For better cities of tomorrow, take good listening to the streets
Pamela Puchalski’s path-of-most-resilience for urban design
In our ‘Trailblazers’ series, we bring you perspectives on creative leadership, social innovation, and positive change from THNK’s worldwide participant community. Today, Kate Inglis interviews New Yorker Pamela Puchalski, Class 1 participant at THNK School of Creative Leadership in Vancouver. As an urban planner and community development expert, Pamela is a specialist in neighborhood revitalization, economic development and city-to-city learning and collaboration. To address the shortfalls and growing pains of the modern city and invent a better tomorrow, she says, get out of the boardroom and into the streets.
You help people work together to solve problems of urban life. Faced with entrenched obstacles or the complexities of city operation, where do you begin?
First, we figure out how citizens already speak and act for themselves — and we amplify those voices. Then we make sure that influential or creative people are listening beyond the limitations of an entrenched bureaucracy. If we want urban institutions to address the needs of diverse populations, we have to design them that way. Listening has to be the operational baseline. Fresh ideas won’t come from a bunch of experts behind closed doors. We need to get into the city and treat citizens as the asset they are.
There’s nothing more valuable than people who are legally, politically, and spiritually empowered as their city’s cultural heartbeat. When we listen well, we go from imposing pre-determined solutions to bringing the city into the job of its own design.
At THNK, we examine the fears that obstruct big thinking. When you came to Vancouver, what kinds of fears were holding you back?
In trying to move cities and communities into a better future, we’re shepherding an incredibly complex web of people, systems, needs, behaviours, and identities. On top of that, we’ve got embedded institutions and fixed modes of thinking. The biggest fear is that we won’t deliver on our best intentions — that somehow along the way, we will not conduct our work well enough. That we won’t be able to balance the occasionally clashing mandates of partners, activists, and municipalities.
Fear is misplaced, though, if it’s focused on project delivery. The more justified worry is this: in every project, will we be able to engineer better interaction, movement, and upward mobility? All the good intentions around delivery won’t make up for a failure to orchestrate cooperation.
As a creative leader, how do you orchestrate this kind of cooperation?
As simple as it seems, making time for it is essential. We need to make time to listen, hear feedback, and brainstorm. And making that time is a courageous act. It goes against the grain. As leaders, we are programmed to insist that everything be planned and structured. It’s against the grain of capitalist-built business to say I Don’t Know with confidence — if you’re in charge of a team it’s one of the most impactful leaps to make.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that a good leader has to know it all, or at least look like they know it all. But there’s no faster way to block progress than to be that way. And there’s no faster way to let innovation unfold than by having the entrepreneurial courage to say Let’s figure this out together.
The urge is to define a project as quickly as possible, then make a to-do list from a required outcome. To co-create as you go is a total reversal of the typical approach. At THNK they call it sensing, and it’s critical to every day of my work right now. If you’re not open, you’re not seeing. Since THNK, my antenna is up.
Let’s extend that raised antenna to a group — how does a context of sensing change the design of cities and communities?
Our job as city and community builders is to foster resilience — the ability to adapt no matter what changes economically, environmentally, politically, or culturally. Good listening helps us to understand what assets we’ve got at-hand, and uncovers new ways to combine existing resources so that communities can solve challenges themselves. This is not to say that residents should go it alone — only that their expertise shouldn’t be overlooked in defining and solving problems.
Tell me more about resilience. What does it look like when a city takes on this quality?
A resilient community finds the advantage in disadvantage. As designers and planners, we encourage it by paying attention to what’s really going on at the street-level, not importing assumptions, and letting cities find their own path.
This is why sustainability, as a concept, has stumbled — it’s hard to put the environment first if you can’t afford dinner. We have to re-examine sustainability through the lens of how people live their daily lives — their unmet needs, their aspirations. We should never override the wisdom of the people we’re trying to assist.
Street-level resilience sounds like something that would take on its own life. Is this the goal? Does this mean designers and planners such as yourself need to be more facilitative than prescriptive?
We want to meet people where they are, with no agenda. At New America, we worked with the Red Hook Initiative, a community group in Brooklyn, to help neighbourhoods hit by Hurricane Sandy. They wanted a way to share local information—they were already trained in radio and media, so all we had to arrange was distribution.
Too many ‘experts’ respond to new ideas with a “Yes, but…” because we feel like it’s our job to anticipate problems and blocks. While initially interested in setting up a radio station, the Red Hook residents decided that a wireless mesh network would be better. We responded with a “Yes, and…”, extending their idea and suggesting a communications network. When Hurricane Sandy hit, this network was the lifeline for locals and emergency responders. It worked — and still works — because it was designed by and for the people of Red Hook. This is street-level resilience.
What is the most important thing you’ve learned about community-originated design?
We’re wrapped up in innovation mania. Somehow we all decided that all the best things are new things, and we’ve lost our regard for what’s already tested and functional. Roots matter. New growth is awesome, but an old growth tree is valuable too.
Perhaps we don’t always need to create something radically different. In addition to entrepreneurialism, we need to consider the radical proving ground of old-school roots. Why not iterate something that already exists, instead of throwing it all out for the sake of reinventing? Small tweaks may not have the glory of a brand new and flashy idea, but sometimes, that’s all it takes to have an impact.
Whether it’s rethinking existing systems or inventing new ones, how can we introduce more creativity into a field as complex as city design?
We can make space for it. We can make peace with all the unknowns. We can worry less about answering questions fast, and approach uncertainty with patience, adaptability, and a shared vision. We can give creativity room to breathe.
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Pamela Puchalski is an urban planner and community development expert. Working in the U.S. and internationally, she develops strategies to build the capacity and influence of civic organizations and local government. A specialist in neighborhood revitalization, economic development and city-to-city learning and collaboration, Pamela has extensive experience implementing high-impact projects such as The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities and the Global Cities Initiative at Brookings Institution. She was also part of the team helping to launch The Africa Center in New York City, a new civic space bridging policy, business and culture. Pamela is currently a Senior Fellow at New America, where she also served as Director of the Resilient Communities Program.
