1) Memorable communities have overcome The Basic Paradox: what sits deeply in our memory and our heart is at odds with what we demand our municipalities focus on.

Most of what municipalities do is provide basic services. Clean water. A place for the toilet whoosh to go. Roads and sidewalks. Services that save your life when you need them. But no one loves a place for its great pipes, unless it goes terribly wrong. In advanced economies, we expect the basics to be there and to be done well.

When citizen surveys have questions about what services a municipality should spend more vs less on, the “soft” services lose out on a comparative basis. But memorability is formed from the long-tail of services – in expression of culture and creativity, in pursuit of recreation, in elevation of beauty in what we see, and in elevation of community animation in things like events. Municipal infrastructure is everywhere we look and can influence pleasure, happiness, and memorability. However, public desire for tax efficiency, to the exclusion of other considerations, pushes in the direction of basic and uninspired.

2) Memorable communities have overcome The Placemaking Paradox: we love what’s different and unique, but as taxpayers we don’t like approving it or paying a penny more for it.

The Eiffel Tower, built for a World’s Fair in 1889, was hated by the French. A leading critic at the time described it as “a hole-riddled suppository.” There was loud demand to tear it down after the Fair. Today, it’s the most iconic symbol of France. The Peace Bridge in Calgary was criticized for its $25 M cost. Google image search “Calgary” today and it’s the most iconic Calgary image and a magnet for the hundreds of people that can be seen strolling the bridge at any given time. It has become welded to the psyche of Calgary as a dynamic, progressive place. One can’t reasonably buy the free marketing value of an icon that sticks out from the crowd. Change creates critics….knee jerk reactions that soften over time…the average that comes from decision by large groups….lots of human-nature psychology involved that can write its own book.

3) Memorable communities have overcome The Standards Paradox; urban planning and engineering standards have created orderly development, but citizen surveys bemoan it as “cookie cutter” and boring.
Conformity dulls the senses. A light standard looks the same across North America. We can choose differently, but it requires leadership, organizational culture, and community to always be looking through the prism of “different.” A Shreddie was just a Shreddie until a ¾ turn in a marketing campaign convinced some to believe it was a completely new product. Evolution works. And it doesn’t need to be any more expensive. It can be purely in the mind as an attitude that seeks pursuit of different and better.

Why does it really matter so much?

1) Residents want to love where they live and have pride in its ambition. They account for most new investment in a community. Placemaking is therefore a good long-term return on community investment.

2) Investors most value ambitious communities in today’s more footloose times. In fact, a rising proportion of our workforce – the creators, knowledge workers, and independent entrepreneurs – make location decisions based on quality of life, which includes feeling of “community beautiful.”

3) Tourists most value differentiation, beauty, experience, and animation; these folks are an open source economic multiplier that grows business and generates taxation that pays for desired services and amenities.

4) In a world of accelerating change, community adaptivity – the ability to peer into the future and grasp relevant opportunities at speed – will shape the difference between high performance communities and communities that struggle. One can see community adaptivity worn on a sleeve in the level of ambition in what is being built.

5) Socially, we are more connected than ever, but lonelier than ever. It’s a paradox of our technological-today. More than ever, we need to reconnect the ability for places to help us gather and to connect…on real terms. This makes placemaking important to community health and well-being, and cultural vibrancy.

There’s no universal placemaking framework. It’s defined on community-specific terms. And it shouldn’t only be about public spaces. Most of what we see around us is private space. If we can enhance the capacity of everyone to think differently about creative expression in geographic space, we can tap a more transformative power of placemaking, which is to create elevated and connected experiences that are shared.

Here’s some places to land on, and connect the dots between, in generating your Community Beautiful agenda and story:

Start with the term. Placemaking is about a municipality doing its planning. How about “Community Beautiful” as a friendlier term that makes it about us as a community. Pick your own. Make it funky.

Add your own action-agenda dash of ingredients from several sources: Engineering (infrastructure standards like lights, garbage cans, benches, and road design that includes greenery); Planning (design guidelines/visualization, mixed land use); Civic Architecture; Downtown Enhancement that feeds the geographic soul of community; Linked Pedestrian and Pathway Systems, because research says it’s our #1 form of recreational activity; Community Animation in key areas like events; Visible expression of art, culture, and creativity that celebrates our uniqueness; and Heritage and Natural Features Preservation.

Community Beautiful can think big, like mixed-use planning at a neighbourhood scale or a cool new community entrance sign. But we often get stuck there thinking it’s expensive. You can pursue the small, in an “Earth that laughs in flowers,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in a vinyl-wrapped utility box program, in paint colours that move beyond resale beige, or in an anti-graffiti program. You can pursue policy that is free but inspired, like mixed land use or road standards that incorporate greenery. You can walk confidently into the future by creating flexible land uses like pop-up developments, markets, and micro-spaces that nurtures entrepreneurial spirit we will need more of amidst economic transformation. We are also entering a brave new world of technology-enabled, adaptive or temporary expression and connection – from Banksy to graffiti walls to projection mapping, to sensor-based installations.

The key is…just start, with community agreement about “why” it’s important. Do small things – from cool park bench to fresh paint. In recognizing the power of cumulative impact of the small things in enhancing perception of place and resident satisfaction, bigger and more ambitious stepping-stones reveal themselves as confidence and success gets under the belt.

Ultimately, Community Beautiful is about enabling expression of the deeper souls of us. It’s an expression of our pride in place as residents. It is about US…the cool legacy we want to leave in the places we call home. It just so happens that in empowering ourselves to rise above the ordinary, we sow the seeds of sustainability and prosperity in future because it’s what the world also loves, and needs more of.