Behold the Power of Books!

I just came across the March 2008 issue of the journal Public Management (agreed, it is not exactly Maxim, but I'm an economist, ok). That issue includes an article by Beth Pollard entitled "Libraries: Partners in Sustaining Communities. The author starts out with "Today's libraries are: ... A civic and economic anchor that attracts not only residents but the small businesses that they frequent, such as dry cleaners, grocers, drug stores, coffee shops and more." Wow, I have long argued that the number one thing an inner-ring suburb can do to revitalize a declining retail area is build a new library or (if they don’t need one) expand the existing library with a satellite in the declining area. And these strategies can be really cheap if, like most older suburbs, the retail infrastructure is way larger than what the market will support. Most mid-century strip malls are struggling because later full service malls and big box stores provide more attractive retail experiences for lots of the goods people buy today. As a result, older strip malls can be twice the size today’s market will support.

But I had primarily thought of libraries as something that brought a steady stream of local citizens to an area as a way of creating social energy that would attract other people and start a virtuous circle that could create a sense of place to the city and begin the revitalization process. What Pollard argues is that the benefits can be more significant. She adds: “In addition to the library’s role in supporting small businesses by providing research, databases, and seminars, a library can serve as a business attraction and retention function… A well used library brings a high level of pedestrian traffic… Some new libraries are part of mixed-use developments, with condominiums above and stores on the street level. The appeal of having everything in walking distance can be a great incentive for social and business activities.”

And Pollard describes how, as the best case scenario, the new Seattle library opened, its annual number of visitors jumped 299%. Of course, the Rem Koolhass designed building is an architectural tour de force. This outcome is not likely to be equaled in most cities.
At the end of the day, a new library that works not only as a repository of books, but as a community center, can bring a new focal point to a city that can generate the social energy necessary to create a much needed sense of place to declining midopolises. And if you look back at my last post, I wonder about the synergistic potential of mixing a new library with Appleseed Project type development?

Seeds of Community

Ok, for the last 20 years lots of successful places have brought people together for shopping, eating and entertainment. This social energy can create a sense of place, but in places with less income, it has its limits. At the same time, without high income levels, developers might not want to risk investing in a place that has nothing going on. At the same time, cities in the inner ring might be able to raise some cash in an attempt to get someting going, but what should they do with it? One strategy is to buy up some property, maybe combine a few parcels with different owners and then offer developers land on the cheap as an incentive to take the risk. I think a different direction needs to be considered.

The public can try to create something that brings people together without the requirement that they spend a bunch of cash. That in itself might create enough demand for other options that retail, restaurants, and entertainment might start up in the area giving even more people reason to join the fun. The trick is to create a virtuous cycle.

Small parks set up for social events, fountains kids can play in, an area available for a farmers market, a classic car show, live music, etc. would be a great idea, so long as it is centrally located in such a place where other privately funded development could sprout up. A library would be a wonderful addition. They almost guarantee a flow of people in and out of the area. What else?

The Appleseed Project (www.theappleseedproject.com) is another element that could be really useful. Appleseed is essentially a place where small business types can go once they have outgrown the dining room table, but cannot afford a traditional office. They provide all the essential business resources from desks and messages to conference rooms which can all be rented as needed (more of less). On top of that, they design these facilities with storage for anything a small business might need to store and even several storefronts for retailers and restaurants to open up shop. What is key (to me) to this concept is that 300-400 people might be using an Appleseed facility each week. That brings in traffic and social energy needed to strengthen the sense of place that I think is key to building community and rethinking our inner-ring suburbs.

Replacing shopping

Thinking about great places I have been, many of them revolve around historical significance. In fact, sometimes reclaimed and repurposed buildings make a great basis for placemaking. Of course, many times these repurposed buildings can utterly fail too. Either way, historical value can be a draw. But I digress.

Lots of the great places I can think of in the US center on nightlife and shopping. Even a lot of malls I have been too have many of the elements of great places. But what about areas without the economic firepower to support numerous restaurants and specialty stores? And what about the inner ring with its emptying strip centers with acres of parking? With much retail gone to the big boxes or malls, how can these areas create enough social energy to pass the tipping point and make a great place? I believe the key is giving people a reason to mix and mingle in close proximity without spending a lot of money. Take a big corner strip mall and replace a square of the parking with grass, a fountain, stalls to sell produce, ice cream, coffee, a place for live music (but no band shell, please -- they look so dead when empty). Maybe replace part of the strip with a library extension or city hall? This would bring a stream of people to the area all week long. Oh, and a few port-a-potties would be nice too.

What else is cheap and relies on other people to increase the value?

The future of housing?

From the website here, you can see that Urban Re:vision - Dallas has facilitated the redevelopment of a city block near Dallas' city hall. The site claims:

"Soon, a single block will be transformed into a place that creates economies,supports community, facilitates relationships and generates resources."

