How it started vs How it's going: Placemaking, Innovation and the Pandemic.

Just five years ago I was (almost) arrested for placemaking in Sydney, now these same placemaking tools are being used to help cities respond to Covid. How did urban planners throw out the rule book, and embrace innovation, in such a short amount of time?

Cities are increasingly turning to placemaking as a pandemic response: closing down streets and transforming back alleys into pedestrian spaces where people can connect and socialise outside. In a recent announcement, NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes announced he was “throwing out the planning rule book and taking emergency measures” as Sydney plans for a summer of outdoor dining. Melbourne and many other cities around the world have taken similar measures.?

Cafes in car parks, bars spilling out onto the pavement, music in the streets. It sounds like a no-brainer.? However the kind of culture change that enables the closing down of streets is the result of considerable innovation across the placemaking sector. ? It’s an incredible success story, and one that is worth reflecting on.?

Just five years ago I was (almost) arrested for placemaking in Sydney. Yes, it’s a true story: the police came and broke up one of the first Australian tactical urbanism interventions in Sydney’s Surry Hills, despite the project being fully sanctioned.? Fast forward to 2020 and there was the largest ever level of government funded investment in placemaking and tactical urbanism as a pandemic response (>$200M invested and more coming).?

So what enabled risk-averse governments to embrace these previously renegade tactics and turn behaviour (and policy) around so fast?? And what lessons in innovation can we learn for implementing other policy and planning changes, as we plan for the next decade of high growth city-making?

While it might have taken a global pandemic to mainstream placemaking and tactical urbanism, the reality is that cities are in a constant state of change.? Having been at the pointy end of this movement, along with many others, there are takeaways in system change innovation from this giant urban experiment that are relevant to all sectors.?

How it started?

Placemaking has been a movement in Australia for 30+ or more years, but the idea of temporary, pop up projects is part of a recent wave of ‘Tactical Urbanism’ which evolved over the past 5 years. Tactical urbanism encourages city-makers (and communities) to experiment with changes to the city, before investing in longer term change. Sounds simple, but ‘temporary’ and ‘experiment’ didn’t previously fit anyway in the local government planning legislative framework or lexicon.??

From ‘no’ culture to ‘yes’ culture?

This meant the projects were treated with the same degree of rigour as a permanent project such as a park upgrade, requiring laborious applications, complex and expensive insurances and often requiring 6 months or more to gain permits, if they were granted at all. On one occasion at CoDesign Studio we mapped every interaction we had with a local council over a 6 months period, to try to get a permit for a 2 week pop up parklet. The permit was denied.?

Mapping individual interactions with Council undertaken before a Parklet permit denied in 2015.

However, we did find out that it was possible to get a $20 skip bin / dumpster permit on the spot. So in a stroke of what we thought was creative genius, we put the park in the skip instead. The project went viral as Collingwood #Skipsters eat lunch out of a rubbish bin.?

It was a cheeky move, nevertheless, the stunt had an impact. More and more councils started to take community and trader led projects seriously, changing their systems around permits and working to say ‘yes’.?

Put a wheel on it?

To get around the permitting system in a more repeatable way, we ended up channeling our parklet funding into a licensed trailer which could be parked anywhere without a permit. This led to a company in-house joke that if you couldn’t get a permit “put a wheel on it”. It worked.??

Park'r Parklet in a Trailer

There are now a number of amazing companies that provide a service of trailer parklets and skip bin parklets, who continue to enable placemaking and experimentation and make it easy for councils to say ‘yes’ such as People Parkers and Skiplet . Check them out.??

How it’s going

In the past 18 months we’ve seen State Governments in Victoria and NSW make their largest ever contribution to tactical urbanism in history - with over $200 Million in collective investment and more to come.? Whether it’s grant programs, outdoor dining projects, festivals and street activations, community arts projects - placemaking is everywhere and it’s brilliant.

One of the previous barriers was resistance from local traders, who are now some of the greatest advocates. ??

Charles and Mollison Street Pop Up Park in Abbotsford is now a permanent park.

Lessons in Innovation for Placemaking and Beyond.?

?In reflecting on the growth of tactical urbanism in Australia,? there are some key factors that made behaviour change possible, in a relatively short amount of time (in city time frames). And these lessons in innovation apply broadly to any change management or innovation context.?

