TRANSCRIPT IN FULL BELOW
Good morning all. It's really wonderful to be joining you here today. I can already feel the excellent energy in the room, just like last night. Thank you so much to Manasvini for the opportunity to give this keynote presentation. And of course, thank you also to Anupam Yog for the opportunity to visit here India, and as you heard, to go on a whistle-stop tour of some really fantastic and as we heard, really groundbreaking innovation projects across India.
I think I've learned so much in the last couple of weeks. It's going to take me a long time to really be able to digest and think about what it all means, so I won't be sharing detailed insights on that tour today. And as we heard also from just earlier, it is my first trip to India so I'm certainly not going to be pretending to be any kind of expert when it comes to managing the dynamics of place here.
But I think as one of my new colleagues mentioned this week, we are very much shaped by our distinctive places and territories and cultures. But at the same time, we do have common goals. And I think we have a lot to learn from each other. I know certainly Australians like myself, urban innovation strategists, have a lot to learn from you. So I'll be imparting some of the insights that I've certainly gathered over my career, but I'm also really very much looking forward to learning from you all today.
Just a little bit more about me and who I am. I come from Sydney, Australia, whereas where I've essentially worked as an urban strategist for the better part of 20 years. I have to confess, my daughter doesn't really like that job title. She's like, "Could you not be a hairdresser or a doctor or something simple that I can tell my friends?" But there you go. That's it. I suppose the kind of territories that I cover, it's not only urban design in the sense that it doesn't only cover sort of hard infrastructure and traditional urban design, it's not only digital strategy because digital strategy also encompasses community and cultural engagement. It's not only culture and community because it's always about the integration of that and the built environment. So if you've got any ideas about job titles, placemaking strategists might work.
In terms of my journey career wise, I've spent much time looking at those higher order urban strategies. Smart cities were a real interest for me for many years. I thought in 2013 that the smart city was kind of done, but I was wrong there. Didn't pick that one in terms of the level of growth. So I was really involved in that higher level strategy space for a long time, but I increasingly was attracted to the idea of working in a much more fine-grained way with communities and cultures. I suppose, because to me, that's where we can really make places work. That's where we can really generate successful urban outcomes.
So in around 2010, I set up ESEM projects, which is a creative placemaking practice, and we've been delivering community and culture focused placemaking projects ever since. I'm also someone really interested in knowledge capture and knowledge transfer. And so part of my role and why I'm here today and on this excellent tour has been as part of my new fellowship with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where I'm establishing a new field around regenerative placemaking. So that's a bit about me.
As you can tell, I'm someone pretty passionate about place. But to be honest, I don't think I'm the only one. In fact, I know everyone is passionate about place. And just for now, I'd invite you to have a little think and reflect on a place that you love. Think about what that place might be. It might be a childhood home or perhaps it's your favorite street. It's a place where you work perhaps. Or is it a holiday destination? Let your mind wander there. I certainly know places that re shaped me like my uncle's farm when I was growing up. And think about what connects you to that place. So is it the people? Is it the memories? Is it the smells and the sounds? We often don't notice these elements about place. It might be the bird call there. Birds are often very distinctive markers of place and place experience, and they connect us to places.
I think places have a really powerful effect on us, and they're central to who we are as people. As part of my kind of obsession with place, I did a PhD on how we've come to use place in our culture, in our cultural transformations. Interestingly, I discovered that the early arts of rhetoric were centered around this idea that we use places as wax. This is a quote from 95 AD if you can read that. Ideas of really connecting and impressing places upon us were how we actually designed rhetoric and debate in western culture.
So now I'd like you to think about a place that is successful, a good public space that you can think of. I've put a couple of well-known examples here, Paris, we also have the High Line, examples like this that we know are successful public spaces. And think about what makes them work. Good public spaces have elements of story, of culture, of ecology and heritage, and they kind of come together. They interweave to create this really strong identity that leaves that lasting impression on us. They're also easy to get to, hopefully, or they're walkable. There's places for people to mingle and to gather.