The idea here is to come up with a model that could be a prototype for residential neighborhoods in the climate/energy era we seem to be entering. There seems to be a widespread belief that when energy gets expensive, we will all have to live in high density urban areas in buildings covered with PVs and wind turbines with gardens on the roof where we can all grow our own food. The planners seem to have written off moderate to low density suburban living.

I think this is a mistake.

Why?

1. The only reason this type of density makes sense is if transportation costs get really, really high. I have faith that electric powered transportation (cars, buses, light rail, etc. powered via nuclear power) will be able to keep transportation costs below what it was in the streetcar era. This means that we will be able to maintain densities below what we experienced in the 1900-1910 period. And even then, residential housing was not as dense as these competition entries.

2. I am going to go out on a limb here and assert that these buildings are a lot more energy intensive in constrution (steel and concrete, and elevators) than a stick-built or even adobe-like two story building. I think it can be argued that the Jones/Emmons 1961 Case Study House #24 idea is much closer to the future of residential housing than anything I see at Re:vision - Dallas.

I cannot find a good pic of the plan online, but basically, Jones/Emmons carved a 48'x60' hole out of a pile of dirt and filled it in with 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, 2 living areas, three garden areas (all 48'x12') and a swiming pool. At 1736 SF, the house isn't at all cramped. With the main living area and bedrooms opening up to the gardens, the rooms would feel larger than they are. The house would also be energy efficient and by using 60'x80' lots, a neighborhood would be much more dense (9 =units per acre) than most of what we see today.

3. Are we really going to get away from the huge economies of scale that agribusiness creates for us and grow our own food in community rooftop gardens? Even if we need to build greenhouses in cities to lower the cost of transporting food to people, won't we want to lower the cost dramatically by letting professionals grow the food for us? This one is beyond me.

4. There doesn't seem to be any sense of place being created in any of these entries. Ok, I guess this is a little off-message, but after my previous posts on placemaking, I have to address this. From what I can tell, most of these entries turn their backs to the street (or rise above it) and then try to create a communal space within the housing development. Have we learned anything from 60 years of public housing? People use streets to get from place to place. The street is where a place can gain social energy from people that live elsewhere. The internal park-like or street-like areas in these plans will mainly be accessible to people who live here. Without reaching a critical mass, these places will mostly be dead space. My grandparents used to live in a gated park-like area development containing about a dozen condo towers each with 120 units. Even with all those people living in such high density, the outdoor spaces were empty most of the time. I am guessing Jane Jacobs would not be a fan of any of these entries.

And finally, one thing is certain. We have no idea what effects policies to control climate change will have on the cost of resources or what new technologies will be developed in response to those changes. What I do know is that trying to keep the cost of energy low and then requireing people to use less of it by having experts design "better" places is a terrible idea. The lowest cost way to handle this transition is to tax activities that cause the planet to heat up and then let people find the lowest cost way to avoid the taxes.

I bet what we would see in that case is a moderate increase in density of economic activity concentrated around our existing edge cities and central cities and a shift towards more mixed use land use to reduce travel costs.

Project for Public Spaces

I was just made aware of an organization pretty much dedicated to building a sense of place. It is called The Project of Public Spaces and the web site goes in all sort of directions. There is a ton of great stuff, although I find a little new urbanist over-confidence in some of the ideas presented. For example I got a sense in the section devoted to reinventing streets as places that new urbanist type streets can be much more prevalent then economic realities suggest is feasible.

I can't wait to wade even more through the organization's site.

Building a Sense of Place

Most of the time when we talk about sense of place, a place people care about, we think of historical significance (Boston), cultural significance (New Orleans), architectural significance (Chicago). But the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that a critical piece of placemaking is social significance which I think can be achieved by creating a place that attracts people.

New Urbanist Andreas Duany was in Dallas recently and he discussed how few good places there are in Dallas. He even trashed the new Victory area near downtown Dallas that everyone here in Dallas thinks of as our best shot at creating a place that matters in the heart of the city. He didn't talk about this in detail, but he inferred that the design of a neighborhood could create a sense of place. I think he is right that a lot of architecture and neighborhood design works against and even precludes placemaking, but I also think that even when architecture and neighborhood design is optimized to create a place, it may not be sufficient to make it happen.

Although the ideas of "focal points" and "multiple equilibria" can be found in lots of economics texts, they don't pop up in the popular press that often. However, Tim Harford devotes an entire chapter of his book _The Logic of Life_ to the importance of these comments in the creation of places and the evolution of neighborhoods.

