Let’s Talk about Place! How Art, Nature, Culture and Business can co-exist for Good Cities

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

CityTalk

Let’s Talk About Place: How art, culture, nature, and business can co-exist for good cities

2024 October 31 CityTalk

Jacquelyn West Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today’s CityTalk – Let’s talk about place: how art, culture, nature and business can coexist for good cities. My name is Jacquelyn West, I’m covering today for the incredible Mary Rowe. I’m thrilled that you could be joining us today for this engaging conversation hosted by the Canadian Urban Institute. And as mentioned in the publicity materials – today, we’re exploring how placemaking allows us to reimagine cities more than just functional spaces, through placemaking. And this is our position. Cities can become vibrant, inclusive environments that foster a sense of belonging, community interaction and sustainability.

Before we get started, I want to acknowledge that from coast to coast, we honor the ancestral and unceded territories of the Inuit , Métis, and First Nation Peoples. We are committed to reflecting on the harms of the past and walking together in a spirit of openness and reconciliation. Indigenous people have stewarded  these lands for generations. We are grateful for their wisdom, resilience and ongoing contributions. Our efforts to build inclusive communities and protect our natural systems must continue to learn from and be guided by their experiences. We also recognize that urban planning and development has too often reinforced exclusionary practices of colonialism. The work of creating cities today requires confronting these legacies and embracing new approaches rooted in equality, inclusion and shared stewardship.

So as Mary likes to mention, our chat here with CityTalk is an engaging environment all on its own. So if everybody just wants to take a take a minute and let us know where you’re coming from today and saying hello. So please feel free to use the chat and engage with everybody there.

One note on housekeeping. I think I should start there. We have a very short hour, so we may not be able to take questions, but what’s normally encouraged is that you write your questions for the panelists in the chat and we definitely do our best to get to them.

I’d love to introduce today the amazing group of panelists that we have. Joining us, we have Nate Storring who is the Co-executive Director of the Project for Public Spaces, Amanda O’Rourke, who is the Executive Director of 880 Cities. Madeleine Spencer, the Co-Director of Placemaking US, and Jerome Barth, the Executive Director of Bellville Placemaking.

And before we hop into our conversation, we have a really exciting announcement to make. So today, as you may or may not know, is World Cities Day. And so we are glad to be celebrating this with you, our audience. And as a special thank you for attending today, we are offering a discount code, a 20% off the ticket price for our upcoming summit, The State of Canadian Cities, which will be this year in Ottawa at the NAC, the National Art Center, on December 5th and December 6th, focused on why infrastructure matters for the future of Canada. So at the summit, we do have an exciting lineup of speakers and guests from government, from across multiple sectors, and we’re going to be putting the link here for the event in the chat, and everybody will receive their coupon code by email.

So today we are bringing this group of voices to talk about how we can reshape our cities for good. And we are really looking to 1) go a little bit deeper on the topic of place making. We’ve had the beautiful fortune over the last couple of months to engage with hundreds of practitioners across the world to really dive into “what is placemaking now in 2024” and “how is it relevant as we go forward” and “how can we maximize its potency to really create people powered spaces?” So to begin our conversation, I would love to call on Nate Storring to turn on his camera and a note of introduction. He’s a super passionate person about engaging the public in urban design policy and planning through storytelling. He is the co-director of the Project for Public Spaces, if you haven’t yet heard about it and he leads and implements organizational strategy, overseeing placemaking programs and communications and development teams. Thank you for being here today.

Nate Storring Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to have a conversation about placemaking.

Jacquelyn West Brilliant. I thought maybe just for context for our audience, maybe he wanted to talk a little bit about the organization and just the pioneering position of this in our field.

Nate Storring Sure. So, yeah, my name’s Nate Storring. I’m one of two co-executive directors at Project for Public Spaces, and we’re an international nonprofit based in New York City that collaborates with policymakers around the world to create a world of community-powered public spaces. We’re actually celebrating our 50th anniversary next year, which we’re really excited about. So 2025. And we were founded way back in 1975, really with a focus on kind of more like human-centered design, right? Really looking at how people use public spaces. We were pioneering observation techniques to really understand the nitty gritty of why people sit one place and don’t sit in another place, that kind of thing. And over the years, what we found was that everyday people, the people who are using these spaces or the people who could use these spaces, were just as good at observing, evaluating and coming up with ideas for improving public spaces as we were, as the experts coming into all of these communities. And often they had insights we didn’t have about local assets and all of that kind of stuff. And so over the years, we’ve sort of transitioned from playing the role of the experts, kind of coming in to consult, to being really facilitators and coming to communities to work with local folks, hand in hand, to actually do this observation, evaluation and improvement of public spaces, which we call placemaking. So we really sort of helped popularize the idea of placemaking. It was a term that was floating around a lot in the sort of 80s and 90s, and we helped kind of popularize it through several publications or training, online resources, and really working with this this sort of emerging group of practitioners to bring it to the forefront. And today we continue to do that, but through some of our convenings, for example, like our International Placemaking Week conference. So that’s a little bit about us.