1. Defining the problem locally (not generally)?

While most urban policies make sense in general terms, such as “we need more jobs” or “make streets safer”. In the detail, (and implementation) we often get stuck. Because the problem isn’t defined at the hyper-local level. What one street needs is different from the next street. The economic ecosystem of one activity centre is different to another.?

We need to understand, specifically how a macro problem like traffic speeds or congestion (or retail vitality or social connection) operates at a street of block scale. And for that you need hyper-local data.? In many of the projects in the early days this literally meant going door to door. Now it can be collected digitally.?

2. Build partnerships??

There are many stakeholders involved in local placemaking projects: local traders, authorities, community members, visitors, asset managers and more. Once the problem is identified, stakeholder mapping and engaging local stakeholders is critical. For placemaking projects, each stakeholder has something to contribute.?

For example, in a project run by CoDesign Studio which focused on making laneways safer for women , local residents and community organisations were invited to contribute time, materials, resources as well as ideas. This resulted in some local residents running a community lunch, a local artist facilitating a mural, and a local youth organisation running events.? In a business context, local businesses may be invited to personalise outdoor dining spaces.

3. Start Small?- Lessons from Startups

Taking a lesson from the tech sector and startups, the question any project should start with is - what is the minimum viable product - MVP version of this project that we could achieve. And start there. The core catch cry of tactical urbanism is ‘short term action’ for ‘long term change’. This model can apply to many other types of covid-recovery actions and future policies, not just placemaking.?

4. Create Demonstration projects?

There is no single better way to demonstrate an outcome, or concept, than a physical (MVP level) project on the ground. Start with a park in a skip bin/dumpster before the park. Start with a temporary closure of the street before the permanent park.??

Turning car parks into outdoor dining, or streets into parks using temporary paint and pot plants spark the collective imagination of what’s possible, and enable people to imagine what change is possible? While not all city-making projects have physical outcomes, it is possible to think about what trials of services might look like - a trial bus route, temporary online programs, a season of events. Demonstration projects are pivotal for behaviour change.?

5. Measuring outcomes?

The demonstration projects are only worth doing if we understand what the outcome was. Gathering evidence in the form of data, observation and storytelling is all an important part of the trial projects, yet a step that is routinely under planned for and under invested in. If you’re doing a short term project with a view to long term change, make sure you account for the need to measure the outcome in order to justify your budget bid for long term change.?

6. Embracing Failure?

I’ve worked with many cities who are excited about trialing new ideas and small scale, temporary, MVP projects but who are highly risk averse and can’t accept failure as an option. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t have innovation without some failure along the way. That’s the whole point. We need to see failure as progress and learning as part of the journey - not want our money back if the trial didn’t work as planned. Embrace the lessons.?

You can’t have innovation without some failure along the way. That’s the whole point. We need to see failure as progress and learning as part of the journey - not want our money back if the trial didn’t work as planned.

In the same way that the technology sector has built a culture of embracing failure as an important part of long-term success, we need to reframe our relationship with failure for urban projects and policies.?

Curiously, Covid-19 has created an enabling environment for risk-taking, removing many of the perceived barriers to getting started for many local governments.?

7. The FOMO factor??

Another contextual factor that is worth mentioning here is the ‘fear of missing out’. Cities like to copy each other and while everyone thinks they’re unique and special we spend a lot of time looking over our shoulder to what other cities are doing. The fact that many global cities have embraced placemaking - San Francisco’s parklet program and New York City DOT's Plaza Program are stand out examples - has made it easier for others to follow suit.?

8. Learning to Say ‘Yes’?

Finally, any kind of true leadership is all about mindset. A willingness to say yes and move ahead. Over the past decade there has been an increasing focus on citizen-centric governance. It has however taken the risk, insurance and regulatory frameworks some time to catch up.?

From top-down to community-led - excerpt from The Neighbourhood Project

What Covid-19 has enabled is not the methods or the processes - these were proven a decade ago - rather it has catalysed this final step: a mindset shift.? Many cities have been forced by circumstance to say yes, rather than putting community and business ideas in the too-hard basket. The council in the #skipsters example above, who,? five years ago said a firm no, has not become one of the leaders in embracing placemaking as a pandemic response.?

Change is possible.?