Great Public Spaces Needn’t Be Owned by the Public

Most well-used public spaces are owned by the public.  When I talk with others of creating more energized public places in the North Bay, the initial assumptions are publicly-owned parks and downtown plazas.

Much of the reason for the assumption is that privately-owned public spaces in recent times are often dismal places.

As has been documented by William Whyte and others who have looked at the plazas of Manhattan, people rarely linger in most plazas owned by private corporations.  The problem is that the corporations were induced to provide public spaces in exchange for additional building height.  But having provided the spaces, they had no interest in maintaining a plaza which people actually used.  So they sought design solutions that would make the plazas as dreary and unfriendly as possible.  As a result, few folks find enough enjoyment to hang around.

Here in the Bay Area, the plaza in front of the Bank of America Building in San Francisco is an example of an unfriendly public space.

But there can be well-designed and well-used public places that are privately-owned.  Corporations that followed the concepts put forth by Whyte have often energized their plazas.  Examples in Manhattan include the CBS Building and Rockefeller Center.

Here in the North Bay, although not as fully energized as some may have hoped, Theatre Square Plaza is an example of a privately owned public plaza that offers some vitality.

Yet one more example, this one again in the state of New York, is Larkin Square in Buffalo.

The Project for Public Spaces, an organization that is well-aligned with the work of Whyte, interviewed the Zemsky family who own Larkin Square.  Having revitalized their obsolete industrial buildings and finding that they didn’t need as much parking as they had anticipated, the family began looking for other uses for the land that remained.  Trying to build a place that they would themselves enjoy and learning from the usage as the public space evolved, Larkin Square was the result.

The lunchtime office worker crowd, fed by a restaurant in the square, is typical of many better public spaces, but where Larkin Square excels is in the evening, when food trucks and free music can attract crowds of more than 1,000 people.

As Leslie Zemsky notes, the family couldn’t always justify the costs for Larkin Square based on the projected bottom line, but they were sure that building the square as an engaged public space would provide benefits to the family.  And they were right.

In describing the success of Larkin Square, the Project for Public Spaces notes their eleven steps for building great public spaces.  I’ve linked the eleven steps before, but they’re worth reviewing again relative to Larkin Square.  The concept of triangulation, the idea that site features can be configured such that strangers are induced to begin conversations, is particularly intriguing.

I’m writing about Larkin Square because the Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Buffalo this year.  The 22nd annual conference, better known as CNU 22, will begin in Buffalo in a few days.  Having enjoyed and learned much at CNU 21 in Salt Lake City last year, I’ll be in Buffalo this year.  And with the conference closing party in Larkin Square, I’ll have a chance to look around the square myself. 

Based on the CNU 21 experience, I expect to rub shoulders for five days with inspirational urbanists and to return with lots to share, much of which will quickly find its way into this space.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

A City Trying to Rediscover Happiness

Leo Tolstoy’s most famous quote may be “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  (For those who haven’t studied Russian literature, it’s the first line in “Anna Karenina”.)

In the forty years since I first read that line, I’ve found it to be usually true.  Indeed, it often pops into my head when observing families both happy and unhappy.

However, its reverse may be true for U.S. cities.  There is a multitude of ways that cities can be successful and happy.  But many unhappy U.S. cities are surprisingly similar in their unhappiness.

To review the path to today’s discontent, many U.S. cities were founded in early 20th century or before.  Their original configuration was organized around walkability, supplemented with the occasional horse-drawn buggy or drayage wagon.  Even the advent of intracity public transit didn’t greatly affect the city layout.  (As Jeff Speck and others often note, a transit trip always begins and ends with walks.)

The advent of the mass-produced automobile in the 1920s put a little pressure on the city, but the Great Depression deferred the explosion.

It was only after World War II that the massive change came.  The final horses were put out to pasture, transit was largely abandoned, and we turned our cities over to the automobile and its parking lots, ever-widening streets, strip malls, and sprawl.

Which brings us to today, with the many costs of our automobile obsession accumulating out of control.  Climate change is peering at us over the horizon, public health is being affected by the car-culture, and we can’t afford to maintain all the stuff we built.  It’s a sad state of affairs.

Many cities recognize the problem and are trying to find solutions, often through a form of urbanism.  But it’s hard to back out of a 70-year-old cul-de-sac, especially when it’s all that most residents have ever known.

Admittedly, this history doesn’t pertain to every U.S. city.  But if you live in a city that was founded anytime before 1920, there’s more than a grain of truth in this summary.

Which brings us to Buffalo, New York, a place that had peaks of success that towered over its rivals and valleys of despair that remain legendary.  Buffalo is also a place that is now trying to find a successful future in the half-forgotten successes of its past, largely through a turn to urbanism.

Buffalo will be the 2014 host of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU 22).  At CNU 21, a newly-produced film about Buffalo was shown to kickoff the twelve-month buildup to CNU 22.  I’m unsure if the film was produced solely for CNU, but it might as well have been.  With crystal clarity, Buffalo hits all the notes in the urbanist anthem.  Buffalo will be a fine host city for CNU 22.

If your schedule allows twelve minutes, watch “Buffalo, America’s Best Designed City”.  It’s a tourism film, but a tourism film with a moral.  And if your schedule allows another ten minutes, think about what your city and Buffalo have in common and if your city is doing as much as Buffalo to restore its vitality.

Schedule Note

The next meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat will be a joint meeting with City Repair Petaluma.  To accommodate the larger group, we’ll meet at the Petaluma Arts Center.  (A voluntary $5 donation to the Arts Center is suggested for each attendee.)

We’ll view a City Repair video entitled “Transforming Space into Place” and discuss if the City Repair concept can be brought to Petaluma.  You can look at the City Repair website for an advance look at the model.

The meeting date will be Tuesday, November 12.  We’ll begin assembling and mingling at the Arts Center at 5:30.  The program will begin at 6:00.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)