It’s approach is similar to Place Making - a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, ultimately creating good public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and well being.

A Phoenix From The Ashes, which takes place on October 29 and 30, will illuminate the Lancaster Canal with a series of installations, audio and visual displays, light projects and music.

This magical, enchanting and memorable experience will be concentrated on the stretch of the canal that runs from Moor Lane to the Water Witch pub and will animate the story of what the waterway means to Lancaster, its heritage and its people.

A Phoenix From The Ashes is just one of a number projects led by The Dukes beyond the walls of its Moor Lane home.

Another such project coming up this autumn is Metropolis, the major youth event for Preston Guild, which takes place on September 7.

The Dukes Creative Learning Team have been working with hundreds of young people from Preston and the Ribble Valley to create an event like no other seen in Preston Guild Hall.

Placemaking tosses out the idea that an architect or planner is more of an expert about how a place should be used than the people who are going to use it. By bringing people together around a shared physical place, it’s also a powerful tool for disrupting local complacency. Great public spaces give people a tangible way to connect with their neighborhoods, building a stronger local constituency–aka sense of community–over the long term.

PPS then goes on to give “7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space.” The idea is to give average people the skills, motivation, and mindset to make the public spaces in their neighborhoods better.

I’ll let you click over to the PPS post to read all seven points on the list, but I would like to highlight a few particularly applicable ideas here:

If there’s a place in your neighborhood that seems forlorn or forgotten, there are probably just a few key things about it that don’t work for the people who live nearby.

Ask yourself: “How might this community want to use this space, and what’s the most efficient, immediate way to make that possible?”

No one organization or individual can create a strong sense of place for a neighborhood; either people work together do what’s best for the community, or you lose any sense of civic life.

What I really like about these points is the idea that we can all make a difference. When I walk around my neighborhood and see empty parks, neglected benches or just forlorn sidewalks, it’s discouraging. But when I read things like this, I’m persuaded that people can make a difference.

Penrith Council recently launched the Penrith is Here campaign, resulting from a collaboration between local community, local business and local government which aims to put Penrith “on the map”, distinguishable from greater western Sydney as its own “destination, place, people”. While some residents criticise the brand for being too simplistic and being a mislaid priority, Penrith opinion writer Michael Todd endorses the campaign, writing:

The ‘Penrith is Here’ brand will drive jobs and economic investment, as well as enhance community pride by changing the way people see the area… we now have a brand that allows you to express your pride in our area. I know I’m not the only one that gets sick of the ill informed stereotypes people have of the Penrith, especially in the city and inner west. I see this as our chance to change these perceptions and all Penrith businesses should get behind the new brand.

The campaign strategy makes use of a multi-channel approach to reaching its audience, including environmental branding, traditional media, and social media, and it will be interesting to chart its progress.

I love the alfresco reading ‘room’ and am really looking forward to all the new things planned for Kings Square. It shows that good things can happen when councils involve the community, as many of the ideas now implemented came from workshops with place making expert David Engwicht and other workshops about our city square.

Stay tuned for better, more creative and fun furniture, a Green Wall, the Framing Freo artworks by Greg James, due by late June, market umbrellas, lots of strings of LED lights, etc.

These are all good and positive initiatives by the City of Fremantle!

Roel Loopers

Lancaster is the half-way point for this year’s Olympic torch relay and The Dukes will be joining in the celebrations.

We have been invited by Lancaster City Council to provide entertainment in Ryelands Park on June 22 when the torchbearers have a lunch stop at Our Lady’s Catholic Sports College nearby.

Hundreds of people are expected to congregate in the park and a team from The Dukes will be there too along with performers from Slightly Fat Features and live music from a pedal-powered band who will keep the crowds entertained.

Later on in the year, The Dukes will be cheering on the torch relay once again – this time to support Karl Green who has been chosen as one of the torchbearers for the Paralympics.

For more than ten years Karl has been a member of Shattering Images, The Dukes theatre company for people who have a learning disability and a passion for performing. He was nominated  for the Paralympic honour by The Dukes creative learning director, Guy Christiansen.

Millions of Americans rent; some 34% of them in fact. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population survey, 42% of renters are under 30 years of age and 17% are over 65. How is it that anyone can lump together so many seniors and Millennials and then suggest that somehow they are not essential elements of the American mainstream that deserve choices in housing?

Renters are transient and disconnected the critics argue. To be sure, renters without children, both young and old, may be disconnected indeed from schools; the one basic hometown institution mostly supported by property taxes. However, from this observation it is a far and dramatic leap to suggest that renters by their very nature are disconnected from the community at large. What models of citizenship are we promoting that equate the value of contributions to a society by the dollars collected through a tax on real property?

