1. Wikicity
How Web-Enabled, Citizen-
Driven Initiatives
are Redesigning the Urban
Interface
Aaron Naparstek
Monday, April 9, 2012
Harvard University
Graduate School of Design
2.
3. Is the Internet changing the way
we plan, design and manage
cities?
If so, how?
4. An inspiration for tonight’s event:
Park(ing) Day
Rebar Group's first Park(ing) installation in San Francisco, Sept. 2005
5. The Park(ing) concept really resonated.
“Public space reclamation in progress.”
May 2006, Park Slope, Brooklyn.
14. Park(ing) becomes official city policy in San Francisco
Spring 2009, San Francisco launches the Pavement-to-Parks program
15. San Francisco calls them “parklets.”
Today there are 24 "parklets,” including 2 mobile parklets.
16. New York City also implemented a version of Park(ing)
August 12, 2010, NYC's launches its Pop-Up Café program.
17. Park(ing) becomes official city policy in NYC
Pearl Street
50-Seat Pop-Up Cafe
in Lower Manhattan's
Financial District
18. A new way of designing streets and public spaces.
Before After
Broadway at 34th Street, Herald Square, Manhattan.
19. A faster, cheaper more feedback-intensive design process.
Before After
Phase 1 of “Castro Commons,” in San Francisco.
20. “Lean Design” and “Agile Development” for cities.
Phase 2 of “Castro Commons.”
21. The city is the original social media.
Giant chessboard in the middle of Broadway at Herald Square.
Editor's Notes
Welcome everyone and special thanks to our guests who traveled to get here tonight. My name is Aaron Naparstek. Loeb fellow. Founding and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog.org
Over-arching question for tonight's event, a question I've been thinking about a lot over the course of my fellowship year: Is the Internet changing the way we plan, design and manage our cities? If so, how? Tonight we have a group of guests who, I think, will help us begin to generate some answers to that question. But before we get to the panel, I want to share with you one of the key inspirations for this discussion tonight and, in the process, give you a concrete example of the "Wikicity" at work.
In September of 2005 an art and design group in San Francisco called Rebar turned a single, metered parking space into a temporary public park in Downtown San Francisco. Their idea was really simple: Pop some quarters in the meter and instead of parking a car, roll out some grass sod and put down a bench. The photo that you see here went completely viral. At the time I was just starting to develop Streetsblog as part of an advocacy effort we called the NYCSR, and I thought this Rebar project was genius. Here we were, a bunch of us, from many different fields and perspectives -- we were starting to call ourselves the Livable Streets Movement -- and we were trying to figure out ways to explain the problem of the automobile in the city. We were trying to explain how much better our cities could be if we stopped giving up so much of our public space to the private automobile. And here was this one image of this one brilliant little two hour long art project that told the whole story….
Pretty quickly Rebar began receiving requests to create the PARK(ing) project in other cities. Rather than replicate the exact same installation in other cities. And rather than trying to prevent other people from copying their work or stealing their idea. Rebar made a very interesting decision….
They decided to promote PARK(ing) Day as an “open-source” project. They created a how-to manual to empower people to create their own parks, in their own cities, in their own way. hey picked a date in Sept. 2006. They called it “PARK(ing) Day.” And thus a global phenomenon was born.
In 2006… 47 parks…. And there's just a huge variety of designs, activities and applications taking place in parks…. So, what has happened here? One way to look at it is this: Park(ing) Day turned the metered parking spot into an API. An API is an "application-programming interface." It is a set of programming instructions that allows third party software developers to plug their software into your service. For example, Facebook makes its API available so that outside software developers, people who don't work for Facebook, can create apps that plug in to Facebook. Park(ing) Day essentially says: The metered parking space is just an API. Anyone can come and develop a new application for this piece of public space.
Park(ing) Day 2007… And there's just a huge variety of designs, activities and applications taking place in parks…. So, what has happened here? One way to look at it is this: Park(ing) Day turned the metered parking spot into an API. An API is an "application-programming interface." It is a set of programming instructions that allows third party software developers to plug their software into your service. For example, Facebook makes its API available so that outside software developers, people who don't work for Facebook, can create apps that plug in to Facebook. Park(ing) Day essentially says: The metered parking space is just an API. Anyone can come and develop a new application for this piece of public space.
Park(ing) Day 2008… And there's just a huge variety of designs, activities and applications taking place in parks…. So, what has happened here? One way to look at it is this: Park(ing) Day turned the metered parking spot into an API. An API is an "application-programming interface." It is a set of programming instructions that allows third party software developers to plug their software into your service. For example, Facebook makes its API available so that outside software developers, people who don't work for Facebook, can create apps that plug in to Facebook. Park(ing) Day essentially says: The metered parking space is just an API. Anyone can come and develop a new application for this piece of public space.
- Park(ing) Day 2009… - And there's just a huge variety of designs, activities and applications taking place in parks…. - Most remarkable: This art project led to real, long-term changes in government policy. In 2009, SF launched Pavement to Parks.
- Park(ing) Day 2010… And there's just a huge variety of designs, activities and applications taking place in parks…. So, what has happened here? One way to look at it is this: Park(ing) Day turned the metered parking spot into an API. An API is an "application-programming interface." It is a set of programming instructions that allows third party software developers to plug their software into your service. For example, Facebook makes its API available so that outside software developers, people who don't work for Facebook, can create apps that plug in to Facebook. Park(ing) Day essentially says: The metered parking space is just an API. Anyone can come and develop a new application for this piece of public space.
