Arts and culture or arts versus culture?

By Leonardo Vazquez

In my work in Creative Placemaking, I tend to focus on the arts as a framework and catalyst for community improvement.  Some client team members from cultural or heritage organizations have wondered whether this excludes them.  No, no, no -- just the opposite.

Creative Placemaking uplifts culture and heritage as much as it celebrates the arts.  What makes a place distinct is how the cultures there interact with the environment and the people.  Cultural norms tend to be drawn from the combination of heritages in that place.

A place-based orientation to community improvement -- one of the pillars of Creative Placemaking -- can happen only when local cultures and heritages are respected.

This mural at the Neighborhood House in Morristown, New Jersey reflects the  history and culture of its neighborhood. Image courtesy of Kadie Dempsey.

The arts, no matter what form they take, tend to reflect the realities of the artists -- what they see, sense and believe.  In other words, the arts reflect culture and culture informs arts.

 

One of the biggest reasons we focus on the arts in Creative Placemaking is that it can help promote more just and equitable communities.  Communities tend to be drawn to order, and people tend to want to be around other people like them.  This is why people in cities and suburbs who don’t like regulations don’t often mind land use controls.  It’s also why even decades after segregation has been outlawed, so many communities, organizations and social settings seem racially or ethnically polarized.

Creativity is a threat to order and sameness.  So a community that values the arts and is welcoming to artists is more likely to value other types of diversity. (The one exception is when “the arts” are seen as a way to gentrify a place.  In other words, leaders bring artists and arts businesses in to increase property values so that undesirable people and businesses will leave.  In those cases, leaders might have to learn hard lessons about valuing diversity.) 

Break the grid, no right angles, depopulate: Ideas for protecting communites in future storms

By Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Even if another Hurricane Sandy never happens, future storms will be more expensive and cause more damage.  It’s not just because of climate change.  More people are moving to waterfront communities, even as sea levels rise.  More people are working from home -- so power outages are not just inconvenient, they’re an economic hardship.  Even little things like expanding or waterproofing basements are making flooding worse -- especially for downriver communities that may be struggling to revitalize.

Here are some thoughts on how we can redevelop waterfront and shorefront communities to reduce storm damage.

1. Break the grid.  The traditional grid pattern is common among beachfront communities on the East Coast. It is easy to develop, is easy to understand and creates nice views.  But it also creates channels for water, sand and wind to travel inland, causing more damage to properties that are away from the shoreline. Modifying the street patterns in the first few blocks from shore from a grid to a running vine pattern (envision red brick walls) or a basketweave (volleyball) would disrupt the channels but still be accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists.  

The new pattern would also have the benefit of slowing down traffic, since drivers won’t have long, straight roads to barrel through.

One risk of breaking the grid would be losing some of the nice summer breezes.  But the grid-breaking block doesn’t have to have tall buildings covering the whole area.. It could have open space, such as a neighborhood park, or a low-lying building. In most cases, I would recommend open spaces because it provides more permeable surfaces --that is, more land -- to soak up water and slow down surges.  

2. Rewrite buiding codes to eliminate right angles and large flat exterior walls on the shorefront side of properties.  This could help to disrupt wind and water surges, which would not only protect the shorefront buildings, but also the properties behind them.  When wind and water hit large flat surfaces, they can go travel faster, or slam them into pieces.  When either of those things happens, anything loose and small becomes a projectile. Shorefront properties should also be required to have metal shutters and roofs made of metal or other materials that are unlikely to break up into smaller pieces.  Will it be more expensive?  Sure.  But the kind of people who can afford to buy shorefront properties in the United States can afford to pay a little more for their own and their neighbors’ safety.

The new architectural guidelines could be simple and provide a lot of artistic freedom for architects. For example:

*No shoreline facing exterior walls shall have angles of between 70 and 110 degrees.  

*No shoreline facing exterior wall shall have a flat surface that takes up more than 30% of the square footage of the wall.  