Jacquelyn West Yeah. Thank you so much. I am really keen to know a little more about the project for Public Spaces and what do you see as your key priorities in expanding the world of placemaking, and are there specific types of investments or partnerships that you really believe would be critical to take placemaking to a new level?

Nate Storring Yeah, for sure. So whenever I talk about placemaking, I always like to take a step back because it’s like…  it’s kind of this jargon term. But I do think it is a really meaningful term and it’s important to kind of ground it in some background. So I always go back to a definition of the term from this book, The Art and Practice of Building Communities. And in the book, the authors say that placemaking is the way that all of us as human beings are just transforming the places in which we find ourselves into the places in which we live. Right? It’s the way that a house becomes a home. It’s the way that, you know, our workplaces are all around us, even, you know, to kind of make them more useful, more meaningful to ourselves. It’s Halloween. It’s Halloween today, of course. It’s actually a great example of placemaking. It’s like people know how to transform their environments to make them meaningful, useful, fun, exciting, all of that sort of stuff. Right? The problem is, and this comes back to your question, is that our urban systems are really not designed to unlock that potential that we all have, that experience that we all have, in placemaking. So, when we think about the way our planning works, right? Public process … when we think about development, when we think about funding, when we think about governance, all of those things are actually kind of stacked against that sort of creative, participatory process that we all actually know how to do, right? So just to give one example, public process, public participation, it’s often set up in an adversarial kind of way, right? Where a vision is already being proposed to the public. And it’s a yes or no. That’s really … those are your options and really needs to be coming earlier in the process, needs to be more creative and constructive in tone rather than being just pitched as a yes or no. So that’s just one example. But, you know, when I think about funding even, and I think this is probably going to come up later, it often comes in these floods and droughts, right? Huge amounts of money for infrastructure. But where is the money coming for care of our public realm. That’s, I think, a really important missing ingredient. And so in our work, we’re always trying to create model projects that demonstrate a different way of actually doing this kind of work in improving our public realm, providing training to all sorts of people, whether you’re a designer or a planner, a public official, you know, anyone, really a funder. And then also the peer learning opportunities and research to kind of continue moving the field forward.

Jacquelyn West That’s really interesting. I’m curious just to take a quick hint, when you say peer learning, what’s does that evoke for you?

Nate Storring Yeah. So for example, I mentioned our Placemaking Week Conference, which we just held our last one in June in Baltimore. It’s a really amazing event, we had over 600 practitioners coming from all around North America and the world. And really, it’s an opportunity for people to learn deeply from each other, but also to learn from the host city. So we always try to work very closely hand in hand with a local partner so people can like get out into public spaces themselves, learn directly from local organizations that are doing this work and hear from them like, where are their successes, where their challenges and those are always really important learning opportunities and we’re always exploring new options for that. We recently launched a Market Cities Network, which is an opportunity for market managers and also folks that support that work to connect with each other and try to learn how to better the public policy that supports markets and the kind of best practices around management and governance and all of that. So we are cooking up some additional new ideas in that regard, but I probably can’t say any more about that right now.

Jacquelyn West Fair enough. Thank you. And I think that’s one thing that’s really fascinated me about the world of placemaking, is that it is very network led. And I think that’s a nice segway, actually, to introduce Amanda O’Rourke, who is joining us from Toronto. And Amanda is the executive director of 880 Cities. And 880 Cities is a not for profit based in Toronto. And it’s an organization that’s built on the sort of very beautiful, simple concept that cities are planned, built and managed thinking about the needs of children and our aging population. So it’s this idea of 8 for 80. So welcome. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda O’Rourke Hi, Jacquelyn. Hi, Nate. Thank you so much for having me.

Jacquelyn West It’s really a pleasure. Amanda and I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside CUI and 880 Cities as part of the rollout of a robust program that facilitated placemaking across Canada called the Healthy Communities Initiative. 888C was a very cherished and integral partner to that to that program? Amanda I love the way that 880 thinks and talks about placemaking. I was just curious if you wanted to maybe kick off and talk a little bit about that, about that definition.

