Tag Archives: The Place Master

Advent, Le Chemin de St. Jacques, Ste. Foy, Conques and the Essentialness of Place

The Way — from Le Puy to Santiago

For more than a thousand years people have been walking from all over Europe to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. What it is about this place that has drawn people to it for centuries? Clearly the idea of “place” must have an incredible hold on the human imagination to draw so many people to a small city featuring an architecturally undistinguished cathedral over such an extended period of time. Not only has the city of Santiago called to millions of pilgrims over the centuries, but the Way itself, the route and the many cities and villages along it, exert their own powerful force on people.

Santiago de Compostela means Saint James of the Field of Stars. The legend goes that in the 9^th Century a Spanish hermit, following the guidance of a field of stars, discovered the relics of the Apostle James in a cave near the Spanish coast. The veneration of those relics in the church where they came to rest is the goal of the pilgrims of the Way. Saint James became a particular object of veneration because he was believed to have intervened on behalf of Christian crusaders fighting to evict the Muslims (Santiago Matamoras – St. James the slayer of Moors), who had created a great culture of their own during the Middle Ages from the Iberian Peninsula. Continue reading →

Pissing On Sidewalks

Leave a reply

Pink Granite

If your organization has unlimited resources and wants to spend tens of millions of dollars on surface treatments, go ahead and make my (and your contractor’s) day! But in my experience just about the least effective, most expensive thing you can spend your public space improvement/downtown revitalization money on is distinctive sidewalks, signature corners, curb cuts, crosswalks and inset plaques. Nobody notices them. Nobody looks down. And this was true even before people’s’ eyeballs became glued to their phones. These fancy capital improvements create unnecessary maintenance issues. For some reason a lot of groups think they haven’t done anything unless they’ve spent tons of money on hardscape. But that’s not what makes space users perceive public places as great. Here’s another example of where programming and maintenance are more important than design and construction. That money is better spent on a fully blown-out horticulture program – which people WILL notice and which DOES improve the perception of public space. Continue reading →

Going Beyond Safe and Clean

Leave a reply

34th Street Partnership security staff

The number of Business Improvement Districts has expanded greatly over the last twenty years, both in New York City and nationally. There are now close to 1,000 BIDs in the US, with over 60 in New York, and more in the pipeline. The focus of most BIDs is what’s been labeled “Clean & Safe.” Following the model we set up at Grand Central Partnership, they provide staff to sweep the sidewalks and curbs and empty trash baskets. Larger BIDs also tend to provide unarmed private security services on sidewalks within the district, and often those staff members are trained to provide directions and other tourist information. While at GCP, as well as in Bryant Park and 34^th Street Partnership we hired and trained our own staff to provide these services, many small BIDs, and even some larger ones contract out to third-party providers for this work.

Data from the Furman Center indicate that while larger BIDs have a significant effect on commercial property values, smaller BIDs in New York City lack sufficient resources to make much of an impact (http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/FurmanCenterBIDsBrief.pdf ). The Furman Report questions the efficacy of the creation of small organizations, much of whose budgets is necessarily spent on administration, and in recent years, it has been smaller BIDs that have been started in New York. This was certainly my experience in Downtown Jamaica, Queens, which has three BIDS, two of which are quite small. None of the three can afford to maintain a security program, and even the largest of them finds itself with very limited resources, given the magnitude of the challenges with which it has been tasked. Continue reading →

Make American Downtowns Great Again

1 Reply

Frankreich, Provence, Aix-en-Provence: Cafes auf dem Cours Mirabeau

Cours Mirabeau, Aix-en-Provence, France

Cutting edge thinking among urbanists and the progressive development community is that American consumers are tired of the covered shopping mall and are seeking a return to the walkable downtown retail experience – or that’s what one hears at the Urban Land Institute and the International Downtown Association (David Milder’s blog analyzing retail trends on medium and small-sized city downtowns is required reading towards this end: http://www.ndavidmilder.com/blog). But, what makes the experience of being on Main Street great? What would make it better? What do we enjoy about being there? What opportunities does this create for aging Downtowns across the country? Continue reading →