Today renters are helping to stabilize and even save neighborhoods devastated by foreclosures just by the act of moving in.  Beyond their physical presence, renters bring income, purchasing power and the foundations of community.

People chose to live in the best place that they can afford.  That best place often has a mix of employment opportunities, welcoming neighbors, and some amenities such as open space or retail shops or entertainment venues.

Being welcoming to new residents regardless of their housing preferences is an act of good faith by a city. By using an inclusive approach, a city can demonstrate that it seeks to attract people of energy and talent to build a life for themselves and for those they hold dear. Such an attitude proudly declares that a community wishes to serve and support a diverse and unique corps of residents.

Banks Reserve on land known as ‘Warndoolier’

Hosted by the Vincent Reconciliation Group and the City of Vincent, the event is the next step in a local Reconciliation journey that is demonstrating how place making can further Reconciliation aims. It builds on earlier Reconciliation discussions and activities that have happened at the park in recent years and that I’ve had the pleasure of helping to facilitate.

Everyone is invited to join in this historic event, held as part of National Reconciliation Week (27 May to 3 June 2012).

• The event takes place at 11.00am on Sunday 27 May.
• The formal ceremony will feature a Reconciliation choir, an Elder’s Welcome from Nyungah Elder Mrs Doolann-Leisha Eatts, and the unveiling of a plaque by Mrs Eatts and the Vincent Mayor Alannah MacTiernan.
• This will be followed by activities for the whole family, including Nyungah cultural activities and a ‘treasure hunt’ throughout the park.
• There will be a walking tour to highlight community aspirations for enriching Banks Reserve as a Place of Reconciliation.

See the attached flyer for full event details.

The community vision for the Place of Reconciliation that was developed in collaboration with local residents, organisations, and Aboriginal community representatives is included below. There will be plenty of opportunities coming up to join in implementing the vision – stay tuned!

Although some marvelous architecture was created in the 20th century, we are still playing catch-up in the area of public space. Earlier eras seemed to understand the need for places were people would enjoy gathering and circulating. And they developed some great precedents for us among countless parks, plazas, boulevards, public gardens, arcades, and railway stations which still provide pleasurable experiences for people all over the world.

Public spaces must act as places with permeable boundaries allowing ownership by all, thus preventing the creation of territories.  The commitment to developing the public realm must result in an improvement in the lives of those communities adjacent to the site.  If not, we end up with commercial centres with no sense of place and which bring no benefit to the disadvantaged communities on the periphery e.g. the commercial and economic development.

As suggested by Andrés Di Masso University of Barcelona, research in social psychology has stressed the fundamental role of space, place, and environmental categories in the constitution of subjectivity and the regulation of social interaction (Aiello & Bonaiuto, 2003; Bonaiuto & Bonnes, 2000; Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). Mostly assuming a discursive epistemological framework (Billig, 1987; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), this emerging trend encompasses a varied set of approaches interested in the social construc- tion of space. The main topics investigated include the normative meaning of morally connoted spatial discourse regulating neighborhood relations (e.g., Stokoe & Wallwork, 2003); the language of place as a system of rhetorical warrants reproducing ideologies of racial exclusion (e.g., Dixon & Durrheim, 2004; Dixon, Foster, Durrheim, & Wilbraham, 1994); the role of place-discourse in women’s narratives of identity (e.g., Taylor, 2005); or the value of landscape rhetoric in the construction of nationhood (e.g., Wallwork & Dixon, 2004). Building on a well-known idea in environmental psychology and human geography, according to which personal experience is unavoidably located (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983; Tuan, 1977), the main point made by the bulk of these studies is that our individual and shared interpretations of space and place-behavior are also culture-bound discursive resources that accomplish functions in larger sequences of social (inter)action, often echoing broad ideological processes.

A particular strand within this set of studies has more recently been concerned with “the political significance of people’s psychological representations of space,” accepting that “these shape people’s understandings of who belongs, the rights and freedoms that people may claim and exercise, decisions where we feel ‘at home’ and ‘out of place,’ where we may move to, or avoid, and much more besides” (Hopkins & Dixon, 2006, p. 174). According to these authors, places are relevant not just because they afford and shape psychological experiences, but also because such “psychological constructs” may be socially deployed to provoke particular political effects aligned with people’s individual or collective interests and demands. This justifies Hopkins and Dixon’s claim for political psychology “to recover the micropolitics of people’s everyday constructions of place and space” (p. 174). This task involves both acknowledging the representations of place which imply psychological notions of who we are, where we belong, and to whom we are committed, as well as the discursive processes that make place-representations work as symbolic devices with a political value.