Amanda O’Rourke Yeah, I’ll try to. I mean, Nate, thank you so much for starting us off on such a great footing. And I have to say, happy almost 50th anniversary. I myself have been the benefit of the wonderful placemaking, education and resources that Project for Public Spaces has put out there. I attended “How to Turn a Place Around” training like 20 years ago, which like just blew my mind and still inspires me to this day. And so just connecting it back to that ongoing learning and strengthening the connection of people in a place that is, I think, fundamentally how 880 Cities also really thinks about placemaking. I really like the thing that really sticks out to me when I think about placemaking and defining placemaking, which is always like a big topic. You know, the fundamental aspect of placemaking to me is that it’s ongoing and never finished and it’s iterative. And in a way, placemaking to me is always like this kind of ongoing conversation and ongoing method of thinking about how to strengthen the connection of people and place. And I think in that way it’s so beautiful to know that you’re kind of never finished and you’re both kind of creating memory and space, but also celebrating past memory of space. So as a nonprofit organization, practically speaking, while our mission is to ignite action and challenge the status quo, to create those healthier, more equitable and sustainable cities like we did with that big roll out of the program in collaboration with the Canadian Urban Institute, focused on pandemic response and how to actually activate public space in the midst of a pandemic and support healthier communities and healthier placemaking. So practically speaking, place is kind of our medium. So while we are thinking about city building at this high level and thinking about what kind of cities we’re building and who we’re building them for, the actual medium and sort of canvas that we’re using is place. And so similar to Project for Public Spaces, and I’m very much inspired by a lot of the early work of those early pioneers working in this field, very much doing these kinds of demonstration projects and working very closely with local governments to support ongoing capacity building, but also actual physical transformations of spaces in real time.

Jacquelyn West Beautiful. Thank you. And still on the topic of the Healthy Communities Initiative, how do you feel a program and a project of a scale like it was … the sort of emergency response put right into the hands of communities and brought to life through animating spaces? What would you say were some of the lessons learned, some of the outcomes that were were seen and almost like noted through that project.

Amanda O’Rourke Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing for us coming out of that big collaboration were the relationships developed. And I think fundamentally placemaking is very much relational. So when we’re working really closely with either local governments or with community organizers and grassroots community advocates, it’s really about using place as a kind of organizing vessel to strengthen relationships that actually further that social impact. So we, for sure had all of these wonderful measures of success, and we go through a process when we’re supporting many of the grantees that receive funding to animate public spaces or implement their projects, you know, a lot of our work centers on helping people identify measures of success and tools to measure the impact beyond the sort of traditional methods which are usually just capturing real estate value or they’re capturing, you know, a very specific economic lens. We’re looking at, you know, social connectedness, sense of belonging, we’re looking at social trust and figuring out ways to kind of measure the impacts of those kinds of projects on those key measures.

Jacquelyn West Yeah. Beautiful Amanda. And, you know, I think in the portfolio of 880, you’ve been able to … you’re coming from the not-for profit sector, coming from a Canadian base. I’m wondering if there are other projects or other impacts that you’ve been able to note whereby these intentional efforts with creating place and hearing from the community what is desired from that place? What have you seen that you think that we can take to decision makers and stakeholders about the value of investing in placemaking?

Amanda O’Rourke We’ve got so many numbers, Jacquelyn …

Jacquelyn West I love that …

Amanda O’Rourke It’s so important because I think in general, you know, there is the old adage, what gets measured gets managed. And certainly while placemaking and the impacts of placemaking are sometimes harder to measure – So you’re looking at, you know, happiness and social trust and social inclusion and you’re looking at physical activity levels or you’re looking at civic engagement. So these measures are harder to measure, but they’re not impossible to measure. And we certainly can see that from the animation of spaces and certainly also from very much at the outset connecting community involvement and community leadership and building capacity at the local level also strengthens those relationships and the capacity to steward places in the longer term. And I think that’s where we really, you know, there’s a lot more to do and I think a lot bigger return on investment that we often I think underestimate is just those sort of relationships and additional capacity that certainly from the Canadian Healthy Communities Fund, we know leverage so many new relationships and new folks that maybe didn’t identify themselves as placemakers per se, that got brought into this beautiful tent of the placemaking community.

Jacquelyn West Yeah, I agree. I think that was a really special outcome was, you know, people who work with their hands getting dirty in the community to create these kinds of outcomes, being able to adopt the language of placemaking, but then also become aware to a new world and ecosystem of tools and guides available. And I think that that’s a really nice segway to introduce Madeleine Spencer, who is the co-director of Placemaking Us, an organization that is, you know, dedicated to capacity building, but also building those intimate relationships with communities on the ground that are doing this good work. We’ve had the wonderful pleasure, at CUI, to have been working with placemaking US as we’ve been kind of uncovering this ongoing dialog about placemaking. And Madeline and your team have brought such an incredible, beautiful perspective to the table coming from this, you know, this distinctly south of the border perspective. So, hello, Madeline. Welcome.

Madeleine Spencer Hello. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you to the Canadian Urban Institute and also all of the cohort, Jacquelyn, Nate, Amanda and Jerome. I’m excited to be here today.