Race, Class, Equality and Public Space

Leave a reply

1894 Bryant Park Dan Biederman Bryant Park Corporation

1894 Bryant Park before the physical changes. Looking north.

A serious challenge facing public space managers is people living in and engaging in antisocial behavior in public spaces. This seems to be a particular issue for cities on the west coast, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Eugene, Oregon. The situation is raising a raft of crosscutting concerns about individual rights, the causes of economic disadvantage in our country today, the sensitivities of upper-middle class urbanites and our society’s stubborn unwillingness to assist those suffering from serious mental health issues, including substance abuse. Conflicting interests and ideologies play out in policy discussions about how public spaces are governed and managed.

Successful restoration of social control to public spaces is not about enforcement. The apparent decline in the quality of the public space experience in the second half of the 20^th century was driven almost entirely by how safe people felt they were on sidewalks and in parks. Many felt that the public realm of shared space was out of social control, and as a result, they feared for their physical safety. Some of this fear may have been exaggerated or even incorrect, driven by race- and class-bound assumptions and stereotypes. But even if the threat was not real, the perception of it kept people from visiting, working, shopping in or investing in public places perceived to be unsafe. Much of the success of improved public spaces over the last two decades has been based on improving those perceptions – making public spaces feel safer by employing “broken-windows” management (discouraging low-level disorder and providing high-quality, detail-oriented maintenance) and placemaking practice. Continue reading →

The View from Vancouver

Leave a reply

The view from harborside in Vancouver. Stanley Park is on the left.

The Placemaking Leadership Forum of Project for Public Spaces held last week in Vancouver, British Columbia brought together hundreds of people who are involved in one aspect or another of placemaking. Having never been to Vancouver before, I found it a beautiful setting with a well managed downtown. The attendees were not only attentive and social, but in my interactions with dozens of people with whom I was not previously acquainted, they proved to be dedicated, intelligent, caring and humble about their work. It was a thoroughly pleasant experience – and a tribute to the folks at PPS who conceived of and organized it.

What was most interesting to me about the substance of the programs was the evidence of a number of diverse streams of thought among those present. Most obvious was the contrast between the outcome-oriented, utilitarian placemakers (which included a number of us who have been around for a while) and process-oriented practitioners, to whom community-building and giving voice to citizens about the future of urban places is paramount. Many of the latter group appeared to me to be newer to placemaking – although by no means was this exclusively the case. Attendees also expressed deep concern about issues of inclusion and social/economic equity. Continue reading →

Say It With Flowers

Leave a reply

A view of the planting beds — on the south, shady side.

Nothing gives you more bang for your public space improvement dollars than plants. When people ask me what the one thing they should do to improve public space, my response is always to institute a horticulture program. Improving the perception of public space is about providing visual cues to users that the space is under social control. Colorful, well-maintained plants send that message in a number of ways. The physical material isn’t very expensive and the skills to maintain horticultural materials are widespread and easy to find. Putting plantings in places where people don’t expect them sends a powerful message.

I knew absolutely nothing about gardening when I went to work for Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1991. My father grew some terrific tomatoes in the yard when I was growing up (it was New Jersey, after all) and for some reason there was always mint growing outside the backdoor of the house that we put into iced tea. And that was the sum total of my agricultural experience when I arrived in the Park. From that day to this, I haven’t had a personal garden or even a yard. Continue reading →

MAKE NO GRAND PLANS

7 Replies

The $600,000 Mistake

Daniel Burnham was wrong. I learned this from making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake. Placemaking/tactical urbanism is an iterative process. You need to learn as you go. It is essential to effectively improving public space to take risks – but those risks ought to be small, manageable ones; ones you can back out of with minimal damage. When ideas don’t work out, for example when they aren’t effective in drawing people into the space, then you need to bite the proverbial bullet and reverse course. That is an important part of listening to the community – admitting that what you’ve done isn’t working when they are voting with their feet (in the wrong direction).