This twofold political and psychological value of place representations is particularly clear when applied to the public space, “the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds” (Carr, Francis, Rivlin, & Stone, 1992, p. 3). Public spaces are the natural arena of citizenship, where individuals, groups, and crowds become political subjects. They are sociophysical settings where public life occurs on the basis of open visibility, scrutiny, and concern, supporting public interest and citizens’ well-being (Brill, 1989). In streets, squares, parks, and loose urban spaces, society renders itself visible as citizenship finds in them a place to be enacted and demanded (Borja & Muxí, 2003).

Some architectural, urban and landscape designers who have worked towards improving public, social, urban spaces are:

Laurence Halpin, Isam Nagouchi, Hideo Sasaki, Paul Friedberg, Roberto Burle Marx, Dan Kiley.

The idea that public space has an intrinsically political significance seems to be widely supported. Following Carr et al. (1992), “it is impossible to understand public life and the spaces in which it takes place without recognising the political nature of public activities” (Carr, S., Francis, M., Rivlin, L., & Stone, A. (1992). Public space. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 45). Public life importantly depends on social and political contexts that make public spaces work for the common good. The public space reflects social exchanges between individual and collective affairs, featuring personal rights that are both politically and spatially grounded, such as the “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968; Mitchell, 2003) and freedom of action in the urban open space (Rivlin, 1994).

However, freedom and rights in public space are limited by safety requirements, private inter- vention, and cultural standards of moral order and decorum (Dixon et al., 2006). Hence social life in public spaces is informed and regulated by a value-loaded political tension between liberty and control. This tension frames democratic life in the city, both enabling and constraining the citizen’s exercise of “free” right to the city.

(Urban Space issue 3. John Dixon ) et al.’s (2006) recent study of everyday attitudes towards street drinking as a morally connoted incivility sheds light on a number of topics that are pertinent in the study of public space from the perspective of citizenship. These authors interviewed 59 Lancaster citizens in the town’s most central public space, exploring attitudes towards drinking in public in light of a recently introduced ban on such behavior. The results of their discursive analysis showed how people’s responses constructed street drinking as an infringement of civic entitlements and as a form of visual defilement, breaching the established meanings of the place and generally supporting an ideological tradition of public space that promoted “sanitization” or “purification” (Sibley, 1995), meaning the removal of certain kinds of people not conceived as legitimately belonging to the “public” category (e.g., people drinking in the streets). The study highlighted also an ideological opposition (Billig et al., 1988) between freedom and control in public spaces and contradictions in the category of admissible publics.

Written by Australian place maker, Kylie Legge, Doing it Differently is the first book of a 3 part urban trends series. It looks at a number of creative and innovative solutions to the challenges of living in cities, covering a whole range of trends including Collaborative Consumption, Collaborative Urbanism, The Pop Up Movement and Creative Catalyst, providing a snapshot of collaborative efforts across the globe.

I’ve got a copy sitting in front of me right now, and it’s awesome. Definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in urban trends. Check it out here.

April showers mean May flowers…LA Blooms, to be exact.  This spring, don’t miss the first-ever LA Bloom Festival, a nine-day celebration of transformation and Japanese arts and culture, hosted by the Japanese American Cultural Community Center in Little Tokyo.  Co-curators – acclaimed international artist and modern zen master Hirokazu Kosaka and landscape architect and artist Calvin Abe – have transformed the iconic Noguchi plaza in Little Tokyo into a temporary ecoartspace, replete with one of the world’s largest zen gardens, a colorful metaphorical rainbow (more on that later!), and exhibitions on contemporary and traditional ikebana.  Add to that performances, workshops, and a three-time world champion of sumo wrestling and you have a veritable LA Bloom bouquet of activities.  With so much programming packed into nine days, we thought we’d give you the how to’s and what’s whats.

Opening Night Performance: Mare Nubium - Friday, April 27th – 8pm

Mare Nubium is the abbreviated performance of the much-lauded kalpa, which was performed at the kick-off of Pacific Standard Time at the Getty. In Sanskrit, kalpa means eons, or a long period of time. It’s said that once every hundred years, an angel comes down from heavens and swipes the surface of a stone with her silk sleeves until the rock disappears. Hiro Kosaka creates a symbolic parallel between the kalpa and the inevitable passage of time that slowly transforms our lives and the memories that we hold onto. Performers include Butoh (Japanese dancer) master Oguri, who leads a small company of dancers.  It’s deep, and beautiful, seriously.  Buy tickets here now.  Listen for an upcoming interview with Hiro by Lisa Napoli on All Things Considered.

de LaB Tour with Hiro and Little Tokyo Happy Hour – Wednesday, May 2nd – 6pm to 10 pm

If you miss the opening night performance, catch de LaB‘s special tour with Hiro next week to get an explanation of LA Bloom from the modern day zen master himself.  End the evening with a much-deserved cocktail at Little Tokyo Happy Hour in the zen garden.  RSVP here.  Admission is free otherwise and the ecoartspace and exhibitions will be open to all.