It is key, I believe, to creating a sense of place that a location attracts people. This is because, for the most part, being around people is a good thing. I seem to have more fun in a restaurant or bar that is full of other people rather than ones that are mostly empty. I prefer going to athletic events that are well attended. Cafes in Europe with outdoor seating tend to be located where lots of people walk by and the chairs at the beginning of the day are oriented towards people watching. Harford uses parks as an example of a place that is much more fun to be when there are lots of other people also using the park. I am even more enthusiastic about taking a bus if there are more people on it (although for some reason this is not true about an airplane). Even shopping malls are more fun when busy -- assuming I am not under the gun to buy things and the crowds do not slow me down -- like the Saturday before Christmas.

All of these are examples of focal points, something that creates an opportunity for people to coordinate being around other people without any actual communication taking place. There is actually a park near our house which is wedged between City Hall and a creek that has seldom used bandshell, tennis courts, and horseshoe playing areas, but the park is full of people almost every weekend day when the weather is good enough. The reason is that it contains a large pavilion with grills that can be reserved for use by any group that wants to sign up. Even if groups decide to use it for only 1/2 the Saturdays and Sundays from April to October, use is regular enough and the activity that accompanies it attracts people to the park to use the other grills, the playground, the basketball court, etc. I cannot prove this, but that regular enough use of the pavilion by large groups attracts so many people that even when no one is using the pavilion, the park is a fun place to be. This state of a crowded park on relatively nice weekend days is an equilibrium. So long as everyone believes the park will be well attended and more fun, they will continue to go, making the crowded park crowded. Crowded parks tend to stay that way.

And how about this: In the winter when it is much less likely that any group will reserve the pavilion because the weather is much less certain, even on a pleasant Dallas day (sunny and 60 deg), the park will be less well attended and if we go, we won't stay as long as the park won't be as much fun. This is also an equilibrium. Empty parks tend to stay that way.
This park has multiple equilibria because it swings from full to empty depending on the day of the week and month of the year.

So if I were going to try to build a sense of place in a city based on the social aspect of place, I would do two things. First, I would create spaces (parks, plazas, streets, squares, etc.) that are easily accessible, preferably by foot or bicycle, but also do something that creates a focal point, something that would create coordination of use of the space without any actual communication. Plaza de Mayor in Madrid is a fully enclosed plaza ringed with shops and restaurants. The Place Georges Pompidou (a plaza) in Paris is constantly full of performers, live musical performances, and people. Cafes and restaurants are there, but the focal point has to be the Pompidou Centre, which houses the National Modern Art Museum and a large public library. Between the different potential used for the space, there is virtually no time when the plaza does not have a great deal of social energy. St. Peter's Piazza is in front of St. Peter's Basilica and it gains energy from the stream of the faithful and tourists coming to see the Swiss guard and the Basilica or to celebrate mass.

Unfortunately, the past 40 years have provided thousands of examples of failed place-making attempts. Downtown Galesburg Illinois has a small square off Main Street complete with benches, a small stage with seating and small decorative pine trees. With Main Street on one side and a parking lot on the other, I am sure the designers hoped this place would bring people back downtown. The problem is that there is never anyone in it. LaGrange Illinois turned a street into the walking Calendar Court Mall lined with retail shops. When real malls attracted most shoppers, Calendar Court was left empty and the city has re-introduced the street. Professional planners now decry the three Bs of 1980s redevelopment: banners, berms and bandstands. The first two because it isn't the physical look that matters and the third because their infrequent use never creates the focal point that brings enough people to the area to reach that critical mass that becomes a self sustaining equilibrium of social energy.

The trick is to have a place that has easy access for people to get to, but also has a reason for people to be there enough of the time that people go because they have faith that enough other people will be there as well to make the place interesting.

Two key questions remain. First, how many people have to live within easy access to make this work? This may limit how many such places can be successful. Barcelona and Hong Kong are so dense that there can be a lot of successful social places in a small geographic area. But how about within a much less dense suburban area? It may be my imagination, but the new less dense outer-ring suburbs seem to have less social energy or social places than much more dense middle class neighborhoods. Is this simply a function of density?

The second question is how strong or consistent does the focal point have to be to create a high social energy equilibrium? If an inner-ring suburb redevelops an area as a public square, does the city need to ensure that art festivals, musical performances, street performers, etc. are scheduled twice per month? Twice per week? Can some of this be supplanted with restaurants with outdoor seating? How much does a light rail station add or subtract from the social energy?

This entry mainly focused on small places, but might it be possible to use some of the same ideas to create a sense of place over the entire city? I’ll have to ponder that.

How not to build a sense of place.

Here is great piece about how a noble attempt to build a sense of place failed miserably. It is about a square built in a London neighborhood that didn't quite create the social energy the planners had hoped for. Here.

It turns out that place making is really, really hard. But at the same time, the author discusses how this part of London has plenty of social energy, it just isn't where the planners wanted it. So if there is a lesson here, it is to find where people are congregating, and build upon it.