Hindsight is 2020? Re-Examining 12 Key CityMaking Movements

Today is 2-20-2020 - or better yet, in European format, 20-2-20! It also happens to be the 50th day of the decade. which is insane given how much has ALREADY happened this year! Despite the frenzied start to the year, we’ve had our heads down working on some key partnerships, marketing campaigns, and game-changing technological advances here at State of Place, which we’ll be unveiling throughout the next 50 days! But we’ve also been quite contemplative…You see, we had hoped to have reprised the ever-popular Do This. Not That. blog from 2019 at the start of this new decade, but we’re really taking our time putting together this list, especially in light of ever-important primary season here in the U.S., during which key (urban) policy agendas are taking shape. So we’re asking for one more week to pull this together for you, and in the meantime, we’re inviting you to re-examine our roundup of 12 key citymaking movements that have shaped us to date…

Walkability Hit the Mainstream

You know we were totally going to start here! Even though tools like Walk Score were launched in 2007, walkability hit its full “stride” in the 2010s, with the release of multiple studies showing the link between walkability and economic value. Of course, this research, including of the Brooking’s 2012 Walk this Way report which tied (what is now known as) State of Place to higher office, retail, and residential values, was merely quantifying the demand that had been building up for walkability - and the relative short supply therein. Indeed, walkability transformed from what was seen as a niche issue only us advocates cared about passionately to an absolute must-have and a critical requirement for economic development. In fact, today nearly 80% of people want to live in convenient, comfortable, safe, and pleasurable places within walking distance to multiple amenities as opposed to 55% toward the start of the decade. And walkability is now widely-recognized as not only the key to creating thriving places people love and flock to, but also to increasing health, promoting wellbeing, and mitigating the climate crisis. I for one am particularly elated that this “thing” - walkability - I devoted my life’s work to promoting via data and evidence is being held up by so many as a core value in their own lives.

Complete Streets Getting Completer…

While the National Complete Streets Coalition, who advocates for designing streets that balance the needs of multiple people and modes of transportation - was first founded in 2005, it wasn’t until 2010, when the US Department of Transportation issued a strong policy statement around making walking and bicycling more convenient and highlighting several federal codes around pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure that complete streets got their legs (sorry for all the walkability puns! ;)). Communities responded quickly, with nearly 500 government entities across 27 states adopting complete streets policies by 2013. Our friends over at Smart Growth America have stewarded this approach to street design over the past decade, holding countless complete street workshops, providing technical assistance, and OMG yes, even creating a Pinterest Board chock full of awesome examples of “road diets” and the like. But perhaps most significantly, after over a decade of congressional advocacy, the US House and Senate have finally introduced a bill that would require states to design safer streets for all. In fact, this bill needs your support - so click here to tell your reps this is a matter of life and death! We hope not only does this measure get codified into law, but that in 2020, the Complete Streets movement forcefully advocates for a “hierarchical” model, focusing on designing with the needs of the most vulnerable people on the road first and foremost (i.e., pedestrians and bicyclists, especially children, other-abled, and older users), and then balancing out the rest of the modes.

Our Evolving Relationship with Cars…

This past decade marked the beginning of what I can only call a schizophrenic relationship with the car. I for one, got rid of mine in 2007 and have never looked back, nor do I ever anticipate owning one again. But I’m used to being on the edges. But if you recall, back at the beginning of the decade, we were in the midst of a major automotive crisis. Yes, that was this decade! With people suffering economically like no other time in recent memory, in light of rising fuel prices, they began to see their gas guzzlers as money pits. Many traded in SUVs for smaller models and new sales plummeted. With the entire automotive industry at risk, many car companies began looking for - and eventually adopted - new “business” models - and just like that, enter the era of “Mobility” companies. It’s crazy to believe all of this happened in the past ten years. Since then of course, you’ve seen the rise of “mobility as a service” (MaaS) models, including, yes, Uber and Lyft, but also other innovative car-sharing models, and of course, the rise of electric vehicles. But it’s the allure, intrigue, and promise of autonomous vehicles that has captured the most attention from futurists and (some) urbanists alike. What AVs mean for our future is still very much up for debate - and you know we here at State of Place are bullish on transportation powered (mostly) by our own two feet over the 2-ton variety. In fact, that brings us to the other “extreme” (in, as, opposite, not radical, in our opinions) in terms of how our relationship to cars evolved this decade - the proliferation of car-free streets. As we wrote about previously, pedestrian paradises have popped up all over Europe. It’s clear the movement to ban cars from the core parts of cities is gaining hold, as cities begin to double down on emphasizing the needs of people over cars. What’s less certain is which side of the pendulum - AVs or car-free streets - will have more pull, or whether these may eventually be two sides of the same coin…with mutual benefits. One thing seems to be clear — the coming decade will likely be that much more frenetic when it comes to defining our relationship to cars.

