Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape

One of Oklahoma City's infrastructure projects is a streetcar route serving the downtown.  Photo: Doug Hoke, Daily Oklahoman.

The Congress for the New Urban's conference next year is in Oklahoma City, and in advance of this, the CNU's newsletter is running stories about various aspects of OKC's urbanism.

The most recent story, very good, is about how the city was sparked to act after a national survey said the Oklahoma City isn't particularly walkable and they used the construction of a new skyscraper as the fulcrum to drive through improvements to 50 blocks of Downtown ("How downtown Oklahoma City did a 180"). Also see "Oklahoma City showed how to transition to two-way streets downtown," Palm Beach Post.

It's a great accomplishment, no doubt.  

But I don't think it's an easy example that advocates in other cities can export to try to bring about similar changes in their own communities.  

In planning I joke about "Why can't we be like Portland?" when a citizen comes up to you at a meeting, talks/harangues about something in particular, and then at the end laments that our community isn't like Portland, Oregon.

But what they don't realize is that "Portland" isn't what they think it is, that the great initiatives that they've undertaken are the result of decades of hard, thoughtful, and visionary decision making that accretes -- it builds on and extends previous decisions and programs in a manner where the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

There are six cities in the US that consistently do multiple pretty amazing initiatives when it comes to urbanism:

• Charleston, South Carolina; where former Mayor Riley was one of the nation's leading proponents of urban design improvements (Riley speech on urban design)
• Hennepin County/Minneapolis; when the county realized they needed to invest in Minneapolis to staunch population outmigration to protect the county's revenue stream from property taxes.  Later Minneapolis developed complementary programs, and light rail was added  ("A County and Its Cities: the Impact of Hennepin Community Works," Journal of Urban Affairs 30:3, 2008).
• Oklahoma City
• Portland, Oregon; which starting with the decision to tear down a waterfront freeway in the late 1960s has taken many visionary steps and continues to be a pathbreaker ("A summary of my impressions of Portland, Oregon and planning," 2005; "Universities as elements of urban/downtown revitalization: the Portland State story and more," 2014).
• San Francisco ("Transit First Policy")
• Seattle (" 10 ways Seattle has blown past Portland in transportation moxie," Portland Oregonian)

Transformational Projects Action Planning.  But basically, they've adopted an approach that I now call "Transformational Projects Action Planning," that I wrote about first in terms of European cities like Bilbao, Dublin's Temple Bar district, Helsinki, and Liverpool, along with the German revitalization initiatives organized around the International Building Exposition (IBA) and the International Garden Festival.

-- "Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017
-- "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh," 2014
-- "European Garden Festivals as a model urban planning initiative for Detroit and other US cities," 2014
-- "There has to be a better way to spend $1.85 billion on "revitalization" just to demolish buildings: The US needs its own version of Germany's International Building Exhibition, let's start with Detroit," 2014

Social urbanism is a comparable approach.  Another example of this kind of approach is "social urbanism" in Medellin, Colombia:

-- "Experiments in Social Urbanism"
-- "'Social urbanism' experiment breathes new life into Colombia's Medellin Toronto Globe & Mail
-- "Medellín's 'social urbanism' a model for city transformation," Mail & Guardian
-- "Medellín slum gets giant outdoor escalator," Telegraph
-- "Medellín, Colombia offers an unlikely model for urban renaissance," Toronto Star

-- ""Utility" infrastructure as an opportunity for co-locating urban design and placemaking improvements," 2020

Other places do great things too.  Maybe New York City could be included.  They did a lot of amazing things under Mayor Bloomberg, and Mayor De Blasio left most of the initiatives in place and operating, but I wouldn't say the city has furthered the vision.

And there are smaller city examples too, some I've written about like Spokane, Greenville, South Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, Holland, Michigan, Edmonton and the arts.  Charlie often points out initiatives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Etc.

Plus, the city that helped to trigger the idea of TPAS is Toronto.  See "(Big Hairy) Projects Action Plan(s) as an element of Comprehensive/Master Plans," 2017.

Each has a back story that undergirds their jump from ordinary to extraordinary.  None are perfect.  Some are more visionary than others.  And the cities may have other problems like anarchism in Portland and terrible homelessness issues in San Francisco and Seattle.

The six components of a successful broad ranging revitalization program.  In writing about the various efforts, I concluded that successful revitalization programs, especially in those cities that were working to overturn serious disadvantages, were comprised of these elements:

