PLACEMAKING: CONNECTING PEOPLE AND PLACE | Elena Madison | TEDxSpringfield

Have you ever thought about what characterizes a great public space? You can probably think of some great

place

s: Boston Commons, maybe Brian Park in New York, Millennium Park in Chicago, maybe a

place

in your own community. We all know a great place when we see one, and with all the new attention to urban living, to downtown revitalization, to moving downtown, why don't we have more and better public spaces? After all, the era of construction and design for automobiles and suburban living is over, but it has left us with a heavy automotive legacy. that streets that are parked with cars, empty parks and concrete plazas and even award-winning designs like Pershing Square in Los Angeles that you see on the slide here designed in 1993 don't really work for

people

;

It was designed to be a symbol. it was designed to make a statement it wasn't really designed for

people

you would say well that was in 93 we don't do this anymore but we do this is a brand new park from 2016 designed to become a stage for an adjacent building designed to be seen from a drone or a high-rise office window is not so good for people public spaces are also places where social problems become visible social isolation social exclusion homelessness gentrification all of these things can become very obvious in a space public if we know where Look, the study of how people use public spaces has deep roots, it is not a new science and one of the pioneers of this science was William White, he was an urban planner, he was a writer and he was really a pioneer of observation direct, he used film and cameras to record and really understand what people were doing in the public squares and parks of New York City and he started doing this work in the '60s and '70s, so he used 33 millimeter film, he used old school cameras, all to understand how people use their faces and what they do.

They need to enjoy their public spaces and pointed out that great public spaces are actually made up of a set of basic elements, it's not very complicated and of course first and foremost are other people and not just any person, but a diversity of people. people like us. As mentioned above, one of the quickest ways to assess the health of a public space is to look around and see how many women are in the space. When a space has more women than men, it means it is safe and comfortable, so next time you go. in a public space take that test we also want places with food, food is always great and yes sometimes you have sad scenes like this where the only person who doesn't eat ice cream is the little kid, but we love food in public space And you know. there is an explosion of street food there is ice cream there are food carts food trucks food markets we have discovered street food and that is because we want accessibility we want diversity we want to connect with each other and have fun other basic water component many traditional public spaces used to have these very serious untouchable fountains, but lately we have seen a proliferation of water from water fountains that should be touched and enjoyed and that is the right direction to go and of course, we need places to sit, places to sit in the shade or in the sun next to a stranger or perhaps further away and sometimes even the opportunity to bring our own chair.

Our needs as human beings are not that complicated, so what makes a place comfortable when? We are really comfortable, we rest, we relax, we take off our shoes, so seeing people barefoot in a public space is a sure sign that people feel comfortable, feel like they belong and feel like they can really take charge of this triangulation of public space. It's about layers. activities, so giving us simple things to do is not enough, it makes for a thin experience, so our goal is always to connect smaller activities to create a hole that is larger than the sum of its parts so that people They can connect with each other and then strangers can talk. each other finding common ground in the end it's about coming together, sharing and making new connections, so

placemaking

, what does

placemaking

have to do with great public spaces?

Placemaking is the process of creating those public spaces, it is a collaborative process, it is about people coming together to create places in their own communities and it is a practice that in the public space projects that the non-profit organization profit planning and design where I have been working for almost 20 years we have been developing since the 90's we started using the term placemaking sometime in the mid 90's but today you may have heard this word from other practitioners, so it's really becoming not just a fad, but a practice that a lot of people in the urban field are using and it's really about people working together, so one of our most important principles is that community is the expert and what do we mean by that?

We don't mean that we expect untrained people from the community to go out and start designing public spaces, but we really want to have a conversation and engage the community from the beginning of the process to give people the place to exchange ideas and really be the drivers of the idea of ​​places they need because they already know what they need and what their desires are, so our role as urban professionals is really a facilitation role of providing and supporting information and really coordinating and leading the process, for More than anything else, placemaking is a process and it takes many forms, there are workshops, there is site assessment, there is happy hour, there are little Poppins you can talk to.

Very quickly there are even festivals and events that we organize in the community so that people can come together and we can talk to them and understand what their needs are and what they really need in their community. A space can become a place. A space in a place. they are not the same things, so in downtown Houston we worked on a parking lot and an abandoned park to create one of the most successful parks in downtown Houston, it's called Discovery Green, it even has a boat pond and we started with a parking lot in downtown Detroit.

We were able to revitalize and reclaim the old heart of downtown through this collective process by working on a site that had nothing but traffic and had become a traffic intersection to create a park that today attracts millions of people each year in the nearby Harvard. This is Harvard. Plaza and it's actually a space that sits at the top of the Cambridge Street underpass, it's essentially a cap and has become a Plaza that connects the heart of Harvard Yard to the Science Center, of course, it has food, There are hungry students and it has a fabulous winter program.

If you are there this winter, there are bonfires, s'mores, ice skating, curling, so go and check it out. You can't do it alone. Placemaking is about partnerships and a lot about unlikely partners, so they could be senior volunteers. staffing a playing card like in this park Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta could be homeless youth working with artists to offer programming on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis it's also about lighter, faster, cheaper, lighter , faster, cheaper is about big impactful changes that can be done quickly without big funds and long construction projects, which doesn't mean we don't want to do long-term changes and construction, but it means that when you get people involved we don't you can ask them to wait five years until we finish construction.

Your needs are going to change, your kids are going to leave college, they're going to leave high school and they're going to go to college, they're going to have to do something else, so lighter, faster, cheaper at Campus Martius in Detroit. I was showing you before that we could transform. one of the underused gardens on an urban beach in just three months it is basically a sandbox it has a lot of seats a place for children and families a place for downtown workers because it is downtown and of course there are a lot of office workers in a bit below At the beach cafe you can see the small white pop-up tent which has evolved over the years into a portable container serving food and drinks and at the end of summer in October all of this is put away to make room for ice skating, so that it is lighter, faster and cheaper. gives you a lot of flexibility with a big bang for your buck we also want to program a program for diversity and in some places like Bryant Park diversity can mean activities for kids in families a carousel in a children's reading room in downtown Philadelphia It meant engaging the LGBTQ community through performances by the Philadelphia Gay Men's Chorus at Limburg in Park in Mexico in Mexico City.

It meant that adding family programming and children's activities to your mobile libraries can build resilience and this is really the big lesson. for Alan Berg that I just showed you that this is the community in Mexico City that spontaneously gathered the four people right after the earthquakes last year, people brought supplies, people felt they would be safe there, they were volunteers, they gave each other help and everyone gathered in this place because they were already connected to it, so at the end of the day, creating a place requires many disciplines and a lot of knowledge, but the place also touches many things, from architecture and design, which are obvious things for community development, the transportation community. resilience lifelong learning the place of sustainability of the built environment is also where you can begin to address many social issues, from inclusion and equity to helping your community connect better building social capital creating local economies that support and share a project for public spaces We started building an international movement around placemaking about six or seven years ago and today this is the map of all the people around the world who are part of our movement, they self-identify, they say they are doing placemaking. places.

I'm sure everyone is doing it. in a different way, but you can see that they are everywhere people want to contribute, so I want to leave you with this. You can transform your own community through placemaking. You don't need to be an urban professional to do it. You can be an activist you can be a participant, you can see your places in a different way and contribute and make it happen, so good luck and enjoy your public spaces, thank you.