Vision Zero Nowhere Near Zero

Keeping with the theme of drivers vs. pedestrians (and bicyclists - we really need one word to capture all non-vehicular modes…), this past decade brought with it a proliferation of Vision Zero strategies here in the US. We even devoted several blogs to analyzing this movement in-depth, assessing what cities were actually doing - or planning to do - to “Get to Zero.” Sadly, it seems like in the time since these Vision Zero frameworks were adapted, many cities have actually seen increases in the number of pedestrians and bicyclists (and now micro-mobilists) killed by drivers. SGA’s Dangerous by Design report found that pedestrian deaths increased by 354% from 2008 to 2017! Meanwhile, we produced evidence that showed that a one-point increase (out of 100) on the State of Place Index (remember, that’s our measure of walkability and quality of place based on nearly 300 built environment features at the block level) reduced the chances of a collision by 12.3%, on average, proving once and for call that urban design is indeed a matter of life and death. And yet, we also noted that the overwhelming majority of Vision Zero strategies did not emphasize street design - but rather mostly focused on enforcement and education, which usually serves only to reinforce racial biases and victim blaming, respectively. We absolutely MUST do better in 2020 and beyond - and with policies like Complete Streets combined with our evidence-based urban design recommendations optimized to save lives (if you want to know how, just ask us for a demo of our software :)) - there’s just no excuse. Maybe we should change the moniker to #NoExcuses…

Micro-mobility Goes Totally Macro

Some of you may know that I’ve actually lived abroad (in Shanghai) for about 60-70% of this past decade (that too, is insane). And while historically, it was US-first trends that spread wildfire-like in China several years after said trend had essentially become blasé in the US, when it comes to all things micro-mobility, it was really China that led on this front. I distinctly remember seeing the first dockless bike - a Mobike - in the streets of Shanghai in 2015. My good friend and colleague, Gavin Lohry and I stopped straight in our tracks (much to my husband’s chagrin - another stop to marvel at some new thing “from an urban design perspective”). What was this cute, small, bright-orange bike with a digital interface doing “all by itself.” How could we unlock it? Ride it? Where could we leave it? The possibilities seemed endless. And sure enough, mere months later, there were seas of orange as far as the eye could see. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just on the road…they littered the streets everywhere and clogged the already tight sidewalks of the historically small streets of the French Concession. The good news is that things cycle very quickly in China, and they figured out - what I guess is being referred to as “curb-management” now - fast. But it’s now the rest of the world that needs to catch up. Having visited Tel Aviv recently, there were “contraptions” everywhere - and I don’t say that pejoratively, there were just so many different forms of “micro-mobility,” I’m not sure what else to call them. They, like many other cities, decidedly do not have this figured out, having been nearly run over several times by folks on scooters whipping by at way too high a speed while the “driver?” was on their cell phone. That said, as I told the tech paper, the Cacalist, these micro-modes fill a need - that’s more than clear by their viral-like proliferation across cities everywhere. But when these “contraptions” are merely popped down into cities - without any coordination whatsoever with the public sector, that is going to be a problem. This tech-bro-like disregard for regulation combined with VC’s 100X unicorn expectations is problematic to say the least, but particularly so when these forces are literally reshaping the city from one day to the next. Listen, I get that the citymaking world has historically been slow to adopt new technologies and methodologies. But urbantech companies need to be better stewards of the tech they introduce and they need to be more accountable therein.

