On Historic Preservation: The History of the Future

“You can learn from the past but you can’t continue to be in the past, History is not a substitute for imagination” – Frank Ghery

Like most cities, in my community, Waco, TX, there are beloved iconic structures that define our place. But it’s been a long time. The built environment, probably more than any other thing is something we reflect on to remind us of where we came from and how things used to be… but what about where we’re going?

Someone said that architecture is important because it helps us remember. As much as it defines our past, design of the built environment should also shape our future.

There’s a dichotomy at play in the urban development world that doesn’t seem to be discussed very frequently. The balance between preservation and innovation. Preserving a structure that is historically or architecturally relevant is important, but many times we focus our energy on bringing back the past instead of building the next iconic structure or place. I recently asked a local historic preservationist and advocate, “When was the last time our community built a structure that will be celebrated into the future?” Long story short he couldn’t answer.

We treasure important things from the past but we tend not to build them today and I don’t understand that. I guess you could argue that the reason we rarely build important things anymore is that the values of utility and impermanence have invaded the zeitgeist. Today we live in a culture of instant and disposable everything. Perhaps this is a motivating factor to historic preservationists. Since we don’t build many important things today, we are naturally inclined to hang on to those few remaining, relevant structures.

How do we reconcile this contemporary ethos and at the same time aspire to build great places? Easy, while architecture defines a place, it doesn’t create it. I’ve said it countless times and I’ll say it again. People make place.

In my mind, this is one of the most important values of both the development business and historic preservation, particularly in urban areas. The way we designed and built places in the past, we oriented them toward people. Small blocks, multi-modal pathways, public plazas…the common element was understanding how the space is used and integrating that understanding by designing an active space. Today the common element is exactly the opposite as we orient our design thesis toward getting people in and out of a space quicker and easier.

Sure, urban areas are scaled to lend themselves to historic renovation, but there are also abundant opportunities to build new great spaces in downtowns across the country. Instead we tend to take those spaces and put up something disposable. We treasure and put mechanisms in place to protect old buildings and say, “They don’t make them like that anymore” In the same breath cities all over the country will incentivize new construction with 99 year ground leases and allow structures to be designed at suburban scales with a practical life of 25 years. Short Sighted? Maybe. Is there a better way? Most definitely… build something important… Build something for people.

Economic Placemaking: Competing in a Post-Employment Economy

Cities all over are investing in placemaking strategies as a means of supporting economic development activity. There’s no question that building great places that people want to be absolutely enhances a community’s ability to attract and retain jobs and smart people. However, placemaking as a standalone strategy isn’t the answer to healthy, sustainable communities.

Jane Jacobs, the mother of modern placemaking, spoke frequently about the value of community, small business and creating opportunities to build relationships by designing spaces that encourage chance social exchanges. These ideas are fundamental to making great places.

One thing many cities seem to miss on is making a deliberate connection between placemaking strategies and activating the community that will support those places. A great place is only as successful as the people in it. Creating a strong linkage between placemaking initiatives, talent retention programs and entrepreneurial support amplifies the impact of each. A sustainable community is built on people, places, and jobs.

The New Competitive Reality
Today, talent is a primary currency in economic development. Every city in the country is competing for young college educated talent. Great places with diverse job markets make it easy for people to relocate. As such, larger markets tend to have an easier time attracting and retaining talent.  

Any community’s primary competition in Economic Development today are those places that are succeeding in taking their community’s talent. It’s easy to map talent migration patterns using census figures and safe to say that talent magnets like Chicago, Dallas, Austin and Portland are the winners in this competition. The challenge today is to create an environment that will keep smart people in your community.

As communities begin to respond to this new competitive reality, solid results typically follow. The opportunity to build a new economic engine exists in the coalescing of a solid place strategy with a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem as a means of attracting and retaining talent. 

Toward a Post-Employment Economy
The trends toward a more entrepreneurial economy are real. If these trends continue America may be entering into a sort of post-employment economy. Today's talent appears to be drawn to an entrepreneurial path because they highly value work-life balance. It’s also important to note that the barriers to entry in small business are smaller than ever before.

