.” The keys are making people feel safe and recognizing that it may take three to five years to revitalize a public space.

It could be dangerous to skim this book. Manshel has seen conventional economic development and finds it “better than nothing, but maybe not that much better. In my experience, over the long term, its impact is generally negligible.” (For one thing, once the government-provided subsidies go away, so do the jobs.) Placemaking, by contrast, does work, because instead of bribing or forcing, it creates places where people and businesses want to be.

The author has equally devastating on-the-ground observations on the fad of contracting out services for all but the very smallest ventures. At the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation in Queens, New York, training and hiring their own security enabled them “to hire members of the community who were far more committed to our mission than security agency employees,” and to pay them better than an outside contractor would.