It’s easy to say you love your place. It’s much harder to show it, in part because of the way we think about the nature of city building. We see powerful leaders in government or business, or rich developers and corporations, build cities. Most of us are spectators to the process because it all seems so very big. We need to show people — everyday citizens — that we have a role to play.
Citizens can’t build roads, schools or waterfront parks. We cede this power to government and business. And what we can do — pop-up festivals, yarn bombing, block clean-ups and murals — is often seen as nice or sweet, but not “serious” city building. Because of this, citizens don’t believe in the importance of small-scale efforts.
Do not mistake small for unimportant. We need to re-calibrate our radar to see how important small, hyper-local and fun interventions are to the health and progress of our communities.
There is game-changing power in these small things. Perhaps not in the first iteration, or even the second or third, but as citizens learn how to make things happen, they gain confidence and advance their ideas. Small aspirations become big, and a few iterations down the road, silly projects and their instigators — co-creators, as I call them — may create a transformative project.
Even if they don’t, along the way, they create experiences that make our cities better, more interesting and more lovable. What we build, we value. What we own, we cherish.
In my work with cities, I do an exercise called the “$500 Project.” I show lots of examples of fun, cheap and creative projects led by citizens all over the country. Then, I challenge participants: If you had $500 to make your city a better, more interesting and more lovable place, what would you do?
This challenge works because it pitches at the right level. If I said $5,000 or $10,000, that is too much money. But $500 pitches at the right level, where we look at each other and realize we could raise $500 from what’s in our wallets.
It’s a project we could do next weekend with some supplies from Home Depot. It makes us the doers, not the city. This is the key shift. We have to believe that we can make things happen and see that small, hyper-local projects can have big impacts. Once we learn that, we begin to see opportunities everywhere and, hopefully, we become the grassroots, bottom-up complement to the city’s top-down, big project efforts.
Cities mostly get the big stuff right. There is a playbook for work at the city scale and all kinds of best practices and consultants to help cities through major projects. But there is no playbook for small, quirky, citizen-led endeavors.
Co-creators and projects they initiate are the magic variable — the unexpected X-factor — critical to making great places. If we all follow the handbook, the established formulas, we all arrive at about the same results. When we add the co-creative variable to the mix, we get the extra spice of something different, and the possibility of something amazing.
For more information, go to: http://fortheloveofcities.com/
Peter Kageyama, author of “Love Where You Live: Creating Emotionally Engaging Places,” lives in St. Petersburg, Fla.