Jazz Night with Mia Doi Todd and Motoko Honda – Thursday, May 3rd – 8pm

Jazz and Japanese culture collide harmoniously when gorgeous songstress Mia Doi Todd and experimental avant-garde jazz pianist Motoko Honda take the stage on the plaza.  Buy tickets here now.

Sumo Workshop with Three-Time World Champion Byamba – Saturday, May 5th – 2pm

Even if you don’t have kids, this is something you won’t want to miss.  World champ Byamba brings an often misunderstood Japanese cultural tradition to life for all as he demonstrates the basic sumo stretches and teaches a workshop for little ones.  Basically, a heavyweight workshop for lightweights. Admission is free.

We can trace the origin of federal government new community development to the Hoover/FDR era, where government policy focused on the relocation of over populated urban tenants to rural farm locations via the “back to the land” homestead subsistence program.

FDR’s subsistence and new community social engineering effort was designed to reduce unemployment and population density within urban centers by providing a garden plot for agricultural self-sufficiency ultimately reducing reliance upon governmental financial support.

Some 34 subsistence homestead experiments were begun in 1933 as a precursor of the WPA federal supported new community experiments.

However, after eight years of experimentation the efforts were terminated by congressional action.

This period of history provides an excellent example of governmental social engineering by the use of regulatory and incentive action.

Study of the 99 subsistence homestead and new community program experiments undertaken between 1933 and 1939 offer an understanding of the basics of today’s “Place Making” strategy being popularized by current planning and community economic developers.

“Place Making” today is the federal government’s modern-day social engineering experiment to create vibrant urban oases that will attract young creative class residents for which new businesses will be attracted seeking employees.

Government planners seek to replicate the strategy of regulating and incenting human behavior to create concentrations of selected population to behave in a certain manner – young well educated – especially skilled population in central city locations that would otherwise remain economically stagnant and wither.

The pundits claim higher density urban living will solve environment and social ills.  Compact higher density urban living will reduce auto emissions, reduce oil consumption, create a lower carbon footprint, create less crime ridden safer neighborhoods, offer higher-wage job opportunities, reduce poverty and more.  “Place Based” community development will offer opportunities for improvement in “open space green infrastructure”, creation of walkable communities less dependent on auto transport and create small business economic viability due to higher concentrations of household shoppers to patronize locally owned businesses.

But will social engineering of where and how people live actually work?

For community planners this is a question that needs to be asked and answered?

Using the FDR experiment as an example, one can question whether this form of social engineering will achieve its desired and expected outcome.

Reading the Paul Keith Conkin book Tomorrow A New World: The New Deal Community Program will provide some background and stimulate thinking about the need for, and role of, government in shaping where and how people choose to live.

He chronicles the beginnings of the “back to the land movement” and its rise to suburban and rural new community planning.  He focuses on the rise of the professional city planner in advocating the” need for government [sponsored] whole new towns or communities in spacious rural environments” to house a growing population and to remedy social and economic ills.  The need for government involvement was based on the fear of private sector “inefficiencies and waste that would occur by non-government involvement in effort to provide housing and jobs to the mass of unemployed suffering the effect of economic depression”.

Conkin begins by summarizing early efforts of the federal government to provide housing for veterans returning from the Civil and World War I where federal government policy was formed establishing the role of government to provide housing opportunities, a policy that grew in stature through the great depression and end of WWII.

Documented is government’s experiment applying Garden Cities and City Beautiful city planning principles to what we today might call “Place Making”.

As the new communities movement grew over the years, the Department of Agriculture’s Rexford Tugwell (an original FDR Brains Truster) responsible for the program sought to intuitionalize within government a “long-term solution [for the provision of housing and geographic population distribution] through economic planning for agriculture with social control over the individual and his use of the land”.

His main goals were to “point to a new way of life …to promote industrial decentralization and to show what social and economic planning might accomplish if given a chance” using example governmental planned communities scattered throughout the US.

Sixty suburban new communities were planned as this social experiment.

The success of the FDR new communities program is a matter of serious debate.  Tugwell’s  legacy of federal government involvement in the provision of housing,  although scattered, remains encased principally in the Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development but remnants are found in other departments.

Today’s Place Based planning strategy is just more of the same, the current edition of principles discovered during the FDR era  repackaged to meet modern concerns similar to those of the great depression era, lack of individual employment opportunities, insufficient affordable housing opportunities and lack of individual economic opportunity all giving way to national economic turbulence and US economic instability. 

My study of history raises question of the ability of government via social engineering to regulate and incent human behavior for successful implementation of a federal land use policy directing where people live and work.

For government sponsored “place making” to be successful – individual choice, not governmental regulation and incentives will need to prevail.

Reading Conkin’s book will give the reader much to think about – the government’s role to influence individual choice in determining where and how we live.

