Market Street Prototyping Festival
Why this experiment is so important to the future of urban design
Tens of thousands of people travel down Market Street in San Francisco every day. Most of us simply mind our own business. Few people pause, linger, or converse with our neighbors in this great public space. How could we make Market Street a more vibrant and connected place? For the past few years, the City of San Francisco has has been asking this question as part of their $450m capital improvement of Market Street in 2018.
Led by Neil Hrushowy of SF Planning’s City Design Group and Deborah Cullinan of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the City launched the Market Street Prototyping Festival (MSPF) in the fall of 2014 with the support of the Knight Foundation. The goal of the festival was “to unite diverse neighborhoods along Market Street, encouraging these vibrant communities to work with designers, artists, and makers to build a more connected, beautiful San Francisco.” Given the success of SF Planning’s Pavement to Parks and Living Innovation Zones programs, the festival was a way to test SF Planning’s experience with urban prototyping on the City’s biggest stage.
All of the proposed projects were posted on Neighborland for community feedback during the six month design phase. The design teams tested their assumptions with local residents, and activated their supporters to help with their projects. The 3 day festival in April attracted over 250,000 people and over 25,000 people participated on the festival project site on Neighborland.
“We believe in public spaces that are about the ideas and aspirations of the public themselves. And not us telling them what they should be aspiring to.”
- Neil Hrushowy, SF Planning
What is an urban prototyping festival?
In 2012, San Francisco arts nonprofits Gray Area and Intersection for the Arts produced the first Urban Prototyping Festival in the city’s SoMa neighborhood. 23 projects were selected, and over a hundred local designers and makers participated in creating the prototypes. The one day event drew over 5,000 attendees and included performances, keynote speakers, and panel discussions with some of San Francisco’s most innovative urban designers. Inspired by UP, SF Planning scaled up and formalized the model in creating the Market Street Prototyping Festival.
In the fall of 2014, the MSPF team held an open call for potential projects on Market Street. Among hundreds of applications, 100 finalists were chosen by the festival team. Fifty winning teams were selected by a jury of urban design leaders in San Francisco. Projects were evaluated on their creativity, social impact, feasibility, and the portfolio strength of the team members. Each team was given a $2000 grant, along with access to fabrication tools and facilities and expert mentorship from “design district captains” from Autodesk, Gensler, California College of the Arts, Studio for Urban Projects, and the Exploratorium. The MSPF team also funded 5 demonstration projects from the design district captains.
Project teams included prominent architects from Snøhetta, David Baker, and Gensler; local design firms SITELAB, Future Cities Lab, Jensen Architects, Public Workshop, and Rain Chan-Kalin; local advocacy non-profit Community Housing Partnership; innovative startups Basic Training and Walk Your City; local artists George Zisiadis, Chacha Sikes, Yael Braha, Emily Schlickman and Kristina Loring, and 3 For Life; and scholars from Stanford, MIT’s Urban Risk Lab, Mills College, YBCA, and CCA.
All of the festival projects were posted on Neighborland to make the process as transparent and accessible as possible to the public. The design teams also engaged with the public through a series of workshops at their project sites and charrettes where they took feedback on their designs in progress. All of this community input was uploaded to the projects on Neighborland.
The Festival — April 9–12th
After months of sketching, tinkering, and building, the 50 projects were installed on Market Street. The public’s response was emphatic — over 250,000 residents interacted with the projects over 72 hours. The scale of the tactical urbanist festival was unprecedented. The design teams directly engaged and conversed with thousands of residents, and observed the public’s response directly to their work. The festival leadership team hosted a series of events and walking tours of the festival. Additionally, Gehl Studio observed and recorded the public’s activity to help measure the overall impact of the festival.
One of the most successful prototypes was the Tenderloin ExerTrail project from Cheyenne Purrington from Community Housing Partnership. The project is an “accessible, scalable, outdoor urban exercise path” and it engaged residents of all types throughout the festival. It was fairly rudimentary from a design perspective, but it was one of the most empathetic projects of the festival. The project was responding directly to the need for healthier public space for the residents of Central Market and Tenderloin.
Basic Training’s Play Everyday was equally successful in terms of interaction, and remarkably well-crafted, but it had a slightly higher barrier to participation. That said, most residents were quick to give the pull up bars, mini rock-wall, and rope swing a try.
