It’s virtually impossible to study urban planning these days without taking courses on placemaking. And the founder of the placemaking movement is a name most of us in the community revitalization business would recognize: Fred Kent.
Fred Kent is a friend of mine, and Fred, despite his curmudgeonly personality, has had a major impact on cities around the globe, or as one brochure puts it, from “Bologna to Buffalo.” In fact, for those unacquainted with the world of placemaking, here is a brief (well maybe, not so brief) explanation of Fred Kent’s impact:
According to Project for Public Spaces: “Today, Fred is applying his community organizing skills to lead a global placemaking movement that is connecting and supporting public space innovators, advocates, and professionals across the globe. The movement has been fueled by a consistent flow of ‘transformative agendas’ from Fred, which Project for Public Spaces has turned into direct support for communities looking for change. Informing, and grounding, these ideas, Fred has facilitated thousands of community-based projects that have demonstrated a new paradigm for shaping public spaces, including leading ongoing transformations of high profile places from Houston to Harvard Yard, Perth Cultural Centre to Downtown Detroit. Fred has made his passion for placemaking contagious with hundreds of keynotes, ranging from half a million at Earth Day 1990, to a room full of leaders at the World Bank. Perhaps his biggest impact is building the capacity of hundreds of local placemaking organizations, and city-wide placemaking campaigns, and from Cape Town to Kuala Lumpur, San Diego to Mississauga.”
However, many if not most cities and downtowns are struggling these days, and the problem is that most have become quite attractive places — but they have emptied out, as people work from home, companies downsize and businesses flee central city business districts for suburban locations or simply close their doors.
So, as helpful as placemaking has been in creating attractive urban spaces, it may not be the answer to solving the dilemma that cities now face — empty office buildings, vacant retail spaces and a feeling that once vibrant downtowns have become ghost towns.
How does retail thrive? Design for women.
In the terminology of academic research, placemaking is “necessary but not sufficient.” A few years ago, I co-authored a book entitled “Design Downtown for Women — Men Will Follow.” Our research showed that women are the most important demographic group for a city to succeed. Women make or influence over 80% of retail, dining, residential and healthcare decisions. Placemaking (or at least, place maintenance) is very important in attracting and keeping women as customers, visitors, business owners and residents.
But what do women consider the most hated thing about coming downtown? Parking, especially parking garages, which one woman in our survey described as “dull, dirty, dark and dangerous.” Second on the list of major dislikes was the absence of clean safe public restrooms. Planners should be paying attention to these gripes before adding planters and decorative lighting.
Rick Reinhard, a veteran of downtown revitalization, quotes another veteran who helped author a book called “Centralized Retail Management.” Our friend Jim Cloar says that the problem is not “placemaking” but is “place management.”
Years ago, when the International Downtown Association was trying to help its members compete with the growing shopping mall phenomenon, we asked, “what did mall developers know and do that we in the downtown world were not doing?” The answer was relatively straightforward: There was one owner, and that owner was responsible for managing the center. That meant efficient, high-quality maintenance, coordinated marketing (every tenant paid a fee) and a tenanting practice and policy that supported “companion retailing” — in other words, recruiting and placing tenants strategically.
The problem every downtown has that makes it different from the malls is multiple ownership of properties. And the way man downtowns have addressed this is a mechanism called Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs. These BID organizations try to replicate the effectiveness and efficiency of malls by providing centralized management, marketing and maintenance.
And while BIDs have generally done an acceptable job of public space maintenance and placemaking, where they seem to be lacking is overall management and marketing.
Multiple owners of properties make coordinated management a difficult task. BIDs usually need to craft a “cooperation agreement” in which property owners agree to turn over some business recruiting responsibilities to the BID; need to offer concessions and incentives, such as reduced or free rent or tenant improvements; and need to agree to engage a topflight marketing firm to develop a unified brand and programs such as hospitality training for employees.
This requires a new paradigm, a way of seeing downtown as an entity, and the city as being a place where sufficient resources — talent, financing, training — exist. This means abandoning the typical Chamber of Commerce “Drop an ad in Site Selection magazine” approach to business recruiting. It means “growing your own” as Dr. Bob Meeder in Pittsburgh has done for years, and Dan Gilbert in downtown Detroit has been doing recently.
Many years ago, when I was active in managing downtown parking, we used to say, “People don’t come downtown because it is a great place to park.” We are discovering that people don’t come downtown (or locate their business in downtown) because it has nice sidewalks, pretty flowers or decorative lighting. And they certainly don’t come downtown because it has bike lanes or bus lanes.
Customers will come downtown for a great restaurant, a destination retail or a well-managed office building at a reasonable price with responsive management. People will choose to live downtown if there are other people around, places to go and things to do. Placemaking is part of the mix, but it clearly is not the answer to restoring the economic health to our downtowns. This will take, to use a football phrase, the “hard blocking and tackling” that overall “place management” implies. And this means the existence of a downtown management organization that understands how businesses work.