Jacquelyn West It’s really a pleasure. Madeline, I’m wondering from your experience, how has placemaking emerged as that response to some of the maybe design and social challenges of our modern urban environments? So like, what are some issues that placemaking might directly address?

Madeleine Spencer Ok, just to start, I’m going to put myself in place. I was sitting in the middle of a square in an Etruscan city, where I am right now. And the city’s built … We’re talking 27 B.C., these are built to last. And in that square, it has a church. It has people around. There is a group of elders that I watched the other night and all of the women sat in one area and all the men in another, and they were all watching in the middle square as children played. And then all of the women, when they got up to leave, linked arms and they walked together, the elder women walked together home. I haven’t seen anything like that except kind of in the movies or in images. And it was really … it’s like a radical thing for me to see that. And when you’re asking the question about, like, what it is about placemaking, I believe that placemaking undergirds a need for a deeper relationship to place and how it’s made or kept. And it also establishes a value shift in our current methods of urban planning. And the value ship is one that reaches kind of back to a more holistic place based on localized stewardship of knitted communities that maintain the stewardship of place self. And I believe that this is a reaction really to like the Federal Highway Act and divided, siloed, “zoned for use” cities that are no longer multi-use, that are car centric and not pedestrian friendly at all. And these spaces are controlled, are spaces for socializing, are controlled. And I think that we’ve even seen that over time we have these spatially segregated cities. And as social creatures that need each other, that need connection, that need love, that need to have bonding experience and friendliness, I think that more than ever, we really need to be able to facilitate and foster the reconnection of communities through space and through placemaking. And that one other thing that I think is really important is that we’re seeing that 50% of the globe is currently moving into cities. And one of my questions that I’ve always held is like, how are we all going to live together harmoniously in public space? And it’s something that I’m constantly trying to understand. And one of the beautiful things about placemaking is that when people come together and they do this kind of barn raising activity of like really looking to … whether it’s painting murals in a city, whether it’s building out a tactical urbanist, like a central corridor where they are putting a model on the street to make it safer. Like all of these things really bond people and make them feel ownership of where they live and where they love. And it starts to reconnect them to the land, to the people and to the place. And some of these ways that we really need to reach back to our own indigenous cultures to understand that reconnection. So I feel that’s really important.

Jacquelyn West You know, we’ve often spoken in the context of flourishing and how public spaces can encourage a deeper human flourishing. And, you know, I’ve always enjoyed, like exploring this topic with you and you even brought up that example of … this morning in the piazza in Italy where it sort of becomes this sort of impromptu gathering space where community can meet one another as neighbors, they can connect and find those unique experiences. I’m wondering if you wanted to take a moment and maybe share a little bit about this lens of how we can measure the outcomes of a successful or a potent public space through the idea of flourishing?

Madeleine Spencer Well, it’s interesting because I remember when I very first spoke to you and we were talking about this, you kind of pressed me and were like, is flourishing the real ultimate goal of, you know, what we’re doing with placemaking … is it really the place. And it really actually made me kind of deep dive into why I believed also that this concept, which comes from the Aristotelian time of, you know, eudaimonia, which is actually more than just happiness. It’s about this concept where people have a life that feels filled with meaning and it’s the flourishing is something that I was impressed by Setha Low’s book that recently came out just in 2023 called Why Public Space Matters. And in her book, she had this framework where there’s like these six degrees of flourishing. And she’s talking about how holistic, interconnected approaches to creating vibrant, inclusive, sustainable communities is an aspiration of individuals who are fostering environments that support human flourishing. And so the framework is kind of a roadmap, and she starts to go into some of the very important aspects of social justice, health and play, recreation, informal economy and cultural identity and also ecological sustainability, which are all really pertinent to the current discussion and the pressing matters that are concerning in our society today.

Jacquelyn West Yes, amazing. I’m wondering if you could expand on /// What does that actually look like in a community context? Like, is there an example where-by specific interventions in the name of placemaking have encouraged some of these outcomes that is described by this framework?

Madeleine Spencer Well, so one of the examples which, actually I’ve had the opportunity to go to the place and I’ve also had the opportunity to read as a case study … And so all these different knowing nuanced parts of what created this space and it would be considered a social justice space, but it’s the Hudson River Walk which has become a transformed bridge that goes from one side of Poughkeepsie over to the other side of the Hudson River. And it’s a beautiful space where people from all different walks of life come and enjoy this space. But what’s interesting is the community had to fight to actually preserve the space as what it was. And so that’s the part where the social justice piece comes in, where communities are saying, “No, we’d like to keep this and we’d like to make it something very viable for all of us, for a healthy environment so that we can walk the space”. And also that’s open to everyone to be able to be included in the space. And it’s become a beautiful place to go and see the river and both sides of the city from like way above. And it’s … So that would be a really good example.