For the most part, I’m a skeptic.  While I fully support urban revitalization much which, by necessity, must be completed by government action,  I have serious questions about social engineering policies to regulate and incent behavior that reduces individual choice.

But last week, when I attended Rediscover Main Street, the 2012 National Main Streets Conference, in Baltimore, Md., I was reminded that cities are also working at the neighborhood, block, and even building level to produce very big results.  The National Main Street Center operates under the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but this is not your typical church ladies’ historic preservation.  The tone at Main Streets is not about preservation for the sake of preservation—a perspective that can trivialize the efforts—or even preservation for architectural merit.  Rather, Main Streets is a “preservation-based economic development tool that enables communities to revitalize downtown and neighborhood business districts by leveraging local assets—from historic, cultural, and architectural resources to local enterprises and community pride.”

As part of a session on “complete streets,” Executive Director of Dubuque Main Street Dan LoBianco presented the Historic Millwork District in downtown Dubuque, Iowa.  The comprehensive program, which began with the Main Street-style restoration of a series of historic warehouses, has been a catalyst for revitalizing the city.  As a result, it has attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin.  Talk about starting small to think big.

So how did Dubuque’s Historic Millwork District go from being a simple main street restoration project to a nationally, and internationally, recognized model?

• Complete Streets.  The District underwent a “complete streets” transformation between 2010 and 2012.  The new street infrastructure accommodates drivers, public transportation users, pedestrians, bicyclists, the elderly, children, and people with disabilities.  This included a complete reconstruction of underground utilities (funded through federal TIGER and state RISE grants), permeable pavement, sidewalk reconstruction (including curbs and bump-outs), and historically-appropriate, energy-efficient street lighting.  In addition, Phase 1 of Dubuque’s Intermodal Transportation Center (DITC) is underway within the District.  The complete streets approach doesn’t provide funds, it simply changes the way existing funds are spent, so this effort paves the way for future smart growth development throughout the city.
• Historic Preservation.  The Historic Millwork District was the backbone of the regional economy at the turn of the 20^th century.  It was home to dozens of companies and 2,500 employees.  A National Register Historic District designation recognized the important cultural and regional history of the district, and the city responded with the use of Federal and State Historic Tax Credits and New Market Tax Credits, to rehabilitate many of the historically honored structures within the District into loft-style housing units.  The project seeks the continuation of the 26% Federal Historic Tax Credit for Disaster Recovery (FHTC), which has been a key funding source for making historic rehabilitation projects like this possible.
• The Arts.  Newly renovated housing units and the urban lifestyle are attracting artists, craftspeople, cultural exhibits, and events.  The neighborhood is being reborn as a cultural hub for the region.
• Partnerships.  Dubuque has 25 years of experience fostering revitalization through partnerships with community leaders, the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation, Dubuque Main Street, and philanthropic organizations. This commitment to partnerships continues with redevelopment of the Historic Millwork District with development goals created out of a shared community vision.
• Housing Options.  With the recent location of an IBM customer service center in Dubuque and the resulting addition of 1,300 new jobs, the potential for economic revitalization has increased, but so has the need for affordable rental housing options, especially for transplants seeking an urban lifestyle.  The project is expected to add over 700 multi-family housing units to the downtown.
• Sustainable Dubuque.  The city has committed to sustainability.  Sustainable Dubuque ensures a viable, livable, and equitable community for the next generations by embracing economic prosperity, social/cultural vibrancy, and environmental integrity.  The Historic Millwork District upholds this mission by creating high-skilled jobs through employer attraction and historic rehabilitation, increasing community knowledge, pride, and mobility, and creating utility systems that ensure healthy air and clean water.

As Dubuque Mayor Roy Buol joins an NLC delegation to the cities of Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden and Hamburg, Germany in just a few days as part of an International Sustainability Exchange, the city is sure to attract more positive international attention for its commitment to and achievement in sustainability.  But learning more about the Historic Millwork District was also an important reminder of the not-so-small efforts happening right there on Main Street and how they can help catalyze major progress.

Planners and others in the allied fields, particularly in the public sector, like to talk a good game about what it means to create good places. Those pontifications, including my own rants and musings, often include words and phrases such as “density”, “mixed-use”, “vibrancy”, and “sense of place”. But as I pour over the maps, photos, videos and forums in search of my own Great Good Place, I’m often quite frankly pissed off to find that the many planning offices are generally located in drab buildings or located in lifeless parts of town. It’s not always the case, but enough to make me cringe at the hypocrisy.

We have no problem whatsoever telling others how their properties should look, feel and interact with the public realm. But what of our own spaces and places?

Here in Lansing, where I currently live, the city planning department is located in the bottom level of a parking structure.

