User:Jacobfrancis/sandbox

The Arts and Creative Placemaking

While the arts and creative expression play a substantial part in establishing a sense of place, economic growth and production must also play an equally large role in creating a successful place. These two factors are not mutually exclusive, as the arts and cultural economic activity made up $729.6 billion (or 4.2%) of the United States GDP in 2014, and employed 4.7 million workers in 2012. This means that the arts can be deployed as a powerful tool in the creation or rehabilitation of urban spaces.

Jamie Bennett, executive director of ArtPlace America, has identified the following four tools used by communities while implementing creative placemaking.

• Anchoring: When a key arts institution, organization, or building in the area prompts additional foot traffic or regional draw. These anchors can attract additional business, and become a strong source of identity for the neighborhood.
• Activating: When visual or performing arts are brought into the public realm, it activates the space while creating interest, activity, and engagement. More people and "eyes on the street" drives curiosity to explore and establishes a sense of safety.
• Fixing: Taking vacant, underutilized, or blighted spaces in a neighborhood and treating them as an opportunity for new art and design projects. This can change how people think about these spaces and the opportunities that they represent.
• Planning By using the arts and creative community meeting strategies, stakeholder enthusiasm can be bolster, resulting in valuable input for community design. Bringing artist into the planning process can create upend the familiar and allow participants to mentally “unhook” from there preconceived notions.

Community Attachment

Great places must do more than meet the basic requirements if they want to foster greater community attachment. A strong sense of attachment can result in residents who are more committed to the growth and success of their community. The Knight Foundation conducted a study measuring community attachment, and found that there was very little variation in the primary drivers of attachment rates when compared between different cities across the United States.

Drivers of Attachment:

• Social Offerings - Gathering places that foster face-to-face interactions, building trust with others, and an environment where people care for one another. This includes perceptions of a healthy nightlife, an arts and cultural scene, and community events.
• Openness - How inclusive the community is to a wide range of people and lifestyles. Openness is measured by perception that the place is good for old people, racial and ethnic minorities, families and children, gays and lesbians, college grads looking for work, immigrants, and young adults without children.
• Aesthetics - The physical beauty of the place. Mostly focusing on the availability of open green space, parks, playgrounds, and recreational trails.

Attachment Trends:

• Geography: The attachment rates are similar between residents who live within the city, and those who live outside of the city.
• Age: Older residents (65+) have higher rates of attachment, on average, than younger residents.
• Community Tenure: Newer residents were the least attached, and those who had lived in the community for 3-5 years were the most attached.
• Income: Higher income resulted in higher attachment rates, with those households making $75,000 per year or more being the most attached.
• Race and Ethnicity: Hispanic and non-hispanic white residents had similar levels of attachment, while black residents averaged lower levels of attachment.

Placemaking: Livable Streetscapes

An example of a plaza built to mesoscale, or human scale. Plazoleta del Chorro de Quevedo, La Candelaria, Bogotá, Colombia.

An example of a plaza built to macroscale. Hammarskjöldplatz, located in Berlin, Germany.

Streets are the stage for activity of everyday life within a city and they have the most potential be designed to harness a high-quality sense of place. Effective placemaking in the streetscape lends special attention to the streets livability by representing a sense of security, sense of place, visible employment, variety of transportation options, meaningful interactions between residents, “eyes on the street” as well as "social capital". All of these interactions take place at the mesoscale. Mesoscale is described as the city level of observation between macroscale--being bird's-eye view--and microscale--being textures and individual elements of the streetscape (streetlamp type, building textures, etc.); in other words, mesoscale is the area observed from a humans perspective, for example: between buildings, including storefronts, sidewalks, street trees, and people. Placemaking for a street takes place at both mesoscale and microscale. It is important that planners, architects, and engineers consider placemaking from the mesoscale when designing for places that are intended to be livable by Whyte's standards.

Placemaking Tools and Practices

Tools and practices of placemaking that benefit from utilizing the mesoscale context include:

• Form-Based Codes
• Infill Development
• Urban Forestry Practices
• Civil Engineering
• Architecture

The Future of Placemaking

As society changes to accommodate new technologies, urban planners and citizens alike are looking to consult those technologies to enact physical change. One thing that has had a massive impact on western society is the advent of digital technologies, like social media. Urban decision makers are increasingly looking to plan cities based on feedback from community engagement so as to ensure the development of a durable, livable place. With the invention of niche social technologies, communities have shifted their engagement away from local-government-led forums and platforms, to social media groups on websites such as Facebook and Nextdoor to voice concerns, critiques and desires. In a sense, these new platforms have become a Third Place, in reference to Ray Oldenburg’s term.

Social media tools such as these show promise for the future of placemaking in that they are being used to reclaim, reinvigorate and activate spaces. These online neighborhood and event-centric groups and forums provide a convenient non-physical space for public discourse and discussion through digital networked interactions to implement change on a hyper-local level; this theory is sometimes referred to as Urban Acupuncture. This type of shift towards a more crowd-sourced planning method can lead to the creation of more relevant and useful and inclusive places with greater sense of place.

Notable People

• Kevin Lynch
• Ray Oldenburg
• Jeff Speck

Literature

• The Image of the City
• Walkable City: How downtown can save America, one step at a time
• The Great Good Place
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Evaluate Wikipedia Article -- Walkability

1. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
   • The article stays on topic and all citations, references and links are relevant to the topic of walkability.
2. Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
   • It is obvious that the authors passionate about walkability, but all statements and claims in the "Benefits" section are cited appropriately.
3. Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
   • No
4. Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
   • Of the 5 citations that I checked, 3 worked. 1 linked me to a web-building site, and the other gave me a "404 Page Not Found" error. The articles whose links did work were written by well-known authors with knowledge of walkability and city planning, like Daniel Parolek of Opticos Design, a firm that specializes in Form-Based Codes.
5. Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
   • Mostly, the article makes claims using facts that are cited. However, in the "Environmental" section, there are no citations that ground the claims made. Some of the sources, like the one link to a blog post on Missing Middle Housing by Daniel Parolek of Opticos Design is an obviously biased, yet knowledgable, source.
6. Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
   • There is some reference to databases that could be checked to assure accuracy. The history section should be updated to include topics like new urbanism.
7. Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
   • Mostly just conversations on editing, removal of misleading terminology and subjects, and leads to sources that would help to beef up the article.
8. How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
   • It is rated as Start-Class on the quality scale, High-Importance on the importance scale. It is part of the WikiProject Urban Studies and Planning.
9. How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?
   • The article explores the theory of walkability more thoroughly than any class I have had mentioning the subject. Usually, our classes mention "eyes on the street" and other Jane Jacobs coined concepts. URP 498 Form-Based Codes is the class that most thoroughly discusses walkability.