Jacquelyn West Yeah. And I can imagine how that really encourages a sense of belonging and ownership and identity for the community, having stood up and really made their demands known to city stakeholders about how important it was for there to be co-imagination around what that space … what that space could be. I’m tempted to shift it … we’re in in New York examples, we’ll speak to the home Jerome Barth, who’s joining us from Brooklyn, New York who is a partner at placemaking firm called Bellville Placemaking. Hello, Jerome.

Jerome Barth Thank you for having me. And thank you to all the great speakers before … I’m going through what they’re saying and thinking what’s left for me. But it’s very compelling.

Jacquelyn West Beautiful. Well, just to give a little context of where Jerome is coming from. He comes from the world of public space management, placemaking, urban revitalization with experience at the Bryant Park Corporation, Times Square, and recently taking on a series of Canadian place projects. [That’s right]. So, again, we’re so happy to have you. I’m also excited to have someone who’s coming from the … more of the outside of the not-for-profit sector and coming from Bellville Placemaking, which is a consultancy that is really bringing this work into the development sector. And I’m wondering if we could sort of spark the beginnings of our conversation around funding, because as this field of placemaking is evolving, you know, so are the models that are able to fund and sustain this work. I’m wondering if you wanted to maybe take a minute to paint the picture of kind of what emerging or, you know, maybe they’re not so emerging anymore, but what are funding models that you’re seeing that can support the growth and ongoing management of incredible public spaces?

Jerome Barth Thank you Jacquelyn, and you know I feel conspicuous being the only for- profit actor here but I hope that my not-for-profit background will give me enough credit in the eyes of our audience. But I think I want to go back to what a previous speakers said, which is that the money’s there, there is tons of money. It’s just that it is really these big buckets for capital money typically gets sunk into a massive redesigns and reimagination. Some of them very well done, very well inspired some of them less so. There’s also a ton of money on the private side. Developers have money for all sorts of things or can be incentivized to provide the right things. But it’s not a lack of funds. And there’s another thing which I think is important, which is to not present placemaking as a cost. Placemaking is an investment in a higher quality product that typically would be cheaper to maintain over the long run and offer higher returns both for municipalities, for developers and greater happiness. Everything that Amanda was talking about, and that Madeleine’s talking about, the joy and the sense of being centered in a place that people experience. What we like to push our clients towards, and that’s either municipalities or private developers is this idea of “value capture” to say, look, you’re creating this place with typically a new investment or reimagination of some kind of a space. Why not put a sliver of the ongoing costs of the place – why not dedicate that or the income it’s going to bring into form that portion of your municipal real estate tax or portion of your CAM charge if you’re a shopping center or some element and reinvest that into the everyday operations of space. I think I think one thing we believe and I’m curious to see if the other panelists agree with me is that there is no high quality public space nowadays in urban centers, even in smaller cities, that can be fully managed exclusively by the municipalities. The municipalities are not equipped to manage a complex relationship with stakeholders, with the public, with constituents with the numerous demands on the space and the demands on programing. So you need to go through some kind of third party partnership/manager … We like to do public/private partnerships, we believe that works very well, involving the community, involving local businesses, involving local civic institutions, involving the public sector and developers and private sector. And funding them through the value that is created there. And if you put that in place at the beginning of a project, if you put it into a conversation about not just how we’re going to build this, but how are we going to take care of this, it’s a lot easier to get the buy in from all the actors to make it happen.

Jacquelyn West Jerome, I’m curious to know how does that differ from like a BIA, for example, that is collecting funds to bring programs and information to a main street.

Jerome Barth Fundamentally, it doesn’t. I mean, the BIA is a mechanism to do this all BIA’s have different charters and different ways of funding themselves. And it’s more it’s more about the BIA in this case, embracing the mission of delivering quality space for people besides very core services. But there’s all sorts of these … I think I’ve worked for 5 or 6 of them myself. It’s all about the ambition, right? I mean, are you just bare bones? We’re going to sweep the sidewalk and we’re going to change your bulbs. Or do you really have a feeling that your job encompasses the care, the ongoing care, the stewardship of the places with the public in mind, number one. And even if you do have an ambition, will your local municipality allow you to do that? We see a lot of turf wars, a lot of defensiveness at the idea of privatization and what does it mean? You know, it could be that there’s a risk that a private actor would appropriate the public space, but most of the time, that’s not what it’s about. Most of the time it’s about a transfer of competencies from the traditional organization of the public sector towards third party public private partnership management.