Michigan State Housing Development Authority, one of the State of Michigan’s major community and economic development arms, is located in a mauve monstrosity of a single-use building that turns its back to Michigan Avenue. And despite preaching its placemaking agenda, the Authority subjects its employees to the all too common sterility of cubicle life.

Austin, Texas is a city I’m incredibly interested in, and I could definitely see myself living there for a stint in my 30s. It has a reputation as a vibrant and culture-filled city, and has been dubbed the live music capital of the world. The South by Southwest (SxSW) music festival draws people from all over the globe who want a lively and interesting downtown music experience unlike any other. The city has one of the most progressive urban design programs and decent (if not overwhelmed) smart growth plan, and is actively attracting companies to the likes of Apple, Inc. It’s no wonder that Austin has also topped the charts in terms of population growth in the last few decades. But where is their planning department? Across the river from downtown in a mono-use building amidst a sea of parking and nothing of interest around it.

And it doesn’t end there. Too often, government buildings all around the country are just as bland and don’t contribute to an overall sense of place. Yes, governments are under monetary constraints and excess of any kind is highly scrutinized, as it should be. But whereas employees once demanded decent pay, great benefits, and pensions, younger employees are now valuing (and choosing) great places and a high quality of life before “perfect fit” or high paying jobs. They want to work in places that are creative and interesting and will choose these places readily before pay.

Why should the private sector, who often receives high dollar government contracts, get the “cool” work environment downtown, with the exposed brick walls and the coffee shop next door? Shouldn’t government attract talent, too? And if we could attract talented workers, would we need to hire out so much work to employers who do attract talented workers?

If the good word we’re preaching is placemaking, why shouldn’t we practice what we preach?

Last Friday, 23 March 2012, I presented my MSc-thesis research proposal for fellow students and researchers of the Rural Sociology Group. My thesis research is titled “The Sense of Place of National Park Galicica” is part of my Msc-study International Master Rural Development (www.imrd.ugent.be). Joost Jongerden of the Rural Sociology Group is my sepervisor. My thesis presentation can be viewed at www.galicica.rantasa.net, a website on my thesis research where I will post research proceedings as well.

In my research I will use new media as tools for communication with the public but also as research method. I developed a website at the proposal stage of the research (www.galicica.rantasa.net). It enables dedicated communication with stakeholders and public, by offering updates on the research and a contact form. The web page also hosts the questionnaire on the sense of place of “Galicica”, thus becoming an important and integrated tool to the research. The information on the research currently presented on the web page is limited. This is not to lead the visitors of the web page, thus creating biased answers in the questionnaire.

To spread the questionnaire, I will use Facebook and targeted e-mail messages that are disseminated by the participants, causing a domino effect. This approach resulted in more than 50 completed questionnaires in the first week.

In my approach I will apply a layered exploration of the sense of place. The first layer is the use of Flickr, the social network of photographers, as a start of the research. This is with the aim to explore the peoples’ perceptions on Galicica, through the photos that people have tagged with ‘galicica’. This exploration leads to basic understanding of the place Galicica, which was used to create the questionnaire. The questionnaire is the second layer. Though it explores deeper in the sense of place, it will be used mainly as a guide to the interviews that Ranasa will conduct in the Park.

For my research on sense of place, I take the three fold concept of social space developed by Lefebvre (1974) as a conceptual frame: social space is represented by the spatial practices [the perceived], the representation of space [the conceived] and the representational space [the lived]. I recognize the nestedness of this concept (see Vanclay, 2008) and further more, I merge it with the definition of place [the representational space] developed by Friedmann (2010). I locate the source of the creation of the sense of place in the lived experience, both individual and group. Thus, his questionnaire and interviews will be focusing on the lived experience of people.

The National Park Galicica will be subject of my study and explore the sense of place with my framework. It is a protected area in Macedonia that is of high tourist interest and is inhabited by over 5000 people in 18 villages and settlements. Thus, making it a challenging exploration where interest and perspectives come into conflict.

My main research question is: What kind of sense(s) of place of the National Park ‘Galicica’ exists, and how does it (they) relate to nature protection and the park’s development?. I will focus my research on discovering the sense of place of what represents an abstract conception of the National Park Galicica. But my aim is to explore the applicability of the concept of sense of place in planning and management of protected areas.

For further information you can conact me via my web page dedicated to the research: www.galicica.rantasa.net

Preston Guild is another big county event this year in which The Dukes is involved.

The Creative Learning Department has been commissioned by Guild organisers to spearhead  a major performance by around 100 young people in Preston’s Guild Hall on September 7.

Preparations for the event, called Metropolis, begin soon with young people aged 13-19 being invited to take part in workshops during April and May.

Musicians, dancers, Scout groups, bands, schools and performers of all kinds will be invited to attend the workshops and there will be opportunities for those who want to work behind the scenes too.