So we know all these things, but importantly, these places also capture great value. So the example of the High Line in Manhattan, I think it's a very well known example. It's an excellent example of a renewal initiative, turning an abandoned rail corridor into a linear park. So this was completed in 2014 after 13 years of planning and design and development. The 115 million that the city invested on the High Line has since generated over $2 billion in private investment surrounding that linear park. And that in turn is set to generate about a billion dollars in tax revenues for the city over the next 20 years.
So we know that good places are really valuable, but it turns out also that great places do take time and commitment. They can't be taken for granted. Especially in a world of rapid change, they don't just happen. I think it's really important to recognize that some of the most valuable real estate today in cities was at some point vulnerable to demolition due to the big forces of urban progress, to accommodate greater growth, greater speed, and greater efficiencies.
Sometimes places really have to be fought for. So places like Amsterdam, really well known as a bike friendly city, this was nearly demolished in the 1970s to make way for new expressways. And at that time, communities had to rally together. They took to the streets to stop this. And this particular protest was about saving kids' lives because the community was really worried about what cars were going to do to children's lives there. And they were successful. They maintained their historic core, and now Amsterdam is the city that it is today.
So I would actually argue that the whole focus on placemaking as a urban principle can really be traced back to the levels of destruction into the older fabric of cities that were seen across the developed world in the 20th century. So in other words, we kind of start to value place when we encounter what happens when we fail to care and cultivate them.
So I know that we are here today to talk about place innovation, not just place history. I thought it would be useful to sort of step through some of the forms of innovation that we've seen since this kind of emergence of place as a guiding principle and what it tells us about where we're going as well. I mean, ultimately, the key message here is placemaking is not new, but it's really critical to building strong value in communities.
So these are just different forms of innovation that we've seen since around the 1960s and '70s, starting with that kind of community-led protest movement that protected this really valuable heritage core of cities. But then moving on to the professionalization of place management and placemaking. And then I think we're on this kind of cusp of a new form of placemaking that I think is really exciting. I think we are only at the beginning of it, but it's going to be a really important new development. So I'm just going to talk through some of these stages in a bit more detail.
So as I mentioned, since I think of first generation placemaking is when we all began to realize that if we didn't protect places, then they would be lost. The city where I come from, actually the builders, laborers all bandi together to stop development. We don't like that much. But ultimately, what that did was protect some of what is most valuable real estate in Sydney today. Likewise, places like Washington Square, home to a major protest movement led by Jane Jacobs in the '60s, that led to that realization that places are for people, and this of course is a highly valuable public space today. Jane Jacobs who led that protest movement has really established a whole kind of tradition and discipline of urbanism that is about places for people. It's more than a buildings, it's about the people that shape it bit.
In more recent times, we've seen, as I mentioned, the professionalization of placemaking practice. So I think this is really where in the context of new urban development, a focus on what is the quality of the public realm. If you don't have high quality public realm, you'll detract from the value of your investment and you'll ultimately not produce a successful place. And this has really been about amenity. I would see it as a strong amenity focus and a strong activation focus as well. Accessibility, amenity, comfort, safety, things like this.
Ideas like Jan Gehl's Life Between Buildings don't only focus on the building itself, focus on what happens between those buildings. That itself is like a programming space. How can you program your public spaces in ways that attract people or that further attract people from there? In this context, we've had more and more research that shows the way that increased accessibility, walkability, and safety then has yield increases on local properties. So we know trading can go up by 40%, and I'm quoting here research from Living Streets. But good urban design will also raise retail rents by up to 30%. So it makes good economic sense to design public spaces that are amenable and safe.
The work of organizations like the Project for Public Spaces has been hugely influential for not just recognizing that this is important, but producing a whole series of resources and taxonomies about different areas of focus, sociability, uses, access, comfort, and image. And within that, you can't quite see on this particular slide, but within that, lots and lots of strategies and tactics and ideas about how you can program your public spaces to be successful. But there's huge amount of knowledge resources in this space.
I've really witnessed in my time in this field the growth of placemaking agencies. We've got a Center for Public Spaces, PlacemakingX, Digital Placemaking Institute. We have a number of placemaking focused agencies in Australia.