Jacquelyn West Yeah, super interesting. Well, on a similar thread to that I’m curious about, the sort of the beginning of the use of this term “placemaking”. And, you know, placemaking has started to find its home in a variety of disciplines. And I’m curious just to know from everyone, how do you see this sort of broad adoption influencing what is the core of the practice? Like, are we at risk of diluting the meaning and maybe losing sight of that sort of core community centric principle? I’m wondering first, Nate. did you want to share first?

Nate Storring Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that is always the price of when a work becomes more popularized, perhaps, right? Is that everyone uses it a little bit differently. I mean, I think about like the word architecture, right? Architecture means all sorts of stuff. Or curate, curating, right? My background is exhibitions, curating. Think about how that word is used for everything now, right? And so I think placemaking is starting to get into that category of like people use it in all sorts of different ways. But I do think that there is a bit of a risk, and that’s why I always like to come back to that definition I gave earlier of it’s something that we all do all the time as human beings. It’s not something for some specific class of people or some specific profession. We all have it in us. We’re all doing it. And it’s really about how does that play out in public space? Or do you have a whole bunch of different stakeholders? It’s not like a house where it’s like one household. And how do our systems and our professions interact with that practice of placemaking? But you see it with developers, planners, architects, you know, marketing …

Jacquelyn West Engineering firms …

Nate Storring 100%, you know, like all over the place. And so I do think, we always, as people who do try to center the community in that practice of placemaking, I think we always need to be pushing that part of it and reminding people that if someone says they’re doing placemaking and the community’s not involved, it’s not placemaking.

Jacquelyn West Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, that goes back to what you were sharing, Amanda, about sort of the experience through the Healthy Communities Initiative was that people who were doing community work being, you know, kind of being invited and included in this placemaking movement and then finding a network, a mentorship and access to tools and funding in so doing.

Amanda O’Rourke Exactly. And I think the placemaking movement is strengthened so much by having folks especially you know, for folks who aren’t familiar with that initiative, it was a lot of grassroot community organizers who were maybe entering into the placemaking field from a background in doing social justice work or community service or even community gardening, but didn’t necessarily … or urban agriculture, but didn’t necessarily self-identify as being part of a broader placemaking community. So, you know, yes, I agree with you, Nate, totally there. Placemaking is at the risk from the perspective of these kind of larger, dominant forces of kind of co-opting placemaking for, you know, putting a shiny billboard on a sort of a status quo development. But at the same time, placemaking is also enriched and enlivened from a lot more interest coming up from the grassroots advocacy work and social justice movements and which I mean has been very much fundamental to the movement from the beginning, but certainly from our Creating Healthy Communities experience, people who are frontline service providers didn’t necessarily connect with that term of placemaking, even though they were doing it and practicing, you know, many of the principles that we see connected to the placemaking movement in their daily interactions.

Nate Storring If I can just build on that for one moment, one thing that we’ve found is that when people do discover that word, sometimes it’s a source of belonging because they find other people who are doing work that they were doing and they just didn’t have … they didn’t know the word that connected them. And it’s also a way to access resources, because there is – there is not a huge amount, but there is funding out there for placemaking like grants that you can use to do this work. And if you know the language, then you can access that stuff better. So that’s the flip side of it becoming more popular.

Jacquelyn West And for the benefit of our CityTalk audience, which, you know, tend to be quite a proportion of city builders, of policy experts and so on, I think it’s important that we sort of, I think, go a little bit deeper on this idea of how the economics of a place can be tied or the economic vitality of a place can be tied with really effective, place oriented developments. You know, hear in Montreal I have the beautiful pleasure of working in the Quartier de Spectacle, which is our central entertainment district. And it was, you know, the genesis of like reserving this place for culture at the center of Montreal was, you know, 80 cultural organizations standing up to say “what we really want is a place and not a precarious place, but a place where we can be celebrated, where we can showcase and where we can have a platform to really showcase the cultural vibrancy of Montreal to our residents and then to the world”. So it prompted a summit, a conversation, and then a $220 million investment that has now yielded a $4.1 billion return 20 years later. So I’m curious, I know that’s a really extreme and large example, but I’m wondering from each of your experiences, have you seen where placemaking initiatives have been able to help local economies and in some ways strengthen a community resilience? Madeleine.

Madeleine Spencer It’s interesting because for the question earlier about the term, I really think that it is … the thing that’s pushing placemaking out into the world is funders. And the truth is, like when the NEA started saying that they’re going to fund placemaking, like all these people wanted to put the term placemaking in their work because I feel like it’s a very political thing. And so it’s part of what drives people, maybe even to be exploring the term for the first time. And I had seen that before, especially in nonprofits where the word collective impact was being used. And then everybody wanted to say, we’re doing collective impact work. And one of the things in our process about starting to actually define kind of typologies, I really do believe in it because I wasn’t sure at first and I was okay with like this ambiguity of language. But I’m starting to recognize more and more that I do think that having a typology and a shared language about it helps us to provide more nuance to the terms because placemaking is very broad and urban tacticalism falls in it and creative placemaking falls in it and work that is like … what are some of the other … like even technology is a brand new area and how it’s actually embedded into cities. Like so the thing is, I’m just saying like it’s really important that people can understand and also helps them to be able to share from the ground up with policymakers about why their community could be better for them if they have a language to share with them to get policies passed and then the funding can come from different places instead of it just being funded by philanthropy or some of the places that it’s currently being funded.

