In March 2007, The Project for Public Spaces' Fred Kent visited Chicago to meet with many of the key leaders in the Livable Streets movement. Kit Hodge, who was a key figure with NYCSR's birth in NYC, arranged several meetings and presentations - including a very productive, private meeting with Cheri Heramb, the Commissioner of Chicago DOT.
It's apparent that Chicago is on its way to developing and implementing key strategies that will transform its streets into safer, interactive public places. Just one is Mayor Richard Daley's Pedestrian Advisory Council of which Heramb is a co-chair. But even more vital is the air of cooperation and openess that exists in the city government to make a good faith effort to work with communities and advocates to change Chicago for the better.
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Ethan Kent:</i> [00:03]
Project for Public Spaces was invited here to Chicago by Kit Hodge who
actually helped to organise and found the New York City Streets Renaissance
while she was in New York working for Transportation Alternatives.
She set up a bunch of key meetings for us. First with the Commissioner
of the Department of Transportation and a lot of her key staff.
Then a public presentation where Fred Kent, the President of Project
for Public Spaces presented, followed by the Commissioner. We
got a lot of people excited.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Fred Kent:</i> [00:27]
Your streets are the greatest opportunity as they are in any city for
defining your city and changing the whole perception of it. For
seven years we’ve designed our city around cars basically. And
now how do we spend the next five or ten to 20 years designing our cities
around people, and taking the car largely out of the equation?
Not emptying the city of cars, but bringing it back in the context of
each neighbourhood. We just talked to about 130 people and they
were so energised and engaged and so passionate about their city, and
they’re all leaders. People coming from many, many different
neighbourhoods, from many professionals. It’s an organic thing.
It has to be done by a store owner here, a little… a person here.
You don’t know what it is, it’s right there. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Ethan Kent:</i> [01:10]
We actually challenged them to go a lot further, to go for what they
call context sensitive solution to actually doing placemaking, and the
Commissioner really liked that idea. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Cheri Heramb:</i>
[01:19] Context sensitive design is the [unintelligible 01:21] transportation
community. I really like placemaking much better because context
sensitive design doesn’t mean much to people. So I think we’ll
talk about placemaking. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Fred Kent:</i> [01:32]
She blew me away. I mean she just totally loves the idea of placemaking.
It totally resonated with her whole focus for Chicago. She’s
about building communities. She’s not about this idea of moving
traffic.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Cheri Heramb:</i>
[01:47] We’ve been doing a variety of workshops at [unintelligible
01:49] with our staff on placement. We’ve also got a new group
that we’re working with, it’s the Mayor’s Pedestrian Advisory
Council that brings in experts from all over the city, from the hospitals,
from institutions, education, the Parks is participating and our intention
is to make Chicago a place where not only can people walk safely, but
also enjoy the experience.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Ethan Kent:</i> [02:17]
More than anything else, what we’ve been struck by is how open they
are with talking to us, talking about really challenging ideas, to talking
about how to open up the public process, to focus to the transportation
issues on broader outcomes, to look at themselves, the DOT, as really
a community building agency.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Fred Kent:</i> [02:33]
What we’re talking about is how do we take these kind of storied cultures
where the kids stand on the street corner and talk to each other and
play ball and their parents are talking and, you know, the kind of neighbourhoods
that we like to be part of? How do we understand those and how
do we integrate those into a street system which is more about reducing
friction, or getting rid of friction, and we need to bring those two
worlds together? It’s really kind of energising to come here
and to see the enormous receptivity the ideas that we’ve been trying
to get into New York City system and there seems to be too many barriers
to the New York City politics that don’t allow these ideas to percolate
up from within the communities. And it’s a kind of a tragedy
and I think in the long run it’ll be destructive for New York
City. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Ethan Kent:</i> [03:23]
We had a meeting with the advocacy leaders in the city, a lot of young
people that are involved in a lot of community based projects here.
It was really exciting meeting all these people and seeing sort of the
counterparts of the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign in Chicago. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Fred Kent:</i> [03:35]
The only way to design a good place is through people in that community,
about asking what they’d like to do in that place. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Ethan Kent:</i> [03:40]
And what we’ve found is, you know, both communities and the professions
in city government have sort of atrophied and they’re willing to be
sort of creative and there’s sort of this structure that we sort of
put everyone into these boxes, you know transportation and parks and
buildings. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Fred Kent:</i> [03:55]
And they’re trying to work together. I mean to be very honest
with you, you’ve got some very good people here and they just need
to go a little further, and I think they can become enormous allies.
But they need you more than you can imagine. I’m watching this
streetsblog and the stuff that Ethan and Clarence are working on as…
I’m watching to see how transformative that is within New York.
So it’s a great time for change and maybe New York can learn from
Chicago. Chicago’s going to get a lot better than New York without
any question. Perhaps the change in administration within the
Transportation Agency could actually open up a whole new era for the
city and attract many, many partners.</font> <br></p>
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