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- [00:12]
Andrew Tuck
Hello and welcome to the Urbanist, Monocle's.
- [00:14]
Program all about the built environment. I'm your host Andrew Tuck.
- [00:18]
Laura Crescimano
Coming up, they're the glue. They connect everywhere we go, all the land uses, all the buildings. But there's a way in which I think we have neglected it or we have thought about it in a more privatized way essentially for kind of individual vehicles.
- [00:30]
Andrew Tuck
How can we reimagine our streets to become effective third spaces in our cities? Today we head to one of the world's most car dependent countries, the United States, to see how streets are being rethought and redesigned with more pedestrian use in mind. From a firm operating out of two cities with proud industrial heritages, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, who are working on converting the geographical center of Indianapolis from a busy roundabout into a pedestrian paradise and to a studio in the San Francisco Bay area. Who are rethinking how citizens interact with public areas from the waterfront to the city's downtown. That's all ahead in the next 30 minutes right here on the Urbanist with me, Andrew Tuck. Reconnecting pedestrians with spaces the that have been designed for cars is an ongoing battle for cities. Nowhere more so than in the United States so called Rust Belt where manufacturing and industry has long been championed and car dependency is still high. Pittsburgh and Indianapolis based firm Merit Chase find themselves firmly within that Rust belt region. But they've been working on a project in downtown Indianapolis to to encourage a new culture of walkability. This summer will be the third year that they have partially shut down Monument Circle, the geographical and symbolic centre of downtown Indianapolis. It currently operates as a vehicular roundabout and occasional events including festivals and demonstrations are also staged here. Merrick Chase will also be developing a longer term vision for Monument Circle to explore its future potential and uses. Well, it's my pleasure now to be joined by the two eponymous founders of the firm, Chris Merritt and Nina Chase, joining me from Indianapolis and Pittsburgh respectively. Chris and Nina, thank you both for speaking with us. Chris, can you perhaps start by telling our listeners who may not be familiar with the city a little about Indianapolis and the kind of city it is.
- [02:41]
Chris Merritt
I live and work in Indianapolis, Indiana. It's the capital city of Indiana. It's right in the middle of the state. It's generally a very kind of relatively flat city. It's easy to get around. It's a very planned gridded city. It was originally a mile Square planned in 1821 by Alexander Ralston, kind of modeled after Washington D.C. so it's on a grid. There's a Circle in the middle that we'll talk about. There's four diagonal spokes. It was originally a mile square and now it's a very big kind of sprawling city. It's about 400 square miles with a combined city county government, which has its challenges and its positives at the time when it was implemented. It's a very big city for events, conventions, sports teams and our kind of Hoosier hospitality. We're a very friendly city and a nice place to raise a family.
- [03:33]
Andrew Tuck
Nina, tell me. I think just hearing Chris talk there, you can see some of the issues that might come to the fore. Such a large sprawling city in many ways. So when you come to the questions of how you get people walking, how you begin to re engineer some little parts of the city, tell me, how did the conversation begin about Monument Circle? And again for our audience, maybe explain what the ambition is.
- [03:57]
Nina Chase
So Monument Circle, as Chris mentioned, is the circle in the center of downtown Indianapolis. It currently operates like a rotary or a roundabout in the middle of the city for cars. It's three or four lanes wide and there are retail shops around the edge of it. But it sits in the middle of downtown Indianapolis and everybody drives through it. And the ambition of the project for Monument Circle fits into a larger ambition for downtown Indianapolis to really rethink the public realm and make more space for people on foot or on bikes and still allow for cars, but make more space for people at a human scale. I think something else that's pretty unique about Indianapolis as a very flat city is that the right of ways between the buildings and between the curbs on the roads are really, really wide. And so luckily we have a lot of room to work with. And so we can kind of use some of the space that's traditionally and historically been dedicated just for cars and put a little bit more of that back to public realm for people. And so that's been the ambition for downtown Indianapolis. We've been working alongside the city of Indianapolis and many downtown partners over the last few years to create a vision for that public realm change. And then Monument Circle is now a project that we've been working on for the last couple of years, doing some pop up work to test some ideas around where we could take away lanes or close parts of the circle and get people excited about making it more of a park space and less of a space just for cars.
- [05:18]
Andrew Tuck
Chris, what's the response been in most cities, and I'm sure in Indianapolis, a city that many, many years ago was seen as a key part of the automaking industry. So you've got that heritage. How has this gone down when you've said to people, okay, we're thinking about re engineering, certainly Monument Circle, but beyond that, as we'll discuss as well in a moment.