3. Construct buildings on mounds of at least a few feet.  Not only will this create a little more protection for the building, it will create more land to absorb flood waters.  Why did so many parts of New Orleans get flooded in Katrina while the French Quarter remained secure?  It is on higher ground.

We already have the “FEMA” houses, which are essentially built on stilts.  The problem is that the ground floors tend to have concrete or other impermeable surfaces.  In high-risk areas, new construction and reconstruction should be built on mounds and stilts.

4. Put a moratorium on new basements and basement expansions. One of the reasons that flooding seems to get worse every storm is that in most communities, there is less land to absorb water.  The problem is not just big basements for large houses; waterproofing these areas ensures that water gets passed across and downstream to flood other people’s houses.  In exchange for taking away potential space underground, communities could allow property owners to build a little higher.

5. Avoid mechanical solutions for protecting against water. There are some interesting ideas for protecting the New York City shoreline from wave surges.   But any idea that requires someone to operate the systems in an emergency, or that require significant ongoing maintenance, should be ignored.

People tend to get less vigilant as the last dangerous event moves further into the past.  At a governmental level, this means spending less money on maintenance and on people to manage the infrastructure.  Check out America’s Infrastructure Report Card to see how well our collective governments do, even as we face more disasters.

The way to go is to recreate natural barriers -- sand dunes, marshes, rocky barriers between beaches and residential areas.  Beach replenishment is a Band-Aid solution, which gets even more expensive when greedy shoreline property owners extort their municipalities by suing to ‘protect’ their ‘property rights.’

5. Underground power lines. Yes, it is probably expensive in the short-term to put power lines underground and take transfomers off poles.  But it is more than a matter of convenience.  

In the New York and New Jersey areas, several people without heat died of hypothermia, falls in their homes, or from carbon monoxide poisoning from failed attempts to heat their homes. (Yes, it’s likely that these people could have gone to shelters.  But the need to stay in your own home in a time of incredible stress is so strong that many people are willing to take unnecessary risks.)

It’s also a big economic drain when the power goes out. It’s not just the traditional commercial areas that suffer.  The number of people working at least part-time from home has been growing rapidly  In New Jersey alone, the number of “non employer establishments”  -- that is, sole proprietorships and small business partnerships -- grew from nearly 513,500 in 2002 to more than 604,700 in 2010, according to County Business Patterns -- a 17.8% increase in eight years.  Not all of these organizations are in homes, but with more people telecommuting,  our economy is getting more dependent on neighborhoods and subdivisions.

Taking the electrical system off of poles would reduce costs for and risks to first responders, hospitals, and public shelters. It would also create a demand for electricians, construction workers and managers, which would boost the economy.

6. Depopulate high-risk areas. The Rockaways in Queens and Midland Beach in Staten Island were part of a dwindling number of places where middle and moderate-income residents could live very close to waterfronts.  If everyone were generally rational during storms and took reasonable precautions (such as heeding evacuation warnings), we should try to protect these areas from gentrification.

But as can be seen from most of the deaths in Staten Island, the desire to stay at home is so powerful that people are willing to take what others might see as irrational risks.  I believe that adults should be held responsible for their actions.  Unfortunately, they may be guardians of children, pets, elderly relatives or others who may not be able to choose for themselves.

That’s why I think that high-risk shorelines should either have no or few permanent homes, or that they should be gentrified so that large vacation houses or hotels face the shoreline.  (The latter is more likely to happen.)  These properties then become the barriers to protect homes and businesses inland.

My career focuses on social equity and opportunity.  So I struggled with the idea of making it more difficult for low and middle-income people to have the same access as wealthy people.  But as a planner, my first duty is to protecting the public’s health, safety and welfare.  Encouraging more people to live in high-risk areas, knowing that some of them will take unnecessary risks (and knowing that some greedy property owners will subdivide lots to put even more people at risk), is wrong.

That said, we should continue to provide more public access to shorelines and riverfronts. Everyone should be able to take a walk on the beach, safely.

Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP is a national award-winning urban planner, the Executive Director of The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking, and a Senior Associate with the Nishuane Group in Montclair, NJ. He lives in northern New Jersey, and was without electrical power for eight days after Sandy.

New ideas on human needs placemaking

By Leonardo Vazquez, Executive Director, The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking

A few years ago, I connected psychological theories of human needs to placemaking practice.  (See Principles of human needs placemaking.)

In that essay, I condensed human needs theories of Abraham Maslow, other psychologists, and the environmental psychology field into four categories:  physiological (i.e., food, health, shelter and other necessities of life), relational (connections to other people) and self-actualization (the need to 'be yourself') and the environmental need to be in aesthetically pleasing and green spaces.

As I've delved into creative placemaking over the last few years, I realize that those categories alone didn't answer two questions of human motivation:  Why are people content to be passive recipients of arts experiences?   Why do we get bored?

Because people need novelty in their lives.  Most people who do not have extreme compulsive or obsessive disorders seek to know something new, do something different, or even experience the same things in new ways throughout our lives.

But not everyone is looking for novelty all the time.  If that were the case, humans would be constantly restless beings, unable to maintain long-term relationships or live in a single community for many years.  There certainly wouldn't be zoning and subdivision regulations. These provide order and stability.  In other words, they respond to the human need for security.

Psychologists had identified security as a principal human need, and I made a mistake by lumping it into the other categories in my earlier essay.   (I guess it was because of my desire, not need, to make simple charts with four compass points.)

So now I see six principal human needs and their implications for placemaking practice:

• Physiological -- Food, shelter, health, and other necessities for physical well-being
• Placemaking implications:  Grocery stores, health facilities, housing
• Security -- The need to feel more safe and secure in an environment.  In other words, security is about minimizing risk.  A closely related idea is convenience:  the more distant or inaccessible something attractive seems, the more the person risks in pursuing it.
• Placemaking implications:  Land use regulations that are fairly and consistently applied, presence of security, safe streets and public areas, safe neighbhorhoods,  navigational aides such as signage and wayfinding strategies
• Relational -- The need to build and maintain respectful and loving relationships with others
• Placemaking implications:  Clubs or associations; spaces where communities of many sizes can gather, spaces that feel "owned" by communities, "third places" -- cafes, malls, etc. -- where individuals can gather to build and strengthen connections.
  
• Environmental -- The need to be in aesthetically pleasing and natural environments.
• Placemaking implications:  Attractively designed built environments, parks and open spaces, public art.
  
• Self-actualization -- The need to develop and express one's interests and creativity.
• Placemaking implications:  Schools, places where expressions of different interests are tolerated or welcome  (such as festivals), regulatory and social environments that provide fair and equitable opportunities for success.
  
• Novelty -- The need to learn and have new experiences.
• Placemaking implications:  Places that are different from other places; spaces that offer participants opportunities to see something new, or something familiar in new ways; theaters, museums and galleries; pedestrian-oriented spaces (because it easier to see new things or people while walking than while driving); opportunities for people to do something new or differently.

These needs can be complementary.  That's why the communities and areas that offer an abundance of placemaking elements tend to be among the most expensive places to live.  (As in the earlier essay, I'm determining "need" by what people are willing to pay to get the need.  Traditional economists might say that there are no real needs other than those for physical health.  But this idea assumes that mental and emotional well-being is either irrelevant or a luxury.  I suspect that these types of economists don't make very good party guests.)

But these needs are often in conflict, which is why placemaking can be so challenging.  In fact, the six needs could be organized into three continuums:

• Physiological versus environmental:  For most of human history, creating more opportunities to meet physiological needs has meant destroying or damaging aesthetic or natural environments.  Open space gets cleared to make new housing, trees and grasslands get bulldozed for road widenings. Even though adaptive reuse and environmental protections have slowed down the destruction of natural environments, proposed changes in the built environment also create tensions.
  