Daily Boost’s Soul Gym was one of the crowd favorites, showing that a bit of playfulness and wit goes a long way in public space. There were also several public ping pong table projects, including the People’s Table, which were all highly successful in bringing together neighbors who wouldn’t normally be interacting with one another. Gensler’s Arena Play was an illuminated, six sided design that was the most well-crafted the tables. Given that the Central Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods have the highest per capita population of children, and have the fewest public parks in the city, any of these projects would be welcomed additions to the underperforming public spaces in these neighborhoods.
Cloud Arch Studio’s Common Ground was one of the festival’s most successful projects in terms of encouraging people to stop and linger on Market Street. Again, the playfulness and whimsy of the installation brought together a diverse group of adults and children from all walks of life.
“It’s all about engagement. We cannot make things happen behind closed doors with only a few people thinking about problems that affect so many hundreds of thousands of people.” — Deborah Cullinan, YBCA
Showbox used corrugated cardboard tubes of varying heights to provide a variety of seat configurations for audiences to watch impromptu street performances. Of all of the street stage designs, it was one of the most versatile and heavily used.
There was an exciting, symbiotic relationship between Showbox and Studio for Urban Project’s Outpost, which hosted some of the most engaging programs from the festival. Public talks included Street Plans Collaborative founder Mike Lydon, who shared insights from his new book about Tactical Urbanism. Showbox and Outpost were well positioned in front of The Hall, one of Market Street’s most successful pop-up markets, and this location had a high level of vitality during the festival.
Ian Mackay deployed a helpful, and sometimes cheeky, version of the Walk Your City wayfinding system for pedestrians. George Zisadis’s Bench-Go-Round created a playful opportunity for pedestrians to interact and connect with each other using a public seat. It was a powerfully simple way to transform residents’ experience of downtown San Francisco. Chime SF provided an elegant musical entry to the festival along the strongest desire line from the Ferry Building to Market Street.
CCA’s mobile craft module was surprisingly successful as a modular kiosk system for activating street life. Countless attempts to replicate the success of simple temporary market stalls in the night markets of Asia or bouquinistes of Paris have fallen short over the past few years. The design team at CCA were able to balance aesthetics, modularity, and afforability in their system, and demonstrated a compelling series of programs during the day and night during the festival.
MIT’s Urban Risk Lab’s 72 hour Preparedness Hub addresses one of San Francisco’s most critical issues around resilience to shocks and stresses on the city’s infrastructure: “Entirely off-grid, the hub is built around the short-term and immediate need for water, energy and communication. For the Market Street Prototyping Festival, we have selected one component — “The Communications Tower” — which includes a broadcasting system, lighting, emergency supplies, mobile phone power charger, to deliver public emergency information through radio channels. As an everyday public infrastructure, the prototype has also been designed as a seating area that can play music and provide power generation for a host of different community needs and functions.”
Tim McCormick’s Proto-house (Houslets) project created a micro-unit of housing, small enough to fit in a city parking space. Houselets sparked a heated conversation about what kinds of policy changes renters will have to fight for to start shifting the economics of the Bay Area’s challenging housing market.
Data Lantern, Neuroflowers, and Tree of Changes were all visually stunning projects that performed well at night. Electric wires presented an aesthetic challenge for these projects during the day, but they delighted once the sun went down. These projects illustrated the sculptural and electrical engineering chops of the makers and their design captains.
“This was not an arts festival. It was an act of governance.”
— Neil Hrushowy, SF Planning
What’s Next?
SF Planning and YBCA are currently assessing feedback from the public on the projects and are applying an urban prototyping strategy across neighborhoods and public spaces in San Francisco and beyond. Gehl Studio San Francisco published an in-depth evaluation and analysis of the Festival. Two sets of five successful prototypes will be temporarily improved for two more showcases: one in September in Central Market and one next spring in the Retail District. Ten additional projects from the festival will be selected for refinement, durability improvement, and installation in appropriate locations on Market Street. These “2.0 prototypes” will be installed as part of another festival in September 2016 along with 50 new projects, so follow the festival on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Neighborland to hear about the next open call for projects.
Thousands of people all across the U.S. and in 85 countries across the world viewed the festival on Neighborland, raising awareness of urban prototyping as an emerging best practice for urban design and planning. The design teams are sharing in depth “how to” posts on Instructables, and are available for inquires to fabricate these projects in other cities.
As Carol Coletta from the Knight Foundation stated at the outset of the project, “We hope to see some important ideas emerge from the festival, and most importantly, to promote it as a model for cross-city learning and development.” If you are interested in producing a festival in your city, please contact us and we’ll be happy to share our insights from this highly innovative and effective program model.
Thanks to Sasha Silberberg for her help writing this case study.
