Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Friday, May 10, 2019

(US) National Travel and Tourism Week, 2019: DC should create an annual city-wide Doors Open event

In "What would be a 'Transformational Projects Action Plan' for DC's cultural ecosystem" this is item #22.
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Create an annual city-wide "Doors Open" event for DC's local cultural institutions.  

"Doors Open" events were pioneered in Europe, and are when a community's culture organizations band together to provide a coordinated schedule of events, usually over a weekend or an entire week, where people get free access to various cultural sites and events, many of which are not normally open to the public.

In North America, Doors Open Toronto is probably the biggest.  The Toronto Star even publishes an event guide. (2011 Doors Open Toronto Guide)

But Open House New York Weekend  is increasingly a big deal.  Pittsburgh created one, Doors Open Pittsburgh.  And there are others.

In DC the Dupont-Kalorama Museums Consortium has had a district-specific Doors Open event for many years, as do the art galleries on Upper Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, but including the participation of AU's Katzen Center for the Arts and the Kreeger Museum.

It's not exactly the same, but Georgetown Glow, an outdoor sculpture walk in December and January is growing into a great event.  CultureTourismDC sponsors a week of walking tours (they used to do it twice/year).  Etc.

Building on these events, DC should do an Doors Open event for the whole city but focused on local cultural assets, not "national" ones, from theaters to historic sites to houses to parks to museums, etc.

It should be used as a priming event to take integrated and comprehensive cultural planning to a new level.

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DC does a form of this for the arts, in an event called "Art all Night." I haven't been too supportive, because I think it's held for too short a time, a few hours, in too many neighborhoods--as many as eight--so that the less popular neighborhoods aren't likely to get a lot of visitorship.


That's a lot of work for little payoff.

Instead I recommend that the city do one "Art all Night" event each month, moving it around the city.

Last year there was a similar event sponsored by Halcyon House for outdoor art, called "By the People 2018," and again, I think it had the same problem, too many simultaneous events spread out over a great distance over a relatively short period of time.

Although it was held during the daytime and they had a shuttle service between the sites.

The art installations I saw at the Walter Reed campus, were awesome.
By the People 2018 art installation, Walter Reed campus, Washington, DC, Halcyon House
By the People 2018 art installation, Walter Reed campus, Washington, DC, Halcyon House

This year By the People 2019 is from June 15th to June 23rd.

You could make the same argument I make about Art all Night, that having lots of events over just one weekend will result in a lot of places not getting much patronage.

So it could be over the course of a week.

And it needs to be way better marketed and coordinated compared the other events I mentioned.

Alternatively, you could do it by quadrant. Spread it out over one month, with each week featuring a different quadrant of the city: NW, NE, SW, SE. Yes, the NW quadrant is bigger than the rest, but so what.

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6 Comments:

At 11:49 AM, Anonymous charlie said...

https://www.popville.com/2019/05/apple-store-carnegie-library-dc-history-center/

 
At 1:48 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

I got into an email argument with the director. I was derisive about the likelihood of people going to the Apple Store wanting to/being interested in visiting the DC History Center.

OTOH, it does stabilize the financial situation for the building (although Events DC took it off the hands of the Historical Society a long time ago).
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I can't believe it never occurred to me that it should have been the DC Visitor Center (except for one reason). It's central, it's prominent, it's beautiful.

But it doesn't have parking, and people in cars visiting the city need to be able to stop and park.

… Suzanne made this point.

 
At 1:52 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

… I still haven't watched the Bernie Sanders video you called out. I think you are way more patient than I am.

But I was thinking about the commentary in the article, and what the writer called out as a very obstreperous attitude toward the press, long before Trump.

I think this is the flip side of the problem that I pose. My joke is that there is a fine line between what I call critical analysis aimed at improving outcomes and what elected officials tend to always receive as "personal criticism."

As a former elected official once told me, "it's not a seminar. They believe
they got elected because all their ideas were right and excellent and endorsed by the electorate."

Pointing out ill-conceived or inadequately developed initiatives is not seen as a positive.

It also reminds me of a quote attributed to Virginia Woolf. A friend was remonstrating with her that it was too bad she didn't have any good critics. She responded: "Critics!? An artist wants praise. Praise!"

I think the same is true of politicos.

 
At 12:47 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

The comment I liked in the video was were BS was responding to "Why do you have to go off on tangential issues (Nicaragua?) and his response was 1) we have a bunch of things to do as mayor (all reasonable) and if we do those then we need to as leaders talk about larger issues.

And it struck me that Burlington probably hasn't really been exposed too the negatives; i.e. in DC we see a system that basically completely broke down (control board) and now is springing back because of larger forces but ones city leaders attribute to their own prowess.

(and I've said it before that the US system is basically meant to create small cities like Burlington and not larger cities like Vancouver/Calgary/Edmonton/Toronto/Montreal)


You and I can look at the "system" and see that it isn't working on a city level -- but someone like BS may look at it and think it can work at a city level.

Also, this:

https://www.ft.com/content/5b0a3704-6113-11e9-b285-3acd5d43599e


 
At 4:45 PM, Anonymous Richard Layman said...

will read the FT piece... it's worth writing about in the context of National Historic Preservation Month.

 
At 2:38 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Festival of Museums, Scotland
festivalofmuseums.com

Rendez-vous aux Jardins, France
open gardens, in 2018 as part of "Sharing Heritage" across Europe as part of the "European Year of Cultural Heritage" this was extended to include gardens in many other countries and the multi-national approach has continued in 2019

National Heritage Week, Ireland
heritageweek.ie

Heritage Open Days, England
heritageopendays.org.uk

In 2018, as part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, Germany organized the Sharing Heritage program.

sharingheritage.de/en/projects

But they haven't extended it into an annual event. It was one-off.

 

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