A Love-Hate Affair with Tech

Speaking of tech, technology’s impact on cities in the past decade wasn’t just limited to scaling the concept of micro-mobility. “Urbantech” has really come into its own over the past ten years. I still remember the first time I met Shaun Abrahamson, managing partner of Urban.US in Miami in 2014, just one short-year after he founded what I believe was the first Urbantech investment fund. State of Place wasn’t even a software back then - although we were already crunching numbers behind the curtain, as it will. Both we and the urbantech world has come a LONG way since then. And it’s now not just urbantech. It’s civic tech, gov(ernment) tech, prop(erty) tech, con(struction) tech, and more generally, Smart Cities. In fact, this “ecosystem” blew up in just the latter part of this decade, with the global smart city market generating revenues of over $8.8B in 2018 alone, with the total market expected to reach $1. 4 T by the second half of the next decade. But the landscape of urban tech companies and the like is quite varied - with some companies offering what I can only describe as frivolous offerings aimed at ridding the privileged of whatever small inconveniences they may still face as part of urban living (I’m looking at you Uber - seriously, a helicopter? Just no.). And then of course there’s the stories of WeWork (and the like), who while I happen to know is FULL of awesome, good people truly trying to make places more livable, perhaps the founders’ motives are let’s say not as pure and noble. And then there’s yet others in the Smart City/Urbantech world treating technology itself as the end, shiny goal, and losing sight of the fact that it is and must be simply a means to an end - making cities more resilient, sustainable, and livable - for ALL (not for the few…and privileged). Our hope is that 2020 sees a true harnessing of technology to make thriving, accessible, inclusive, and equitable places people love - and that the VC world follows suit. We know plenty of our fellow founders in this space feel the same. We just hope it continues to proliferate in that direction!

Data, Data, Data!

So keeping to the theme of tech, we of course wanted to highlight the growing role of data in driving better decisions over the past decade. Hello, since, like, we’re a data company! I have to say we’ve (not just State of Place) have made great strides in this arena over the past decade, but boy is there a ways to go! But at least the question of data is legitimately at the table now, and it’s no longer solely in the domain of us datageeks and urban nerds. When I started Urban Imprint (my consulting company from which State of Place grew out of) in 2005, my mission was to translate the results of empirical research into evidence-based urban planning and development design, practice, and policy (guess I’ve always followed the hard road less traveled). This was a hard sell 15 years ago. And in many ways, it’s still an uphill battle now, as the default decision-making paradigm in both planning and real estate development is still very much based on top-down expertise, intuition, gut, and locally-based knowledge. It’s no wonder that many of our customers come to us as a result of starting off their design and development process with the traditional (non data-based) approach and then hitting the “NO” wall, because it’s really hard to defend, justify, and communicate the “why” behind their plans, even if they are beautiful in their own right. We hope that the new decade will flip this script and that many more of you citymakers turn to data as a first line of defense - or as the first road traveled, as it were! Regardless, the good news is that as a data-focused urbantech startup, we’re in much better company these days, with the past decade bringing a sizeable number of data-focused startups trying to make cities better. AAAnd, what I love about this is that an increasing number of them are led by women! My friends Lucinda Hartley of Neighborlytics (who aggregate social data on neighborhoods) and Tara Pham of Numina (who also run analytics for cities using data they collect with their cool sensor) are crushing it, as is Karin Brandt of CoUrbanize (who help communities connect with developers to help, well, “co-urbanize” their projects). That said, we SO need more WOMEN in data and tech paving the way toward making more people-first cities!! Here’s hoping 2020’s data - and urbantech- landscape are decidedly more, well, female!

The World Got More Tactical - and Local

In March of 2015, Mike Lydon and Tony Garcia published a “little” book called Tactical Urbanism, the co-founders, if you will, of the eponymous movement. In fact, in a world - or rather decade - of so much rapid change, what’s interesting is that one of the movements with the biggest impact was focused on small-scale change, at times one block, or painted crosswalk, at a time. But what’s significant about Tactical Urbanism taking hold in the past decade isn’t so much the idea of being able to quickly implement, test, and iterate inexpensive solutions to difficult citymaking problems, like traffic safety or accessibility. What’s most hopeful and impactful about this “DIY” movement is that it’s de facto ground up, citizen-led, and grassroots-based. Taking a page from the “lean startup” mindset - build, measure, learn - the Tactical Urbanism approach enables ordinary residents to come together, take charge, and quite literally be the change they want to see in (their little corner of) the world. And that’s powerful. That’s more than a citymaking movement. It’s an advocacy tool, and one that its founders have been wonderful stewards of. And this isn’t just because we’ve quantified the return on investment of tactical urbanism (though that helps). The proof is in the, as it turns out, New Jersey pudding, where StreetPlans (Lydon and Garcia’s firm) is co-creating (with the help and input from the community, of course) their first ever bicycle master plan - and one of the largest tactical urbanism projects yet, showcasing that this movement is indeed scalable. But they also took on the “man” - the Federal Highway Administration, who insists (without data!) that painted crosswalks are - get this - not safe! We think they have this (and many other things) backward and are glad our friends at StreetPlans and other supporters of Tactical Urbanism (and LGBTQ rights, as it were, since many painted crosswalks are in-fact rainbow-colored symbols of pride - in addition to traffic safety) are fighting the good fight. We see only good things to come in 2020 and beyond for Tactical Urbanism (especially as a potential mechanism for inclusion…but more on that below)!

