Thinking aloud about placemaking

Yesterday I attended a conference on cultural heritage tourism development for (and sponsored by) the Anacostia Heritage Trails Area, the state-designated heritage area, in Prince George's County Maryland.

Partly I went as "market research" to keep track of DC's competitors... but by and large, the conference was fabulous. A lot was packed into the day. There were great presenters and presentations, good information distributed. There weren't many attendees, but everyone I talked to was pretty interesting. There is a lot of energy and examples to tap in Prince George's County.

Too often, I think many of us in the city are high-handed and think we can't learn from other places. Well, for one, the Port Towns Community Development Corporation should put most of DC's community development corporations to shame... what they do with relatively limited resources is impressive, and their focus on community-centric agenda development and community participation in program development is path-breaking in comparison to DC's "traditional" cdcs (by traditional I mean the ones that historically have been funded by DC's Dept. of Housing and Community Development)...

(Note that if you look at the early literature discussing why CDCs should be created and are a ground-up community response to the need for change and for communities to take into their own hands and create an agenda for neighborhood improvement and action, such as From Poverty To Dignity (1975) by Charles Hampden-Turner, you will be amazed when you compare the philosophy of why to the reality on the ground, at least for most of the CDCs in DC. Organizations like the Port Towns CDC or the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston or the Historic District Development Corporation in the Sweet Auburn district of Atlanta demonstrate that CDCs can in fact be transformational community-building "enterprises.")

I missed some presentations, including a presentation by the director of DC's CulturalTourismDC, but I still aver that DC's scope and approach for cultural heritage development and management isn't yet comparable to the level realized by organized heritage areas.

And, I have written often about the ad-hoc nature of substantive city funding of cultural and heritage development activities in Washington, DC. The State of Maryland is far more organized and structured (although DC provides more money in comparison) in terms of funding capital projects for cultural heritage, the arts, and museum development, with a myriad of programs--clear funding guidelines, required match, etc.

Recently I attended a conference on civic tourism in Arizona, and a big part of that conference was centering upon community building and civic engagement. A few days after the AZ conference I had lunch with Shin-pei Tsay of PPS and I pondered whether participatory democracy is at the heart of placemaking. It's about making great places, great communities, etc.

Besides PPS's efforts (which are paralleled to some extent by people like Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, ex-Mayor Enrique Penalosa of Bogota, Dan Burden and his Walkable Communities stuff, but each is really about placemaking--making great communities by focusing on the quality of the built and natural environment in most aspects--I don't want to say urban design because Fred Kent hates the term, but it's maybe "that phrase..."), there are (arguably) four major approaches to making better communities:

- historic preservation-based (general historic preservation as well as Main Street commercial district revitalization);
- asset-based community development (which includes the Main Street Approach as well as the "community economic development" perspective of Mike Temali);
- arts and culture but not necessarily heritage-related (this can also include the "creative class" ideas of Richard Florida; and
- cultural heritage-tourism (mixes preservation, arts & culture, asset-development, and tourism and destination development, and heritage areas are one way to implement this, but not the only method).

And speaking of broader thinking about place, the concept of the cultural landscape (from geography, cultural studies, and American Studies) looks upon placemaking in a much wider milieu than merely our neighborhoods or even the communities that we live in. (Heritage areas are one way to operationalize these approaches over wide areas.)

In any case, I'm starting to think that the broad movement really is placemaking, and that the four approaches (you might have other suggestions) are subsets really, strategies and tactics for making great places happen.

Last year, in an email to the Main Street list, I said "we are all destination managers now," (see "Town-City branding or 'We are all destination managers now'") because the thing about making great places is that not only are they great for those of us living in them, they are interesting and attractive to others (which is a good thing because usually we need more "customers" than those strictly living within our neighborhoods/retail trade areas to be able to fully support economically the businesses and other attractions that we want).

In short, I am begin to think that the over-arching organization in "the movement" to preserve, enhance, and extend livability--placemaking--is the Project for Public Spaces. (Although I am sure that the PPS people already think that).

Thoughts?
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Getting back to the conference, note that at one level DC competes with the surrounding jurisdictions, but at another level we are intimately connected. I think about this more and more because after all, before the District of Columbia became "DC" it was Prince George's County Maryland... And we are physically connected to Maryland (for better or for worse). Improving these connections and how we benefit from the connections only helps us.

For example, the Anacostia Heritage Trails Area is within Prince George's County only as it is a State of Maryland designated heritage area. But they are connecting their river trail to DC's developing Anacostia River Trail. This will allow further connection to the C&O Canal Trail and to points north in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Click here for a copy of the Anacostia River Trails map.

Apparently the Anacostia Waterfront Park offers pontoon boat tours of the river and last year, more than 6,000 people took tours of the river. The Parks Department of Prince George's County is advocating for the National Arboretum (in DC, run by the US Department of Agriculture) to install a dock so that they can bring people to the Arboretum by boat from the Anacostia Waterfront Park. Wouldn't such a dock be in the best interest of us in DC? Etc.

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking; historic-preservation; tourism