Vital Public Spaces: How Does Your City Measure Up?

Last updated on 2011.08.14

Via Grist and Smart Planet, I find the Project for Public Spaces has published a guide for determining whether your city is doing development right. The criteria seem to focus on larger cities rather than small rural communities, but we small-towners may still be able to draw some lessons.

Here are PPS's signs of a healthy community:

1. "Community goals are a top priority in in city planning." That means lots of civic engagement, lots of meetings, lots of public officials asking residents all over town, "What do you think?"
2. "The emphasis is on pedestrians, not cars." Communities need to exist at human scale... preferably a scale that does not expect everyone to drive a car. Madison isn't great at this: we've had a major restaurant, a bowling alley, and a movie theater within a fifteen-minute walk of many houses in western Madison, yet we have never built a sidewalk out to this entertainment complex. Even where we have sidewalks, we almost never see pedestrians outnumber cars.
3. "New development projects enhance existing communities." Madison's recent development has focused on single-use industrial parks and new housing developments on open spaces on the edge of town. One noteworthy exception is the conversion of the old junior high block into an apartment building and site for an old folks' home. That at least brings some residents downtown. But it would be nice to see some brave developer take a swing at renovating a whole block of Main Street into nice new commerical and residential space—yes, a combination, not just one monolithic brick box surrounded by a parking lot.
4. "Public spaces are accessible and well-used." The pool in Madison has certainly been getting business over the past month. And three of us made Bruce's day Friday by forming a line outside the library waiting to get in.
5. "Civic institutions are catalysts for public life." One of the criteria here is that "schools are centrally located to support other neighborhood activity." Madison has moved exactly opposite from that criterion, moving first its high school in the 1960s, then its middle school in the 1990s, and finally its elementary school in the 2000s to facilities on the north edge of town.
6. "Local economic development is encouraged." Madison does some work here, though it seems to focus too much on one sector, the big industrial employers, and not enough on small local employers. PPS suggests that the city should actively promote businesses that provide "third places."
7. "Public spaces are managed, programmed and continually improved." Ted LaFleur is a true flower in Madison's hatband, planting fine flora all over town. (And by all means, do please revel in Ted's wholly appropriate French name.) But PPS says managing good public spaces is more than aesthetics. You don't want people to just look at your public spaces; you want people to do things there. Again, Ted helps meet that goal with his work in the community garden. Beyond the flowers, we make reasonably use of our parks for public events. We should create more opportunities to bring our sidewalks and streets to life, as DeLon and Dairy Queen crew do on Miracle Treat Day (see my related discourse on the 2010 event).

Read the guide from the Project for Public Spaces, then think about how your city measures up. Then tell us.. and tell your city council!