Public Realm Plans for 2020
What is your community doing to adapt your streets, parks and plazas for future public use?
Most downtowns have high standards for quality of life and realistic goals for meeting these. If you’re a downtown organization like a Business Improvement District or Merchants Alliance, 2020 suddenly became an important year for you and your community to take a close look at all these standards and goals. It is arguably more critical now than ever to deploy a thoughtful and informed strategy for managing public space in order to give your community the best shot at recovery and resilience going forward.
2020’s public realm plans might not be the type of plans your community is familiar with. You probably don’t need to hire a consultant and host meetings for public engagement exercises this time. And you certainly don’t need to create a PDF or book with all the observations, analyses and design decisions neatly presented throughout. This is less of a political exercise. It’s an administrative exercise. What your community needs, is a plan for how you’re going to inform designs and decisions going forward. You need a system, and it can’t be too rigid. The best plans right now embrace an unknown realm of challenges and opportunities for managing public space.
Here are some considerations for how to take an adaptive approach to your 2020 plan for managing public space.
Public Safety
Are you measuring streetscape issues right now? What categories has your community identified, and how are you tracking these?
The first thing your community needs is a flexible framework to identify issues in your streets and parks. This includes coming up with a system or way to monitor and analyze these places and track issues as they occur or reoccur. Whether your system is used to track traditional public safety concerns like dark street corners and trip hazards, or emerging concerns associated with the pandemic, such as people exhibiting a lack of respect for safe social distance and personal privacy, the most important thing you can do for your community right now is establish a system for tracking these issues. To get started, you can create a free account on Citiesense and we’ll help you setup your community’s tools to track and manage issues in the street.
More on this use case here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sp5tscecesr87cu/34thStreetAssetManagement%E2%80%93UseCases.pdf?dl=0
Sanitation
It’s still business as usual in the sanitation space, for the most part. Fewer trash bags to collect saves everyone money and keeps streets clear of clutter so people can spread out, not to mention it’s just a lot more pleasant. Cleaner streets and parks are also safer public spaces.
Depending on your relationship with local businesses and public works, you might consider a complete overhaul of the way your community thinks about waste management. There has never been a better time to test new systems. The general public is more aware that things are in flux right now, so take advantage of that and set new rules that people will be willing to try with you.
Start by mapping out the current system and measuring how it performs. Then engage your community in a virtual feedback process to share a performance analysis of the current system and source as many ideas and concerns as you can. As businesses close (and hopefully reopen) and consumer behaviors change, so should your sanitation programs. Make sure you and your community understand the current system and can think collectively about how it can be improved.
Events
Event management and marketing isn’t going to be the same for a little while, if ever. I’m not saying no more silent discos and farmers markets. On the contrary, we still need to shop and socialize, and it turns out the ability to do so outdoors is actually critical to public health and safety.
For now, take a look at your events calendar. Personally, I think your budget for any events that you know will not meet new public safety guidelines should essentially be reallocated to more critical local services. And I wouldn’t dwell on the budget for events at all right now. I think there will be plenty of money available for creative programming and support from philanthropic partners in the midst of this pandemic, as long as it makes sense with the new constraints/opportunities before us.
Look for partnerships to provide new innovative programs that focus on public health, access to food, culture and safe social interaction. Setting aside $20,000 for a gala or real estate broker breakfast is, quite frankly, irresponsible when that could be allocated to accomplishing one of the above two steps first. Then by all means, gather the brokers and figure out how to attract tenants and consumers to your storefronts… a topic for a different post, no doubt.
Your community’s public space plan will clearly identify a system to measure and improve the conditions of your public realm, so that people can engage socially with a strong sense of safety, accessibility and enjoyment. Getting the nuts and bolts of a plan in place now enables you to chart out the funding constraints you and your community need to recognize and the added values this plan realizes for you and all of your public or private sector partners. We’re likely not talking about solutions at this point, so much as systems to identify opportunities for solutions much more quickly than you did in years past. It may seem more like a business plan than an urban design plan right now. But if we can get this right, then the urban design ideas and solutions will present themselves out of the informed measurements and collaborative community engagement process that your new public realm plan supports.