Jacquelyn West Yeah. Thank you. And Jerome, did you wanted to jump in on that?

Jerome Barth To answer your question, I’m not going to go back into the term because we have so little time. But if placemaking is done right, I’ve never seen it not increase the economic potential of an area. And I think there’s also a tension in our work and I see some of the comments in the chat because you don’t want placemaking, or you don’t want enrichment to lead to displacement. And that’s a reality because rents do go up over time. And you know what? That’s fine. Cities change and places that attract a lot better and attract new people. That’s great. What you can do is be thoughtful about that, again from the beginning and say, “okay, how am I going to fight displacement?” Am I going to try to harness positive or are going to be negative. And I think these local organizations, with the help of municipalities and others, can play a big role by either purchasing or controlling some real estate, by really understanding what are the businesses that are essential to the identity of an area and making sure that they will stay and be a part of the ongoing plan of this. But educating real estate owners to not always go for the quick buck and sometimes it’s a lot better, I will say, you know, in our work we find that owners that are not trading on assets all the time but have a long term vision tend to be better at understanding the value that the cafe or the bookstore, the bakery, or the vinyl shop bring to the attraction of an area. And what I’m more worried about … So I’m not worried about placemaking creating value. I think it creates tons of value in multiple ways as we’ve discussed. I’m more worried about a trend that I see in the literature in articles about, we shouldn’t make things better because then we’re going to have gentrification and displacement. And I think that’s a terrible mistake. I think that communities … every community wants their community to be better. I think it’s incumbent upon us to work with the responsible actors to prevent displacement.

Jacquelyn West Yeah. And it was actually you Jerome, that introduced me to the work of Majora Carter. And I think that it’s an interesting, I find, perspective on this idea of not dissuading the amelioration of spaces, but to really … to welcome it. But make sure that that really, like fruitful dialog and interaction with the community is present.

Jerome Barth You’re going to you’re going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, you know, And that’s not smart either.

Jacquelyn West Yes, beautiful … Nate?

Nate Storring And one thing I wanted to add, though, I think that’s maybe a bit of a challenge to this is like if you … you know, there are very few maps that actually show you all of the BIAs, the parks, conservancies that all of these various places, what I call a place governance organization that is spread throughout a city. But when you find them, there are huge swaths of our cities that don’t have them. Right? And so that’s, I think actually maybe the biggest sort of level of inequality in this is figuring out how we are able to provide that really tailored, place-based kind of governance and investment in places that haven’t been able to get a BIA off the ground, haven’t been able to get a parks conservancy off the ground. And I do think that … I do tend to agree with you, Jerome, that right now, the way our government is set up, it’s not well-equipped to necessarily provide that highly tailored service at a place-based level. But I think there must be a role for them in trying to get more of that kind of service into places that don’t currently have it.

Jerome Barth Because right now it’s rich people organizing because we have the resources and the time and the long term vision. But government knows how it works and government, like in San Francisco, for example, you cannot do a new development if you don’t bake the BIA in. It’s part of the planning process. So that is powerful equity tool, I think, for government to recognize that as a useful layer of operationalization/organization concept, if you want. And that could be replicated anywhere. You know? It’s a decision. It’s understanding, hey, we need something that’s going to provide these services and be attentive and be sort of in between the community, hold some skills, critical skills in programing and maintenance, and then the government and the bigger sort of public service missions.

Jacquelyn West Yeah. Interesting. You know, one result that came out of the research … I’ll come back to you in a second, Madeleine … But one of the results that came out of our deep dive into the topic, the complex topic of placemaking across so many people these last couple of months led us to uncover a series of policy best practices and funding innovations. And so we’ll, as time goes on, we’ll look to share those more with this audience and others. Madeleine, there was something you wanted to say?

Madeleine Spencer I just wanted to mention like the Highline effect, which we’ve seen in like New York, that is a public space that is created for the public, yet because of that public space, all of the rents went up like over 200%. And there’s billions of dollars that were created which ends up privatizing the public space because of the consumption that’s going on around it and makes the amenities for only some people or it’s become a place for tourists. And I’m very concerned about that because I don’t know how public trust, when you add these beautiful amenities so that people can be healthy and have certain things in space, I think that’s it’s a real challenge just to even think through how that works. And is it going to be like land trusts and is it going to be … what is it going to be that is going to help us to shift our values? Because a lot of times even the idea of the way we currently take in resources and the externalities end up being felt, by a community afterwards rather than understanding the public need democratically across, like inequitably across for everyone in cities like there needs to be this reassessment of what our values are and how everybody deserves these things. It’s … Anyway.