Placemaking Went Global

We would of course be remiss if a listicle of the top citymaking movements of the past decade did not include placemaking (a significant subset of citymaking) and our friends over at the Project of Public Spaces (PPS). While PPS has been around for over four decades, the past ten years saw them lead a wide-spread global movement around people-first places. While the term placemaking itself means many things to different people, I think that in and of itself is testament to the diversity of this movement across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In the past year alone, I was lucky and honored enough to speak at two Placemaking week events across two cities that couldn’t be more different if they had intentionally been designed that way - Wuhan, China and Chattanooga, TN. But despite the nearly 8,000 miles between these two cities - figurative and literally - one thing rang true across both places, and it’s what holds the placemaking movement together world-wide: people are refusing the status quo, people are demanding to take back their cities, to design them for humans first, to make them more resilient, sustainable, inclusive, and empathetic (and yes, even in China, where I live). And there’s no question that PPS has heralded this movement and humbly encouraged it to spread organically in a way that reflects local culture, preferences, and norms. It’s why were so excited to move our partnership forward with them in the coming decade and showcase the work we’ve already done with them - quantifying the impact of their work - via three of the first our blogs in 2020! Stay tuned…

Climate Change Officially Becomes a Climate Crisis

So I hate to be the Debbie-downer now that I’ve lifted you up with the last couple movements in this listicle, but we certainly cannot ignore that none of these movements will be worth anything in the decade to come if we don’t collectively mobilize them toward addressing what decidedly became (or was finally acknowledged as) a climate crisis this past decade. We are literally running out of time to save the planet - or to put it more precisely, save the viability of human life on this planet (sure the planet will survive - or maybe even thrive - without us). Don’t get me wrong, I think we’ve taken (small) strides toward addressing the climate crisis. As I’ve written about in the past, the Green New Deal, and before that, the Paris Climate Accord, and the UN Sustainable Development goals - all of which arose in the past 10 years - are considerable steps in the right direction, but I fear they - or its proponents - are not integrating urban design into their vision for addressing this climate. We already know that the built environment impacts whether or not we walk - or more broadly, our choice of travel. And of course, if you choose to (or can only make) a trip in a motorized vehicle, that invariably increases the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). And VMT impacts greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). The link is that simple. And no, you can’t just expect that technology will save us here. Even if we figure out a way to complete eliminate emissions tied to driving immediately (accounting too for how that vehicle is made and manufactured), it’s impossible to completely replace the existing stock of vehicles in time to reduce GHGs to where we need to before we’ve reached the point of no return (which we’re leaping toward very quickly). This is not to say that we should not focus on reducing vehicle emissions via technology at all, but it is to say - LOUDLY - that we must at the same time redesign places so that we don’t need a car to get everywhere (or anywhere). Design must be front and center at the climate crisis conversation. For our part, we’re working to make this a(n) (even more obvious) no-brainer by tying State of Place to vehicle miles traveled - and GHGs - in 2020. So stay tuned for that as well…

Design and Health Fully Embrace

When I first started my Ph.D. (nearly TWO decades ago - yup, I’m that old) in 2001, I can’t honestly say that I had thought much about the links between public health and planning - in fact, I had only recently come to know that urban planning was even a thing. My experience of place, growing up in the auto-dominated suburbs of Miami was personal. And all I knew was that place impacted my wellbeing, my safety, my happiness - and my ability to walk, which as a car-less teenager, meant a lot. And I also knew that as a psychologist (what I actually majored in), I wanted to “fix people” - or at least make them happier. And in 2001, I had found my way to UC Irvine to essentially pull these passions together - and, well, fix places as a mechanism by which to make people happier. And it was, I think my first day, definitely my first week, that I met Tracy McMillan, a PhD candidate, who herself was straddling two worlds - in her case, public health and planning. She was the first person I knew making this link and working to quantify it. And via her pioneering work, and the charge of Jim Sallis of Active Living Research, a 10-year initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, myself and many others (including my own PhD mentors, Kris Day, and advisor, and Marlon Boarnet, my de facto co-advisor, given how much time I spent in his office pondering econometrics) contributed countless studies quantifying the link between the built environment and walking - and its many benefits therein. But it was when I heard that the Urban Land Institute - ULI! - was creating a Building Healthy Places initiative in 2013 - that I knew we’d not only finally made a mark, but that our collective, tireless work would be influencing real estate development decisions and that health would forever be part of the equation. And in the years since, ULI has only built upon this network, expanding it to include a focus on active transportation, access to healthy food, healthy housing, and more. For our part, we have actually put in a grant with the NIH to go back to our roots and tie State of Place to health outcomes and real estate costs…stay tuned for more developments on that front as well!