In this time, we've also witnessed the city emerge as a whole canvas for public art. A program that one of my team leaders has developed in Australia is one that partners artists with building owners and the local government. And through those partnerships, that allows artists work to be essentially propagated across the city. And it's now a really leading model in Australia, and it means that that cost of the investment is shared across the private owner and the public agency as well.
It is also the opportunity to think about our environments as experiences. Experiential design is a huge area. It's an area that I'm very passionate about. How can we create hybrid experiences between digital and physical that bring cities alive? These have been shown to be huge economic attractors for precincts, and I know there's wonderful work in this space happening here. Development of nighttime festivals is another kind of key area here. There's this opportunity to build community even in not just the big cities, but also the smaller cities to build long-term connections in communities through nighttime programming.
So this has been wonderful from my point of view as this place nerd to see the growth and evolution of all kinds of different taxonomies and practices and programs around place. But I guess in the last few years, I think I've certainly noticed a change in the ethic around placemaking that's really significant and I think shows this opportunity for new kinds of partnerships and programs. Of course, we've gone through the COVID pandemic, and that has led to a lot of changes in how we think about CBDs, what the role of CBDs in central areas are in cities. Why do we gather? I mean, of course it's not uniform across the world, but occupancy rates are down particularly at the end of the week, the Friday. And what does that knock-on effect have on retail and other kinds of businesses in the city? It's a real issue that many cities are grappling with. And I'm sure there is lots of expertise around how to approach that in this room.
This kind of context though means that there has to be some new kinds of thinking about why people should come to work, why people want to gather in these spaces. And in this context, I think we also need to be mindful of the other kinds of pressures that there are on cities and communities more broadly. We are living in a climate emergency and there's widespread fear and concern about environmental change and what we are facing this century. In this context also, there's deteriorating conditions of mental health, growing conditions of vulnerability and alienation in cities. So I see new innovations in placemaking that are working to kind of directly address these challenges, linking community, community building, ecology and environment, health and wellbeing and creativity and culture in much more integral kind of purpose-driven ways.
The purpose of connection is really important. We can't just presume that people will gather that these spaces will automatically be programmed. I think we need to think more clearly about the intentions of the why.
I thought I didn't mention earlier, but I am on the ULI Product Council for Resilient Cities in Asia Pacific. I think it's just been renamed Net Zero Product Council. I led in that context a community vulnerability working group. I mentioned in the context of thinking about urban resilience, another buzzword that we actually, to think about resilience, we also need to look at what vulnerability. There was a lot of support for that framework. And we looked at in this context, the health crisis, aging, reduced mobility, mental health issues, natural disasters, some of the issues that I've just mentioned. And what does that have? What does the impact of that on our cities? It has a significant impact on value, restrictions on movement, maintaining activity, restrictions on how we can communicate and engage, access to services and restrictions on economic activity and income. So ideas of vulnerability are kind of increasingly in the mainstream of thinking about what it means to build a great place.
So in this context, we started to look at what are the new kinds of urban design frameworks and principles that can be applied to ideas of community vulnerability. I was really taken by this one. It's the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Guangzhou in China, and it's essentially the first urban design framework that really holistically addresses the health and wellbeing of inhabitants at its core. And I think that's a really interesting shift to actually center mental health and wellbeing at the core of what the purpose of that place is. I mean, it's a master plan, so let's see how it plays out. But just to have these principles centered is I think important.
Another really key idea that's really shaping the way design is happening in public places is of course the idea of regenerative design. As we're living through these different kinds of crises, the climate emergency in particular, we're going through this quite radical rethink of what it means to be human. Many of us have grown up with this idea that we're at the peak. Everything beneath us doesn't matter. We can use it, we can extract it. No problem, we're at the APEX. But actually that's going to have increasingly problematic impacts on what it means to be human for this century. So we have to completely rethink what it means to be human as part of connected ecosystems. When you have that shift, you suddenly think, "Well, how can we work with our environment in ways to regenerate it?" That's actually our role as placemakers today, is to do that work.