The numbers are very interesting. Survey's estimate that nationally, 35% of working millennials (the largest generation in the workforce today) have started a side business, 27% that are already self-employed. 72% of those that are currently employed intend to quit their jobs in the next 3-5 years. For a variety of reasons, it's reasonable to anticipate that America's self-employed workforce will grow by 50% in the next decade. 

Focusing strategies on building the entrepreneurial ecosystem that can support new start-up activity, both on main street and in the lab (tech commercialization) will accelerate the establishment of the community that will be at the center of a community’s placemaking strategies.

Take Aways

• Build a local entrepreneurial ecosystem: Partner with local institutions that support entrepreneurs to increase success with start-ups.
• Celebrate your community’s unique identity: Every place has a story, know your story and tell it. Building on this will build community pride and encourage people to love where they live.
• Nurture creative entrepreneurs: “Creativity is the ultimate economic resource” – Richard Florida
• Invest in shared workspace/co-working: The workplace is changing, keep up or get left behind.
• Cultivate cultural assets, support local arts: Investment in cultural infrastructure is essential for a healthy economy, do not consider cultural investment optional.
• Connect local businesses: Small businesses fuel placemaking strategies. They are at the center of a community’s identity.

Chris McGowan has spent 20 years working to successfully transform Texas cities and build community. His passion for place, inspired design, and innovation drive his work today.

The Zen and the Art of City Building

"The greatest asset that a city can have is something that's different from every other place." – Jane Jacobs.

“The people make the place” – Every person who’s ever loved where they live

There’s no question that placemaking, talent, and innovation are becoming an ever present part of the national economic development and community building conversation right now. Communities across the country are beginning to believe in themselves and their potential. The collective confidence that is emerging is resulting in a major shift in the way we think about our cities. Interesting things are happening everywhere.

The new reality of economic development focuses energy toward attracting and retaining a talented workforce and making places people want to be. The HR department is involved more than ever before in steering business re-location and expansion decisions. Placemaking and strategic community investments in infrastructure and amenities are critical components of attracting talent. Deliberately working to shape the future of a community to create great places will create economic opportunities for cities as they aspire to self-actualize.

Great places define great cities. The great places that exist and are emerging are redefining community distinctiveness. To reflect on what Jane Jacobs said, one important component of becoming a great city is to have a unique identity.

What makes your place distinct?

This question comes up frequently. Quantifying community distinctiveness, an altogether subjective notion, is a challenge. People have tried. There are “weirdness indexes” that attempt to calculate type and share of various recreational activities in comparison with other places. The “culture to cable ratio” proposed by CEOs for Cities theorizes that the more people a city has that participate in cultural activities relative to the number of people with cable television subscriptions can help define distinctiveness. 

These and other attempts to quantify a place’s unique identity miss the fact that the very definition of the word “distinctive” and everything it implies as it relates to placemaking and city building defies measurability. What makes a place can’t be replicated and very often dies when local entities attempt to institutionalize it. Simply put, intangibles don’t exist in quantifiable terms.

In successful places a zeitgeist oriented toward optimism and possibility exists that seems to be a common denominator. Some people call it a “vibe.” You can’t measure it, but by spending time in any of the numerous places around the country that are realizing success in creating place you will recognize a palpable aura of sorts. People make place.

Chattanooga, TN is a notable example. A few years ago Chattanooga had success in attracting a new Volkswagen plant to their community.  When asking Chattanooga officials about this success, every person I talked to said the reason Volkswagen ultimately moved to Chattanooga was due to the “intangibles.”

Today many places are growing in a way they haven’t before. Growing industry employment sectors center around knowledge and innovation. At the same time, we appear to be entering into a new post-employment age where increasing degrees of specialization create unlimited opportunity for the entrepreneurially oriented. These trends are partially responsible for driving people to seek out great places.

All this adds up to a complicated equation that is difficult to quantify and even harder to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand. Many things combine to give a great place the “something that’s different from every other place” that Jane Jacobs was referring to. Perhaps most importantly the collective of personalities and attitudes that exist within the place.

