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.

The Vancouver skyline of residential waterfront high rises.

This shouldn’t have been surprising to me, given the evolution of the thinking of Fred Kent, founder and President of PPS, over the last couple of decades. Fred began PPS in the 70’s to physically improve public spaces under the tutelage of William H. (“Holly”) Whyte. Holly’s work involved close observation of how people behave in public spaces – including by time-lapse photography – and recommending to the owners of public spaces how they might be physically improved. Holly’s report to the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and the New York Public Library on how to improve the use of Bryant Park was the roadmap that made its restoration such a success.

In recent years, Fred has come to see placemaking as a progressive movement, like the civil-rights and environmental movements, to devolve power to local communities and promote participatory democracy. His mantra has become “the community is the expert,” and while a great deal of the work of PPS remains advising public space stewards on how to physically improve their spaces, PPS has become particularly adept at managing the front-end process of community engagement prior to the implementation of such improvements. However, it is generally agreed that PPS and placemaking more generally, have been somewhat less good at assisting those responsible for public space on the implementation of programming and maintenance – even though one of Fred’s other basic axioms is that “good maintenance is more important than good design.” And, of course these two streams of thought are not at all mutually exclusive, and are actually complementary.

But I did have the sense that some of the participants of the Forum are at least uninterested and perhaps even hostile to the idea of actually improving public spaces. One participant said to me, when I stated that much of my work had resulted in increased property values, something like – “but, that’s just furthering the existing economic order.” There was much dark talk at the conference about the “gentrification” (meaning displacement of low and moderate income people) produced by placemaking.

I have two observations to make. First, my experience over the last twenty plus years has been that physically improving public space increases the quality of life for those who live, work or visit nearby – with broad secondary effects that don’t distinguish by identity group or class. Public space revitalization is a good in and of itself, and has been, I would argue, an essential force in the revitalization of cities across the country. Everyone has benefitted and continues to benefit from these improvements. A beautiful, well maintained Central Park in New York City benefits everyone – and not just its immediate neighbors. Contrary to what one presenter at the conference suggested, not only wealthy white people use Central Park or benefit from it.

Second, increasing real estate values and levels of economic activity from public space improvement also provides broad benefits and is in no way exclusionary. The creation of jobs, the generation of increased tax payments, the improved perception of downtowns – all of these benefit every local resident. The vision of a number of real estate owners in recognizing this and investing in public space development (primarily through business improvement districts) has provided the impetus for some of the most important public space enhancement projects in the country. One of the challenges for placemakers is to create financing vehicles to capture some of that increased value in order to support maintenance and programming, as in many cases, government capital dollars for public space improvement are relatively easy to come by, while funds for programming and maintenance are scarce.

I came away from the conference strongly convinced that the placemaking community has to put more energy into identifying successful projects and creating research tools to measure the economic impact of successful public space improvement – something that is now sorely lacking. A major obstacle to new projects is that many political and real estate leaders do not have the imaginative capacity to project the positive outcomes that placemaking delivers. We need the hard data to help persuade them. We also need to analyze the relationship between improved public spaces and residential displacement (something that many of the conference took as a given, but on which, as I have written, there is little research to substantiate). One presenter at the conference had created a fascinating research vehicle that demonstrates the positive correlation between programming quality and municipal prosperity. But correlation isn’t causation and we need to know more.

Similarly, we need to focus more within the community on how programming and maintenance are done. People find the visioning and communicating process fun and interesting to do. Growing great grass, picking up trash and recruiting vendors is a slow, hard effort, and there are some techniques and skills that work better than others. Creating governance and financing vehicles to support such projects is also a major challenge, and more information sharing needs to go on about models that work.

That is by no means to say that community building and participatory processes are unimportant. The reverse is true. In order for most public spaces to truly succeed, community stakeholders have to feel ownership of the space. But what community residents often say they want and what they actually do in a restored/new space are often different things, and the most important way the community votes on the viability of a public space is with their feet. Here is where an iterative process and close observation come into play. Place managers need to watch carefully to see where people aren’t going – and reverse out of existing programming and do something else.

There was tremendous positive energy at the Leadership Forum, thought-provoking presentations and stimulating conversation. The shared values of improving public space, working towards inclusion and equity were evident among the attendees. My take-away is that there is a continuing need to focus on tactics as well as strategy; and we need to better equip placemakers with tools to make the case for investing in improved public space.

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OK, it’s Rome not Vancouver, but you get the point.

As to the city of Vancouver itself, I stayed mostly in the downtown, although I did use the local bike share system to ride to along the harbor and around Stanley Park, one of the city’s major features. In recent years there has been a great deal of luxury high-rise development – particularly where there are water and mountain views. The main shopping street has an amazing assortment of high-end retailers for a city of 600,000. I kept waiting for James Bond to parasail down onto one of the many yachts in the harbor, or to appear, in a tuxedo, on one of the apartment terraces overlooking the water. There is something not quite real about the downtown, and local officials and academics expressed great concern about the city’s cost of real estate as a major challenge facing Vancouver. Perhaps that made Vancouver, a livable, walkable city, an ideal venue for exploring the issues discussed at the Leadership Forum.