At Grand Central and 34^th Street Partnerships in the 90’s we created a sidewalk horticulture program. Our President, Dan Biederman, came back from a vacation France where he saw sidewalk planters and hanging baskets and decided that replicating that experience in Midtown Manhattan would improve the streetscape and the pedestrian experience. Our horticultural team, led by Lyndon B. Miller had already scored a great success with the perennial gardens in Bryant Park. So we went to work trying to figure out how to extend that success to the streets around Grand Central and Penn Station. We were furrowing new ground here because, while some smaller American towns had hanging baskets (like Cooperstown, N.Y.), we weren’t aware of any large city where baskets and planters had been implemented on a large-scale. It was several years before Mayor Daley (who sent his staff to spend time with us in Bryant Park to take notes) implemented the spectacular Chicago State Street streetscape redesign, with its beautiful horticulture program – which eventually expanded all over the Loop. Continue reading →

Gentrification and its Discontents

Leave a reply

The claim that successful urban revitalization results in “gentrification” and is therefore a bad thing is one of those hypothetical objections to placemaking strategies that isn’t based on hard data, a phenomenon about which I wrote as an obstacle to the implementation of placemaking strategies. For the most part, the objection to gentrification by “advocates” for lower-income people is an objection to hypothetical “displacement” of existing residents by new, higher income folks. To put it as plainly as I can, while those advocates (and journalists) often point to anecdotal evidence of low-income people being forced from their homes by avaricious landlords, I have seen no reliable aggregate data in support of that theory.

I’m a student of the strategies for social change that are about bringing people together – not driving them apart. To Dr. King, integration was not only about bringing economic benefit and political power to dispossessed people, but also creating a society where everyone, regardless of background, is treated with equal concern and respect. Social integration is a good in and of itself, creating communities that honor difference. In addition, it seems likely to me, based on observation and experience, that housing and educating low-income people in the same communities as higher income people may well provide those lower-income people with the tools for economic advancement. Segregating and concentrating low-income people seems to lead to higher levels of social dysfunction.

The Furman Center’s most recent “State of New York Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015” (http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/NYUFurmanCenter_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf) demonstrates that in New York City displacement through gentrification is not a significant effect, but also tells us some interesting things about the dynamics of improving neighborhoods. I find the Furman Center to be an indispensable, and non-ideological, source of measurable information about real estate trends. They are also quite careful about drawing conclusions from the data – and not confusing causes and effects.

Continue reading →

Getting It Right

Leave a reply

My only prior trip to Cincinnati was in 2004. The downtown was deserted, particularly the central public space, Fountain Square. The neighborhood north of the downtown, called Over-the-Rhine, is the home of The Cincinnati Music Hall (now under extensive renovation), where the orchestra and opera play, had a terrible reputation and not too many years after my visit was the site of political protests related to racial and economic issues.

But a recent visit showed an incredible transformation. The downtown was lively and busy – including at night and on the weekends. Fountain Square had been redesigned – moving the historic fountain. And while it still has a lot of hard surfaces, it has moveable seating, constant activity, food trucks and really attractive and well-maintained plantings. It was busy all the time, and was surrounded by a lively retail mix.

And Over-the-Rhine has become a dynamic, active neighborhood. Most striking to me was that all of the retail along Vine Street, the main commercial corridor, was local – rather than national chains. The stores were a great mix of interesting food, clothing and other offerings. There was a great deal of development activity – particularly adaptive reuse of architecturally interesting commercial buildings into residential developments. Over-the-Rhine, given its 19^th Century history as a home to European immigrants, has an abundance of high quality, funky revivalist structures (French, Dutch, German, Moorish and who-knows-what).

Continue reading →