Jodi Dubyoski

A critical component of the WHY of Placemaking has to do with how space makes people FEEL:

We use the term “stickiness” to describe a place that people return to and linger in.

Stickiness is created by co-locating uses and activities in ways that support each other AND by an environment that supports lingering, like when an entertainment district with restaurants and bars is anchored by a music or sports venue and connected by a high quality public space like a plaza

We also know that low-risk interactions, like the ones you have with your regular barista or the neighbor you always pass on your dog walk not only boost our mood and self esteem, but contribute to our overall well being, physical health, and even extending our lifespans!

Here's a sneak peek from a talk I'm giving in a few weeks about placemaking for local businesses. In this diagram, I'm borrowing the structure from Maslow's hierarchy of needs to talk about the foundational elements of creating stickiness and place attachment.

The other day I was flipping through some old resources and I came across some notes and diagrams illustrating different forms of capital. The Eight Forms of Capital is a framework developed by Ethan C. Roland of AppleSeed Permaculture, building on Bill Mollison's Categories of Assets. Inherently, my instinct is to begin to sort the types of capital into groups based on their respective currencies: People, Places, and Things

The Things category contains Financial and Material Capital: Money and physical assets like buildings and infrastructure

Places includes Material, Living, and Cultural (which doesn't mean much without People, but is often tied to Place)

People includes the remaining four types of capital: Social, Intellectual, Experiential, and Spiritual

Some observations about the groupings:

There's an inverse relationship to the number of types of capital in a category and the value that we (Western society) ascribes to that particular category. For example, the Things group is the smallest in terms of types of capital, but arguably the largest, most important, most foundational in terms of how we ascribe value. If you think about it in terms of a pyramid, financial capital forms the base, because we typically need access to financial capital to start to move into the other categories

As Roland notes in the paper linked above, three of four People-coded capital types can be accumulated by individuals, but Culture can only be accumulated as a group. What does this mean with regards to the currency of Culture: songs, stories, rituals, etc.? It's as if they only derive value from being shared.

Kids make great travel buddies.

Train travel with small kids is a delight. They’re funny and insightful, enthralled with the journey—and so, by proximity, are you. On a train with a small child you can share snacks, play games, strike up a conversation with a fellow traveler, or simply watch the world go by together (and point out all of the cows and rivers and airplanes). Perhaps it’s the egalitarian nature of travel by train—we’re all along for the same ride—but I’ve found that kids tend to put their best foot forward. They’re cute and engaging, and they like to be helpful, carrying their own bag, etc. Sure, they can slow down traffic getting on and off the train, which can be stressful when it’s crowded, but on the whole it beats swatting at them blindly from the front seat to break up a fight.

A few weeks ago, I was walking around Amsterdam with my dad, which is a pretty incredible thing in and of itself, given that my family couldn't afford to travel when I was growing up, my first time on an airplane was my senior year of high school, and this was only my third trip out of North America in all of my roughly two decades of adult life. My dad's only trip outside of North America was in 1976, when he was seventeen. So the fact that we managed to be on such a trip together was pretty special.

I grew up on a fairly typical American cul-de-sac, albeit on the outskirts of a former streetcar suburb and therefore less sprawling than many similar-looking neighborhoods in the US. Some financial stretching on the part of my parents as well as some generous family reallocation of resources made it possible for us to live there, and it was a pretty good place to grow up. It was, however, 20 minutes from most of our regular activities, restaurants, and entertainment, and my mom spent the better part of however long it took to raise 7 kids driving us around the counties surrounding Baltimore.

Two ideas keep sticking with me as I continue to reflect on last month’s CreativeMornings talk on Revival:

The first is about the myriad of ways that exist to organize a creative life. Our local speaker, an interior designer turned salsa dancer/teacher/fashion designer/interior designer again/entrepreneur, appears to fall firmly into the camp of creatives that build their income-generating activities around their passions and don’t have much separation between their work and the rest of their life. When asked what she did for rest, the speaker paused, then laughed (then admitted that she does put time in her schedule to go down to the river when the weather is nice).

It's easy, when trying to make sense of complex systems like cities, to latch onto frameworks that are clear and legible. While such frameworks are useful in helping to simplify complicated problems, the temptation to apply them universally can lead us down another version of a path we're trying to escape: inflexible codes and ordinances that don't stand the test of time.

Overall population, population density, the sizes and density of buildings, public transportation networks, major employers and industries--these are all things that shape the uniqueness of a place. What IS universal is that nearly every locality (edit: in the US) has outdated, inflexible ordinances on the books that need to be revisited if we're going to continue to build places that support human thriving in the 21st century and beyond.

I’ve gotten obsessed with learning about how we can design our neighborhoods for happiness and health, ever since college, where I quickly learned that the way to get myself out of a funk is to get out of the house and walk to the coffee shop. Without fail, I’d start my walk feeling low but by the time I got to the register to order my coffee I’d inevitably see someone I recognized, have a brief conversation, and feel alive again. It’s like proof of life. Someone sees you, remembers you, and confirms your existence as part of a community. Throughout the course of my professional life, it’s been an ongoing project for me, digging into the whys behind this and how we can design more places that make us happy and strengthen the social health of the places we live.