“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.”
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.
Don’t get me wrong; 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:
“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.
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 many 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 top flight 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.
Excellent story highlighting the need for practical management. I’ve read in numerous places how the lack of public restrooms is a problem downtown. How do they get created? Would they be built and maintained by the BID?
Thanks to Craig Mason for his thoughtful comment. At the time we wrote the book (and I was joined by ten other co-authors who were women) we found that women were underrepresented in most of the professions that “design” the downtown experience: architects, urban planners, landscape architects, civil engineers, real state developers. What this means is that many design decisions are made by men who lack an understanding of women’s issues. For example, look at the tree grates popular around urban street tree bases, Many are “high heel catchers” and imagine if you are headed toward a meeting and break a heel. What do you do if there is no shoe store or shore repair shop nearby? Or another example is the typical multi-space parking kiosk. Some have screens that are almost impossible to read. Glare from sunlight or poor backlighting leaves the customer, (and especially shorter women) struggling to read the instructions. these are just a couple of examples.
I appreciate your comment about who makes the decisions. This is the case in everything in which those at the top whether it’s men in power, white people, etc. no matter how good-intentioned, if they don’t include those living the experience the adjustments, changes, transformations, developments etc. go South fast.
As a landscape architect and urban planner, I completely resonate with your perspective. I’m exhausted by the proliferation of idealized placemaking visions—those glossy, photoshopped renderings filled with endless pink crabapple trees in full bloom, vibrant autumn foliage, or idyllic snowy scenes packed with cheerful, diverse crowds. These overly polished images often deliver empty promises to city councils and policymakers.
Your book, “Design Downtown for Women—Men Will Follow,” has caught my interest, and I’m looking forward to delving into it. It’s fascinating to consider the critical role women play in driving retail decisions and their significant frustrations with downtown spaces: parking—particularly garages, which are frequently described as “dull, dirty, dark, and dangerous”—and the lack of clean, safe public restrooms. Addressing these practical concerns should take precedence over superficial enhancements like planters or decorative lighting.
Your emphasis on prioritizing place management over placemaking is both refreshing and insightful, offering a much-needed shift in how we approach urban development. Thank you for sharing these valuable ideas.