• A commitment to the development and production of a broad, comprehensive, visionary, and detailed revitalization plan/s (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool);
• the creation of innovative and successful implementation organizations, with representatives from the public sector and private firms, to carry out the program.  Typically, the organizations have some distance from the local government so that the plan and program aren't subject to the vicissitudes of changing political administrations, parties and representatives (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool, Helsinki);
• strong accountability mechanisms that ensure that the critical distance provided by semi-independent implementation organizations isn't taken advantage of in terms of deleterious actions (for example Dublin's Temple Bar Cultural Trust was amazingly successful but over time became somewhat disconnected from local government and spent money somewhat injudiciously, even though they generated their own revenues--this came to a head during the economic downturn and the organization was widely criticized; in response the City Council decided to fold the TBCT and incorporate it into the city government structure, which may have negative ramifications for continued program effectiveness as its revenues get siphoned off and political priorities of elected officials shift elsewhere);
• funding to realize the plan, usually a combination of local, regional, state, and national sources, and in Europe, "structural adjustment" and other programmatic funding from the European Regional Development Fund and related programs is also available (Hamburg, as a city-state, has extra-normal access to funds beyond what may normally be available to the average city);
• integrated branding and marketing programs to support the realization of the plan (Hamburg, Vienna, Liverpool, Bilbao, Dublin);
• flexibility and a willingness to take advantage of serendipitous events and opportunities and integrate new projects into the overall planning and implementation framework (examples include Bilbao's "acquisition" of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum and the creation of a light rail system to complement its new subway system, Liverpool City Council's agreement with a developer to create the Liverpool One mixed use retail, office, and residential development in parallel to the regeneration plan and the hosting of the Capital of Culture program in 2008, and how multifaceted arts centers were developed in otherwise vacated properties rented out cheaply by their owners in Dublin, Helsinki, and Marseille).

Oklahoma City: Metropolitan Area Projects as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning.  As discussed in the book Next American City by former mayor Mick Corbett, the city developed a recurring program of visionary public investment--they've since undertaken four different cycles--after initially being rejected by United Airlines in 1987, as the location for a large maintenance facility, which the city worked hard to land.

The then mayor kept badgering United Airlines to tell them why OKC wasn't picked.  Eventually they revealed that they sent a bunch of executives to OKC for the weekend, and they came back saying "we'd never want to live here, there's nothing attractive about the city."

From that point, it took them five years to come up with the idea of MAP/Metropolitan Area Projects, an infrastructure program funded by sales tax, monitored by a citizen oversight committee, with a detailed list of projects that had to be completed within a certain time period, focused on making substantive physical improvements to the community all focused on improving quality of life, such as an arena used to land an NBA basketball team, improvements to the Oklahoma River, the Bricktown Canal, and the city's waterfronts, refurbishment of every school in the Oklahoma City School District, a streetcar, etc.

They are in the final stages of MAP's fourth cycle (MAP4), and through this program, cycles, and projects, they've built a track record of "doing" -and accomplishing big projects.  

The Downtown Streetscape project as an example of serendipity.  Oklahoma City has created a program that incorporates what I call the "six components of a successful broad ranging revitalization program."

And the Downtown streetscape project is likely just one example of the sixth characteristic, the element of serendipity, the ability to do other visionary things in a complementary way, incorporating such projects into the existing planning framework.  

From the CNU article:

Oklahoma City, which ranked dead last in Prevention Magazine’s 2008 assessment of sizable American cities for walkability, soon after commissioned a report on how to improve conditions for pedestrians downtown. An initial analysis by Speck & Associates found that Oklahoma City’s streets were wide enough to handle two to three times the volume of traffic they carried. Downtown streets were largely one-way speedways, and Speck’s plan showed that the city could better use the space to support pedestrians, bicyclists, businesses, and urban life.

 

The city launched Project 180, an effort to rebuild all 50 blocks of streets in their downtown core, funded by tax-increment financing from a major skyscraper development. The name came from a $180 million investment in the 180-acre core area, generating a 180-degree turn in how downtown was conceived. “By right-sizing streets to meet real demand, we were able to calm traffic, double the amount of on-street parking, add a ton of trees and great a robust cycling network. Ten years later this is the project that I am most proud of,” Speck said to a meeting of the US Conference of Mayors. At the same time, the plan converted one-way streets to two-way, rebuilt three parks and most underground utilities, and installed new architecturally designed fixtures and street furniture.

The tax increment financing district financing mechanism is separate from the MAP program and financing system, but fully complementary.

Devon Energy Building, Oklahoma City.  Photo by Holly Baumann photography.

The "Transformational Projects Action Planning" approach makes multiple big projects possible.  I don't think Oklahoma City would have done this project if it would have been their first urban design project and on such a scale, had they not already laid the ground work for "transformational projects action planning" and the undertaking of big infrastructure projects.

The bad assessment they received on walkability was 16 years after the city passed the referendum to fund MAP, and 21 years after they were rejected by United Airlines.  

In the intervening years, taking the rejection by United Airlines as a community-wide call to action, they had implemented a large  number of projects already.  And some, like making the Oklahoma River a national destination for water sports like kayaking ("Revival of a River Alters a City’s Course in Sports," New York Times); "Oklahoma River's success has Oklahoma City bubbling with enthusiasm, pride" and "Development on the Oklahoma River continues with whitewater center," Daily Oklahoman), were serendipitous, not planned as part of MAP, but they developed as a consequence of MAP.

Oklahoma River.  From "RAPIDS: THE OLYMPIC STORY ON THE OKLAHOMA RIVER GROWS," Velocity.

With the Downtown streetscape program, they had the catalyst of a new large construction project downtown to leverage.

People saw the results of community investment in infrastructure, urban design, and quality of life, so even though they are a car-dominated community, improving the Downtown streetscape made sense.

Trying to get a community to undertake a project of this nature and scale is almost impossible when doing it on a one-off basis.