Park(ing) Day in September 2011 included 975 PARKs in 162 cities, 35 countries on 6 continents. And there's just a huge variety of designs, activities and applications taking place in parks…. So, what has happened here? One way to look at it is this: Park(ing) Day turned the metered parking spot into an API. An API is an "application-programming interface." It is a set of programming instructions that allows third party software developers to plug their software into your service. For example, Facebook makes its API available so that outside software developers, people who don't work for Facebook, can create apps that plug in to Facebook. Park(ing) Day essentially says: The metered parking space is just an API. Anyone can come and develop a new application for this piece of public space.
OK. So, that’s a cool art project. Very successful. Lots of fun. But did it change anything? Remarkably, the answer to that question is a definitive “Yes.” Park(ing) Day pointed the way to real, long-term changes in government policy. In 2009, SF launched Pavement to Parks.
In 2009 the City of San Francisco launched its “Pavement to Parks” program. The city began pinpointing awkward, poorly used sections of street space to trasform into mini public plazas. Sometimes involves turning parking in front of a restaurant into café seating. In fact Rebar group has even been contracted to build some of them.
San Francisco Parklets There are currently 22 parklets built in San Francisco, 2 mobile parklets, and a great Promenade on Powell Street. This map also shows a few of the parklets that are permitted and expected by the end of the year (Last updated 11/28/2011). Green = Parklets completed Light Blue = Parklets permitted and expected to be installed by the end of the year Purple = Powell Street Promenade Red = YBCBD Mobile Parklets This map is maintained by the San Francisco Great Streets Project. Visit www.sfgreatstreets.org/parklets for more resources and answers to all your parklet questions. Email info@sfgreatstreets.org to recommend an update to the map.
August 12, 2010, NYC DOT announces its first official "Pop-Up Café." NYC DOT Announces City's First "Pop-up Café," Bringing Innovative Public Space to Lower Manhattan 50-seat temporary space in FiDi enhances street front restaurants New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Department of Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jonathan Mintz, today cut the ribbon on the city's first "pop-up café"—an innovative, temporary new curbside seating platform that provides workers, residents and visitors on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan with a needed public space to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee, a quick sandwich, or just to take in the area's busy streetscape. The 84-foot-long, 6-foot-wide wooden platform, landscaped with planters, wire railing and furnished with 14 café tables and 50 chairs, was requested by two local restaurants for public use in this busy lunchtime and after-work district, where quality seating is in high demand during warmer months. While the platform was installed by the adjacent restaurants, which will maintain and remove it later this year at their own expense, any member of the public may enjoy the seating. The program's effectiveness will be evaluated to help determine if similar temporary spaces should be created elsewhere in the city. The Commissioners were joined by CB 1 Financial District Chairman Ro Sheffe and Downtown Alliance Senior Vice President for Planning and Economic Development Nicole LaRusso in front of Fika café and Bombay's restaurant, between Coenties Slip and Broad Street.
Here’s a Pop-up Café in Lower Manhattan. One of the things that good art does is it predicts the future. It shows us the direction things are headed before the rest of us even know it's going there.
Park(ing) Day, I think, showed us a new way of thinking about the planning and design of streets and public spaces. Rather than every change to the urban environment being a massive, multi-year, multi-million dollar capital project – a redesign of a street could now be done quickly, cheaply and with temporary materials. For those of us who are familiar with software development, this kind of design and development process is very familiar…
You make beta-version of your project. It’s not perfect. It’s not done. But it works well enough. You get your project online so that you can begin to collect user feedback. In collaboration with your users, you get a sense of what’ s working and what is not. And then you readjust your design and development process accordingly.
In the software world it’s often called “lean” design or “agile development.” This is the a lot of software and media is made today. It helps to ensure that the product is moving in a direction that users really want. It helps prevent expensive, time-consuming catastrophes. You deploy a new feature or a design change. You collect data. You see what's working and what's not. And you adjust accordingly. These software design and development techniques are now being applied directly to the design and development of the city.
It’s entirely fitting that this software development mindset would start to influence the way we build cities. Cities, after all, are the original social media. Cities are the technology humans invented to facilitate an efficient exchange of information, goods and services. Good cities facilitate exchange and interactivity. Long before we had Facebook and Twitter we had the city. Increasingly, I believe that the cities, the mayors, the agency officials and the urban planners and designers who are going to be most successful, are the ones who are best able to use lean design and agile development techniques to evolve their cities quickly, intelligently and in close collaboration with their citizens.
Tonight we are lucky to have a panel full of smart, young entrepreneurial practitioners who, in various ways, are working at the forefront of this emerging new form citizen-driven, web-enabled city planning. Ben Berkowitz at SeeClickFix: A tool that let's citizens more efficiently identify, track and solve problems in the public realm. Mike and Aurash, the Tactical Urbanists: They are cataloguing and testing a set of concepts that let citizens actually go out and take hands-on action to improve their cities. And Erin Barnes from ioby.org: Her organization has developed a system that helps citizens come together and actually raise funds for their projects. In the past you might have had to call city government to fix a problem in your neighborhood or try to convince some foundation to support your community’s work. Now, with this group of panelists we see a whole new, web-enabled, community-driven workflow for addressing urban issues. 1. Identify a problem. 2. Implement your own tactical urbanist solution. 3. Raise funds in your own community to support it. But before we get to our guests, I have the honor of introducing to you my co-host this evening, my fellow Brooklynite and my Loeb Fellowship colleague, Jean Lauer. Jean is also an Internet entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of TheSweeten.com, a web-based service that connects home renovation and design projects to qualified contractors, using the Internet to try to make an often difficult process a lot less so. Jean!...