We hope the workshops will engage with 500-600 young people from whom the eventual performers will be chosen to take part in a night featuring drama, dance, music and exciting visual effects.

In the Territorial Review of the Chicago Tri-State Metro Region, the OECD points to some remarkable statistics. Chicago is the third largest economic region in the U.S. with an extraordinary array of institutions of higher education and an adult population with above average attainment of college degrees.  Job and commercial centers are linked to employees across the region through a very good public transit system.  Moreover, the city ranks high in quality of life thanks to high value arts and cultural institutions and plenty of parks and outdoor public space.

Nonetheless, Chicago has some significant drags on its growth potential; drags that shave one or two percentage points from the region’s economic output annually. For example, despite having one of the nation’s largest passenger transit systems, it remains woefully underfunded and highway traffic congestion remains a problem.

Second, while the region’s colleges and universities turn out plenty of graduates to support a growing nanotech and biotech industry, there is a wide skills mismatch among the large pool of labor who fail to graduate from high school. One result of this skills mismatch is pockets of severe poverty that are socially and economically isolated from the parts of the region that are thriving. Worse still are the overlapping and often counterproductive myriad of agencies and institutions in the region charged to deliver pieces of the workforce development services.

Much to the benefit of Chicago-region decision makers, the OECD has the capacity to view the tri-state area through the global lens and offer recommendations that draw on examples from places as diverse as Singapore, Melbourne, Malmo, Sweden and Manchester. By way of example, Manchester has an independent statutory local authority charged with planning, transportation and economic development for the entire region.

Beyond the workforce and mobility issues, the other area for focus is new venture capital. The city and region lags in new business start-ups suggesting opportunities for a public and private sector effort to seed venture capital funds.

The Chicago Tribune called the report “a dose of candor about its economic malaise” in an article reporting on the study. http://bit.ly/ysOkPC

“Fostering cooperation across state lines, given the fiercely partisan political realities obviously is a tall order,” said Lance Pressl, who led the project for the Chicagoland Chamber.  However, “many business, academic and research organizations already operate regionally and can lead the way toward greater coordination.”

I go to my first event next week in London – so I expect to blog about it afterwards, but for now I have been doing my background work on the organisation. In essence it is about getting together professionals across a diverse range of backgrounds with a stated of aim of learning from place. It’s about learning from the collective understanding of place making and sharing best practice.

I am really interested in this. The concept of creating places rather than collections of buildings must allow us to crate better communities and places where people want to live and work. It might all sound a bit ‘fluffy’ sometimes, but places are complex. You can’t manufacture a community – it doesn’t work like that. But when communities grow and flourish they take on a whole new dimension.

But part of this is all about learning. We do need to share ideas and collaborate. We need to think through what works and what doesn’t. We have to test things and try different things. Only then can we hope to put together that magic formula.

Places generally have to have a story – to make them unique. They have to be cohesive and the message needs to be clear.As is obvious this is not always easy.

Next weeks debate is about the new National Planning Policy Framework – a simplified rule-book about the Planning system. It is much misunderstood and have had mixed press. The presumption is in favour of sustainable development – which has been jumped on as meaning you can build and eco-bling house in the green belt. It’s not quite as simple as that!

I’ll do a blog after the event next week….

In 1956, José Luis convened an international conference at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design with a determination to assemble evidence on behalf of a desired disciple he called urban design. The proceedings of the 1956 conference reveal two working definitions for urban design. Urban design, “is that part of a city planning which deals with the physical form of the city… the most creative phase of city planning, which imagination and artistic capacities play the important part.”

Scanning the definitions of the word territory in a dictionary eventually gets you past geography to “sphere of action.” Urban Design - as sphere of urbanistic action to promote the vitality, livability, and physical character of cities. There are several such spheres of action rather than a singular, overarching way to describe what constitutes the urban design enterprise.

The Bridge Connecting Planning and Architecture

Urban designer’s role is to somehow translate the objectives of planning for space, settlement patterns, and even the allocation of resoources into (mostly) physical strategies to guide the work of architects, developers, and other implementers. It is the urban designer’s presumed insights about good appropriate urban form that are seen as crucial to translate public policy or programmatic objectives into architectural concepts. Urban designers must help others see the desired effects of planning. This requires various visualization and programmatic narrative techniques by which goals and policies are converted into useful design guidelines and sometimes specific design ideas.

A Form-Based Category of Public Policy

Since American planning is often accused of being reactive to real estate interests, interests that do not always prioritize public benefit, public policy would be a way to push developer-initiated projects to higher qualitative standards. So, given the presumption that what constitutes good urban form (or desirable uses, or amenities such as ground-level retail, or open space) can be agreed upon by a community, these should be legislated. The appeal behind this interpretation of urban design is twofold. It maintains lofty ideals by arguing on behalf of codifiable design qualities, while operating at the pragmatic level of the real estate industry, facilitating better development.

