“The Place Making Dividend”

Planning Commissioners Journal has made available free Edward McMahon’s new article, “The Place Making Dividend”. An excerpt:

Georgetown is the one of the single best retail locations in the nation. Why? Because, the historic neighborhood is one-of-a kind. It is charming, walkable, and filled with tech savvy young adults. Georgetown is the kind of neighborhood that provides “a place making dividend.” This simply means that people will stay longer, spend more money, and come back more often to places that attract their affection…

What would happen to the Georgetown’s of the world if every chain store operator could build their standard, off-the-shelf building? Georgetown would simply cease to be a special place. It would lose its place-making dividend…

Land use planners have spent too much time focusing on numbers: the number of units per acre, the number of cars per hour, the number of floors per building, and not enough time on the values, customs, characteristics, and quirks that make a place worth caring about…

The more one place (one location) comes to be just like every other place, the less reason there is to visit or invest…

…If you can’t differentiate your community from any other community, you have no competitive advantage…

To foster a sense of place, communities must plan for built environments and settlement patterns that are uplifting and memorable — and that create a special feeling of belonging and stewardship by residents. A community also nurtures sense of place by understanding and respecting its natural context, such as rivers and streams, hills and forests, native flora and fauna, but also its community landmarks, whether historic or unique…

Click for the complete article

See also:

December 2: King Street Rezoning Meetings

Videos: King Street Zoning Workshop
Ways to manifest respect [for residents abutting King Street] include… Requiring design standards for all sides of commercial buildings (not just the parts visible from public streets)…

Gazette: “On what gives a city its appeal” (11/29/10)
…surveys indicated that loyalty and passion for cities are most powerfully formed by “soft” factors [including]…

…openness – a substantial share of residents feeling their communities are good places for older people, young singles, families with young children, or racial and ethnic minorities…

…aesthetics – parks and attractive watersides, tree-lined streets, playgrounds and trails…

The significant point is that communities scoring well on these soft factors also have higher economic rates of growth than jurisdictions that offer less “quality of life” assets and presumably stick with “hard” growth strategies like direct subsidies to business. 

Retail Traffic: “Design Without Borders” (11/18/10)
One quality overseas projects tend to have, which U.S. firms have sometimes struggled to emulate, is that they often fit into their surroundings and provide a cohesive sense of place. U.S. mixed-use and lifestyle projects often are criticized for being pretty, but generic—some are compared to the staged settings at Disney theme parks. All the elements of a classic downtown may be present, but the place feels plastic and like it could be anywhere. Likewise, U.S. malls are still trying to shake off their image as generic and boxy fortresses.

“Opposition grows to suburban-style design in Birmingham neighborhoods”
 “The real issue is you have a choice. When a chain store developer – whether it’s a McDonald’s or a Chick-fil-A or a Walgreens – comes to town, they generally have three designs: A, B or C, ranging from Anywhere, U.S.A., to unique, and by that I mean sensitive to local community character,” McMahon said [Ed McMahon, senior resident fellow at Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute]. “Which one gets built depends completely on how much pushback the company gets from local residents and officials about design and its importance…”

Videos: Zoning for King Street, 9/21/10  



Fran Volkmann: “I want to second what several people have said about design standards. Please, please don’t go forward without design standards. We really have to have them.”

Slide: How Design Standards Can Shape Chain Store Development (download a PDF of all the slides)



Brookhaven, NY: Infill Design Guidelines in Two Pages
“We were getting plans not in accordance with what people wanted,” says the town’s principal planner, Diane Mazarakis. “We’d get a new building that looked like a warehouse with a gable roof. It met the setback requirements of the code. So we drilled down and started to develop architectural guidelines.”

Video Highlights from the 10/19/09 Mayoral Debate: Wetlands, King Street, Infill and the BID
Bardsley: “I think we need design standards… Infill isn’t simply cramming in buildings.”