Equity’s on People’s Lips…But

Is it just lip-service?

This past decade, and maybe, more precisely, in the last couple of years, I’ve finally started to hear more and more people talk about equity. Actually, what people usually ask me about is gentrification - and what they’re really asking about is displacement. And the question is usually framed in what is frankly a staggeringly overly-simplistic way:: So if you’re predicting that increases to the State of Place Index (walkability, livability, etc.) will increase real estate value, what about gentrification? Have you just created a tool for gentrification. I am quite used to getting this question, so I (mostly) patiently explain that we are merely quantifying the inevitable - if you make a place better, it will increase in value. However, that doesn’t have to spell displacement IF you implement urban design changes with and for the community and pair that with policy that mitigates displacement, including affordable housing measures as well as workforce development, transit investment, and others. I try to emphasize that urban design is only one part of the equation in real estate development and planning, and that community development, organizing, and policy must be right alongside there with it. I’m not 100% sure I’m getting through to people…because I’m not always sure of the WHY behind their question. Are they truly concerned about “gentrification” or are they merely worried they’ll get “pushback,” and that they feel they simply must ask? And do they actually get it? Do they get that gentrification - again, displacement - is merely a symptom? That it’s merely a by-product of a structurally unjust system? Of built-in spatial injustices. Of deeply-embedded subconscious bias (that’s become SO much more conscious - and even deliberate - since 2016…). Of rampant income inequality. And that equity is about so much more than that? That it’s about deliberately fostering diversity, inclusion, access, empathy - not merely trying to ward off the potential “unintended” consequences or negative “externalities” of making places better?

Yes, this past decade has seen the rise of the word equity, but I don’t think enough people truly understand what that means. Why? Because all of these movements I’ve outlined in this listicle, what stands to negate all of it, all of the progress, all of this enthusiasm, all of this general move in the right direction toward more urban, walkable, livable, sustainable places - is that this has decidedly, frustratingly, maddeningly NOT been the case equally for all people. If you’re a person of color, you’ve likely not shared in the benefits of these movements. If you’re a person of lessor means, you’re likely worse off than you were a decade ago, or no better off. If you’re a woman, maybe you’re in the room now, but you’re alone and you’re still more uncomfortable, more scared, more threatened, less seen in urban environments than our white male counterparts. And if your other-abled in any way, physically, mentally, sensorially…or older or younger, you’re likely disproportionately benefiting from any one of these movements in the “right” direction. And if you’re any of these folks, you’re likely not the ones making the decisions that impact you - we’re lucky if we’re in the room, and if we’re in the room, we’re lucky if we truly have a say and aren’t just being placated to. All of this…this lack of equity in every which way…this is not just a blemish on an otherwise progressive decade. This is not just - oh, well, this is just the start. This is not just a tragedy of the commons. This is structural. This is built in. This is in some cases, by design.

We absolutely MUST flip this script in the new decade. I for one am tired of working twice as hard, waiting twice as long, having to raise (my already loud Latina) voice twice as loud, having to struggle twice as much, as a minority - in my roles as startup founder, speaker, researcher, writer, conference-goer, meeting attendee, or simply as a woman living and breathing in an urban environment. And yet so many others suffer so much more than I ever have. I’m writing this for you. I’m fighting this fight for you. And I promise to do my very best to harness whatever power that State of Place can bring to bear to meet you where you are, listen, learn, earn your trust, raise your voice, and destroy the structural forces designed to keep you down. I hope 2020 is the dawn of more empathetic, intersectional, inclusive citymaking. And I hope you will all join me. To find out more about State of Place, please reach out to us below. In the meantime, we wish you the happiest of all the holidays and are hope you are surrounded by meaningful, caring, kind, and thoughtful people this season. All our very best to you and yours! xoxo