I've been particularly impressed, in fact, blown away by my visit to [inaudible 00:20:01] earlier. I think it was last week. And it was really, as we heard, and we'll hear much more later today, an example of the way that a new precinct development can actually be actively regenerating its land. And that itself is really attractive and exciting from an innovation perspective.
So I think from my point of view in the way that I've been adjusting to this shift, I've also focused much more not just on the kind of programming of a space. So yes, the lighting installations. Yes, the public art is amazing and beautiful work. Yes, the idea is about amenity. These are all kind of fundamental, as I mentioned, amenity safety program, really critical. But then there's a kind of like, why would people want to gather? What is their purpose? How can we connect with the stories and the people and the areas of vulnerability that people are facing? So some of the programs that I've developed in recent years work with artists to share their story, really building empathy with community in spaces and giving them platforms in the built environment to share who they are and their journey.
There's a whole kind of series of tactics that are emerging now that link the experiential and design, art, programming, but also think about air, canopy, water, soil. Maybe there's relationships between the two. Could artists and scientists gather and could there be an art installation that reflects that relationship? I think we want to see more of this integration of the ecological and the culture as a center of what makes a good place. That's really innovative as I see it.
And increasingly, I think we think of trees as critical anchor tenants. They are not just nice to have. They're absolutely critical to what makes a place successful. How can we build communities of practice around caring for trees? We can plant them, but maintaining them is tough. We need to have cultures of care around our beautiful trees.
I also lead a project called Storybox. This is one that's kind of like hacking the media, outdoor media ecosystem to say, "Well, couldn't we use screens to actually build community connections in place? Couldn't we use this as platforms for public art? Couldn't we also develop new partnerships and programs with cultural institutions, media broadcasters, not-for-profit organizations to give them space in our cities to exhibit and program as well?" I mean, every place I like to say is just full of amazing stories, real and imagined, and it's our job... Well, it's my job as a placemaker, as I see it, to find them and cultivate them and support them in ways that it's not just nice for me and interesting for me, but also for these people, sees them and recognizes their stories as really central to what makes that place meaningful. What is the impression that they offer?
We also use placemaking in this environment to bring ideas about public issues into public spaces as well. So what I'm saying here is there's this shift from purely thinking about lighting and infrastructure and so forth to thinking about what are the key kind of stories and issues that can attract people. It's not enough, I don't think, to say we want to be culture. It's like we want human. What is your story? We want the specificities of what brings people together within that.
So this is really my key message that I want to impart on you today, is that increasingly, the shifts in placemaking are more and more focused on defining the why in ways that are purpose-driven. So ideas like this place is here to be your community. Well, this place is here for you to become a better version of yourself. Or this place is here to restore how you can live with nature. Or this place is where creative people come to learn from each other. These are all really clear kind of propositions to people about why care about this place, why gather here, why come, why visit. But of course, there's the other why, and the other why is really that each of these innovations and developments are underpinned by also improved models of value capture that do evidence the value of high quality and purposeful places in cities.
As I've mentioned, there's more and more evidence that shows the values of these innovations in placemaking. We know walkability increases rents. We know that urban renewal of the public domain also supports public and private value uplifts. I've talked about the High Line example. But there's also increasingly the need I see in terms of future innovation to ensure that we do capture this value in a more data-driven way actually. We always talk about, "Oh, these are intangible values. We couldn't possibly measure them." But I think no, we do actually have to try because it is really uncritical for you to be... I see, for us to be able to demonstrate to people like you here today that there is really significant value uplift to be had in doing placemaking well.
So I hope that I've impressed upon you my passion for placemaking and also wider passion for the value of good places in cities today. So we know places are important, they're valuable to cities, but they do require commitment from many different parties. We talked about, or I talked about people, people first. Everyday people make a difference, but so too do governments, professions, professional place managers whether they're public or private. And these alliances between public, private, and people are really what make good places successful. I think ultimately we just can't afford to not care about their success. Thank you. I'll finish up there.
And I have enjoyed meeting so many of you today, and please do stay in touch if you like.