  For example, a developer is willing to build a new hospital in a low-income community, but only if the city clears some architecturally interesting old buildings on the site.  Building security fences would reduce operating costs for the hospital and widening the roads would make it easier for ambulances to get to and from the hospital, but  it would make the area less welcoming to residents.
  
• Relational versus self-actualization:  This, in short, is the tension between connecting to and doing for others versus doing for oneself.  While and individual can find comfort, protection and esteem in being part of groups that values him or her, that person also has to sacrifice some freedoms to live peacefully within the group. The person may feel unable to travel or speak or engage others as freely as he or she wants, especially if that person is considered a caregiver in the relationship.  This has subtle but profound effects on placemaking.
  
  As Alexander and others point out in A Pattern Language, healthy communities offer a mix of spaces:  public (such as parks), semi-public (corridors or districts that feel unwelcome to 'outsiders') and private spaces (houses and backyards).  In each type of place, there are different expectations for how individuals should relate to and care for one another.  On a regional or national scale, communities tend to be oriented towards self-actualization ('artsy' areas of cities or the Las Vegas Strip) and others toward relational behavior (residential districts, districts centered on religious or social institutions.)  Edges, districts and landmarks can play important roles in alerting participants to the tilt of those places.
  
• Security versus novelty:  In the United States, population shifts between 1910 and 2010 saw an interesting circular trend.  In the early- and mid-20th century, large numbers of people moved from dense urban areas to relatively  low-density suburban areas. Telecommunications and transportation technology made it possible for people to live farther away from one another, and many did.  Despite the baby boom of the 1940s and 1950s as well as surges of immigration, cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis had smaller populations in 1996 than they did in 1960.*  With Internet technology and improvements in transportation technology, one would expect even more people to disperse.  But in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there was a significant shift the other way.  Cities grew again, and small communities added townhouses, multifamily housing, light rail, as well as other investments to make the kind of places found in city neighborhoods.
  
  There are a lot of reasons for these population shifts, but consider this:  There were enormous social and economic changes in the United States between 1910 and 1990 in American cities.  New immigrants and African-American migrants from older southern states were making cities more diverse than ever.  As ethnic groups grew in population, they also demanded a greater say in policy and placemaking.  Civil rights demonstrations and civil unrest actions both tended to happen in cities.  A person who lived his whole life in an industrial area between the jazz age and the MTV erea might have complained too much noise and pollution in the 1920s, then about blight and desolation in the 1980s.  If TV shows are a good barometer of popular culture, then the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s offered order, quiet and convenience.  Even I Love Lucy's Ricky and Lucy moved "out to the country," even though he was a New York City nightclub entertainer.
  
  But by the time Seinfeld's Jerry and his group and the six buddies on Friends lived in New York City in the 1990s, it was a relatively safe and inviting -- albeit still quirky -- place.   In reality, leaders of major cities learned from the Walt Disney Company about how to create dense environments that could offer novelty while maintaining a sense of security.   As managers of dense environments worked to make them appear safer and more orderly,  more people visited and moved there.  Dense environments with many connections offer more opportunity to experience something new.

The three tensions described above are the most significant, but not the only ones among the elements of human needs.  For example, controversies about streetscape design guidelines could reflect a tension between self-actualization and security. A conflict over a new supermarket that might draw in low-income residents to a wealthy area could be a tension between the desire of some to better meet their physiological needs and of others to maintain what they see as existing social order.

Although placemakers try to seek the best balance possible among these elements, there is no central point that meets everyone's needs perfectly.  And it is likely that there is no district or neighborhood that is perfect for anyone all the time; what someone needs changes as he or she ages, has new experiences and new relationships.  The best places are like tables made up of smaller places, each with distinct tilts.

Sources:

*U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999, http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf

Christopher Alexander, et. al., A Pattern Language

William H. Frey, "Demographic Reversal: Cities Thrive, Suburbs Sputter," Brookings Institution State of Metropolitan America, Number 56 of 62, June 29, 2012  http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/06/29-cities-suburbs-frey