Amanda O’Rourke And if I could add, thank you, Madeleine. And I just want to, again, pulling us back to the sort of city’s perspective, which is sort of the space that we occupy. So while we are thinking about public space, we have to acknowledge this doesn’t … place doesn’t exist outside of these broader structures of cities and these like, you know, structures of governance and administration. And so what we really want to think about, as Madeleine mentioned, is what I think so powerful about placemaking is it also asks us really important questions about how we want to live and what we value. So do we want to live in cities where people can have access to great parks and public spaces? Everyone? Do we want to live in cities where people like children can walk to school on their own or enjoy trick or treating and meet friends on the sidewalk? Do we want to live in a city where people feel like they can age in place or have independent mobility? These are the big questions. Place is a very tangible way for us to see it and experience it, but at the same time, this is within this bigger structure of city building and we need really strong public sector leaders, like we need mayors and directors of Transportation and Parks and Recreation. We need them to also demonstrate really strong leadership as well as the private sector, to your point Jerome, we really need to have these conversations about place, but not within these like little equity islands or quality public space islands, but within the broader spectrum of, again, to Madeleine’s point, knitting this all together in a broader conversation about how we want to live and what our cities for and who is it good for.

Jacquelyn West Yeah, well said Amanda, thank you so much. Yeah. And I think that this dialog isn’t just about learning best practices. I think it’s really about envisioning the kinds of cities we want to build and sharing practical pathways to make those visions a reality. If we’re, you know, on the topic of today, like bringing art, culture, nature and business into the ecosystem, just a … maybe to each person, is there a final thought on how the practice of placemaking can help us get closer to the types of cities we would all love to live in? Nate?

Nate Storring Sure. Well, I mean, I think what I would say on your question of bringing all of these different ideas and sort of causes to the table, I do think that that’s  one of the strong suits of placemaking, right? It is … I can’t remember who said it, it might have been Madeleine, that it’s a holistic process. Almost inherently. It’s you know, as our founder, Fred Kent said, when you focus on place, you do everything differently. Right? As soon as you start walking into a public space, right, you start seeing how all of those different puzzle pieces fit together. Right? You can’t separate transportation infrastructure from greenery, from how things are funded, from how things are governed. It’s all mixed together in a real place. And so when you bring all of the stakeholders to the table and get them out in that place and talking to each other, that is placemaking. And that’s how you bring in nature and business and culture and all of those different ways of seeing the city. So that’s my closing argument.

Jacquelyn West Thank you. One minute each. Madeleine, then Jerome, then Amanda.

Madeleine Spencer I think going back to your earlier question about flourishing, I think positive psychology essentially shows and emphasizes that flourishing goes beyond just happiness, and it’s the absence of negative emotions, and it encompasses the holistic approach to well-being that has to do with our physical, emotional, social and psychological aspects of life. And I think that the key components of flourishing is that we have the ability to live and love and have joy and gratitude and hope and contentment in the places that we live and that we’re able to age in place and not be pushed out.

Jacquelyn West Beautiful. Jerome …

Jerome Barth That was amazing. Yes. So very, very prosaically and in the hope that there are some people in our audience who have power over this. You have to realize that most city codes in the US and Canada actually prevent us from building these places. They make it impossible to do it in 100 different ways and to reimagine … reimagining city codes and rules so that you center place as an objective would be a huge hit. And then the second one and then I’ll just pitch for my own my own team here is to say “look whenever we have this project, the big question, one of the things that drives us to mediocrity is to not have an answer to the question, Who’s going to take care of it? You need someone to take care of it. Just like, you know, that your home, your house that you made into a home will not stand if you’re not there fixing it every year. Same thing with public spaces.

Jacquelyn West Ongoing management. Amanda.

Amanda O’Rourke I’ll be really quick. I think fundamentally placemaking is a process. It’s not about just outcomes. Yes, we get really great outcomes from good placemaking, but fundamentally placemaking is not a product. It is a process and an ongoing conversation and iterative approach.

Jacquelyn West Brilliant. Well, thank you to everybody for joining us for today’s CityTalk. Thank you for being part of this journey today. And we look forward to continuing to explore how cities can be shaped by this beautiful practice of placemaking. So merci beaucoup, thank you so much for all being here and wishing you a beautiful afternoon.

Madeleine Spencer Thank you, Jacqueline, for hosting.

Jacquelyn West Thank you. Bye.