The Architecture of the City

This conception of urban design is at once more ambitions yet narrower than the idea of urban design as public policy. Its proponents seek above all to control the shaping of those areas of the city that are public and, therefore, of common concern. Shaping public space is considered the first order of urbanism by the architecture/urbanist. Thus, the primary role of urban design is to develop methods and mechanisms for doing this. Done with authority and artistry, it allows the rest of the city, all that is private, to distribute itself logically and properly in relationship to the public realm. This notion of urban design is best embodied by a stable and stabilizing form, one that anchors its part of the city with unique characteristics that are expected to endure and influence future neighborhoods.

Urban Design as Restorative Urbanism

The traditional city seems at once clearly organized, humanely sized, manageable, and beautiful. Such virtues seem absent in the modern metropolis. At present the New Urbanists are most closely associated with this effort but are part of a long tradition of those guarding or extolling the advantages of traditional urban typologies. The walkable city, the city of public streets and public squares, the low-rise, high-density city, the city of defined neighborhoods gathered around valued institutions, the city of intricate layers of uses free of auto-induced congestion.

Urban Design as an Art of “Place-Making”

Place-making, the provision of distinctive, lively, appealing centers for congregation to alleviate the perceived homogeneity of many and large contemporary urban areas. Economist often remind society that is is the “rare” commodity that gains value over time. As more contemporary urban developments acquire generic qualities or is merely repetitive, the distinctive urban place, old or new, is harder to find. Urban designers should devote their attention to making new places as worthy as those made by their time-honored predecessors.

Urban Design as Smart Growth

To protect urbanism, not to mention minimizing environmental harm and needless land consumption, it is imperative, to control sprawl and make environmental stewardship a more overt part of urban thinking. Since 90 percent of development takes place at the periphery of existing urbanization, the urban designer should be operating there and, if present, advocating “smarter” planning and design. As social observers have long pointed out, suburban and exurban areas, where most Americans live, are not nonurban, merely providing different, certainly less traditional degrees of urban experience or intensity.

Exposure to the natural sciences, to ecology, to energy management, to systems analysis, to the economics of land development, to land-use law, and to issues of public health has not been but should become fundamental to an urbanist’s training. To actually manage metropolitan growth requires dealing with needs -like land conservation, water management, and transportation- that cut across jurisdictional boundaries.

The Infrastructure of the City

The arrangement of streets and blocks, the distribution of open and public spaces, the alignment of transit and highway corridors, and the provision of municipal services certainly constitute essential components of city design. At a fairly mundane yet significant level, this is what fuels the current fascination with Transit-Oriented Development in newer areas of urbanization, and with dense mixed-use, often joint public-private development adjacent to multimodal transportation centers in larger cities.

Urban Design as “Landscape Urbanisim”

In the past few years a new school of thought about cities has emerged: “landscape urbanisim.” Its proponents seek to incorporate ecology, landscape architecture, and infrastructure into the discourse of urbanism. Proponents of landscape urbanism, such as James Corner, insist that the conception of the solid, “man-made” city of historic imagination perpetuates the no longer pertinent view that nature and human artifice are opposites. Valuable urban design, landscape urbanists insist, is to be found at the intersection of ecology, engineering, design, careful programming, and social policy.

Urban Design as Community Advocacy

Urban design is increasingly coming to be associated with local,immediate concerns such as improving neighborhoods, calming traffic, minimizing negative impacts of new development, expanding housing choices while keeping housing affordable, maintaining open space, improving streetscapes, and creating more humane environments in general. Following the social unrest of the 1960s and a growing consensus about the failures of urban renewal, the focus of planing began to shift dramatically from physical planning to process and policy formulation. Ironically the concurrent disengagement from spatial concerns on the part of the planner began to distance the activities of planning from the stuff the beneficiaries of planning wish for most: nicer neighborhooods, access to better places of work and commerce, and special environments to periodically escape everday pressures.

The urban design-minded planner who addresses immediate, often spatially related concerns has come to be seen as the professional most attuned to tangible urban problem-solving, not as the agent of bold urban transformation. Today, it is the urban designer, not the planner, who has emerged as the place-centered professional, with “urban design” often assuming a friendlier, more accessible popular connotation than “planning.”

Urban Design as a Frame of Mind

In rapidly modernizing parts of the world, urban design has emerged as an important component of managing this modernization. Urban design is less a technical discipline than a mind-set among those of varying disciplinary foundations seeking, sharing, and advocating insights about forms of community. What binds urban designers is their commitment to improving the livability of cities, to facilitating urban reinvestment and maintenance, and indeed to enhancing urbanity.