We know it. We feel it. We carry it with us every day as we all contribute in our own way to make our places distinctive. Our cities’ best days are in front of us. As these distinctive cities continues to define themselves we must be able to tell the story; tell our story. The Zen of City Building is about embracing the vibe that is driving change in your community. We… all of us… make place. Let’s work to make them better.

On Placemaking: The Value of Building Community

Urban planners, economic developers, and community builders spend quite a bit of energy, public money and political capital on the idea of placemaking. National non-profit the Project for Public Spaces defines placemaking as “a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces…the art of creating public places that uplift and help us connect to each other.”

At its core placemaking is about creating places people want to be. I believe the operative word in any discussion on place should always revolve around people. Designing spaces and places with people in mind, be they a citizen, a customer, a tourist or any number of other hats we all wear, is the most often overlooked and important piece of the development process public and private. Quite simply, people make place.

Traditionally, placemaking and the science therein seeks to understand dynamics associated with form, function and orientation to ultimately create an identity we can relate to. Placemaking has become a big industry, frequently employing methods involving complex analysis of data and demographics to identify the best opportunity for a return on our community’s investments. As professionals, we know what makes a functionally useful sidewalk. We appreciate and understand the complex relationship between building orientation, traffic patterns, and real estate value. Our process has been measured and methodical.

Today the idea of placemaking drives the design of public spaces everywhere. What placemaking has become is an essential component of any economic development program. There isn’t an economic developer in the country today that isn’t working to attract talent and innovation by prioritizing place. Placemaking principles have even become ubiquitous in commercial development. The lifestyle center is an excellent example. Private investors understand better than ever how the design of a project for example, can frame the customer/tenant experience.

The problem is, you can’t institutionalize authenticity…

Placemaking doesn’t have to be driven by public process or born in a committee meeting or driven by a commercial purpose. At its core placemaking is about civic and community pride. In that respect the idea of creating place is being open sourced all over the country. Movements toward tactical urbanism, active efforts on the part of people to make their places more interesting and functional and beautiful are happening everywhere.

One thing that often gets missed in placemaking strategies is the more connected and interpersonal aspects of community building. Creating an environment where people feel comfortable taking initiative for building place on their own can and will build momentum. Chuck Marohn with Strong Towns talks about this frequently.

Urbanism and traditional placemaking as defined and discussed above, while much more largely dissected, isn’t the only impactful path toward creating a great place where people want to be. Public spaces, both functional and beautiful are essential, but without people a well-designed public plaza, a perfectly planned sidewalk or any other place is worthless.

Intentional work to build “community” is essential to a successful placemaking program. The challenge is, try as we might, community in the “family you choose” sense of the word can’t be manufactured in a board room or a public meeting, but without it place doesn’t exist.

Ask anyone what makes their city, neighborhood or place special and the first two words out of their mouths almost without fail is: “the people.” To effectively support and accelerate sustainable communities we must work intentionally toward empowering people to build their own shared community identity.

Shared concerns and interests build on the foundation that proximity and place design create to make a successful place. In order to feel connected we all need a community that we seek and community that seeks us… this notion of mutuality is an important and often misunderstood two-way relationship.

Efforts that can support the development of true mutuality are driven to inspire community conversation, and ultimately give people a reason to love where the live. 

With that here are some ideas for intentional efforts beyond traditional placemaking strategies that can help build community:

Tatical Urbanism: Make your place more beautiful and functional

• Community installations to meet a need
• More public art
• Purposeful street art
• Raise the bar on local design

Connectivity: Build a Creative Community

• Physical connectivity projects, wayfinding
• Community brand and shared identity
• Create opportunities to inspire community conversation, gatherings and networking

Inspiration: Do good things

• Inspire love, give as a citizen
• Give people a reason to stay
• Make your community famous for something
• Take time to explore

Entrepreneurialism: Create, Grow and Support Business that Advance the Goals of your community

Placemaking can be open sourced in the sense that there is no ownership in the effort to create a particular place, in fact it must be if we are to create successful places. Our work is to engage and enable those things to happen and then get out of the way when they do.

Finally, never forget that it takes forever to build a city.

Chris McGowan has spent 20 years working to successfully transform Texas cities and build community. His passion for place, inspired design, and innovation drive his work today.