- [05:39]
Chris Merritt
Yeah, as you mentioned, car culture is a very important part of our heritage. We're known as the crossroads of America. And though there's been a more recent recogn that the heart of downtown or downtown core can't just function for the big events, the big sports venues that we're so good at and so known for, and folks kind of coming in and out from the suburbs, that's great and we can balance that. But I think there's been a recognition, especially post Covid as folks have kind of gone to more remote work or hybrid work model, that in order to bring folks back downtown and specifically get more people living downtown, we need to focus on pedestrians and the kind of human experience downtown. And so creating more safe, comfortable, walkable environments on streets and in our plazas and how they all connect so you don't drive between the two, but that you can really have a more kind of enjoyable experience. Walking has been a big driver in making downtown healthier and more vibrant. That will also benefit the visitors that we're still kind of interested in our convention and sport business. So it's really come from our civic leader, the mayor's downtown resiliency strategy, our community partners who have really enabled the effort that we've been able to work on.
- [06:57]
Andrew Tuck
And Chris, just sticking with you, give us a couple of examples of things you've done to reimagine this space, to bring it to life as a walkable area as well as recognizing this is, as we were just hearing from Nina, a pop up space. So you need to take the things away at the end of summer.
- [07:13]
Chris Merritt
Yeah, we're working on a few projects. One is the reimagining of Georgia street, which is a three block street in our wholesale district, kind of in the south downtown core, which was reimagined over a decade ago when Indianapolis hosted the super bowl as a kind of festival street. And we're now transitioning that from effectively a kind of flexible street to more of a park environment. So the west block of Georgia street will become a permanent park, closed to cars, and the remaining two blocks will continue to increase pedestrian space for more everyday life that can still flex and function for those big events, but really focusing on the kind of everyday pedestrian experience that connects along Meridian street and North south street in the heart of the downtown that has also been reimagined in the south Downtown plan to remove a couple vehicular lanes that increase tree canopy and pedestrian space that then connects to the Monument Circle project. And Monument Circle is the heart and soul of the city. It's the city's identity and the state's identity. That's the Circle in the middle of downtown, anchored by the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, built at the late 19th century as a monument to Civil War veterans and other war and conflict, but has really been a place of everyday respite and lunch for downtown workers and residents, but also big events and protests and celebration and demonstration. But as a vehicular roundabout has always been imagined for how we can enhance it and make it a better public space kind of every day. And so over 10 years ago, there were initial plans launched to increase park space on the Circle while still keeping the Circle open. And then three years ago, at the kind of end of the planning study, we worked with many downtown partners to actually start to close sections of the Circle and test pop up park for about six months out of the year. The third edition of what's known as Spark on the Circle, the temporary park is actually being installed next week and we'll go through October. And it's really meant to start to kind of test how we might increase more park space programming activation on the Circle itself in a temporary way.
- [09:29]
Andrew Tuck
Nina, it's interesting. Obviously. Chris is joining us from Indianapolis. You're in Pittsburgh. Are you seeing a replication of this narrative in other cities that you work in, that people are embracing this moment of change even when some people are vociferously opposed to the maneuvering of cars off our roads?
- [09:49]
Nina Chase
Yeah, absolutely. It's a trend across the country and especially where we live and work, what we call middle America. So in Pittsburgh and in Indianapolis, both cities are investing heavily in renovating the public realm and thinking about creating more comfortable spaces for people to be and hang out and kind of experience more of that day to day quality. Both of our cities, I would say, do large events really well and have built out infrastructure over the last 50 years to host big events. And a lot of big events associated with sports, especially in Indianapolis. And I think there's a recognition recently that while that works really well for a big event, you have large plazas and large green spaces day to day. Those aren't the most comfortable spaces and they become a little desolate and they have issues of their own when you don't have that large crowd coming through. And so that's been a big topic of discussion in Pittsburgh. There's been a lot of work recently to renovate a number of open spaces in downtown Pittsburgh in a similar way to downtown Indianapolis. And, you know, as landscape architects and for our work in Indianapolis, we've been thinking a lot about how do you create these spaces that still function really well for those big events? You need the big events. They bring in a ton of people. They're fun, they're exciting, but then also, you know, on a Tuesday at lunch, making sure that these aren't spaces that are completely empty. And so we think a lot about paving. We think a lot about street trees and comfort and just shade and creating a nice scale to a space and thinking about movable furniture and how the edges of the buildings, when they hit the ground, that first 20ft, making sure those edges are really active, and they have great retail or restaurants and shops kind of spilling out into them. And so that's been a big push for our work in India. And it's also something here in Pittsburgh that's happening and across cities in America. I think it's a nice shift, maybe, in diversifying just what we prioritize. I think it's always been about cars for the last 50 years and getting people in and out of a city really quickly. And often it's for those big events, get them in for the big sports events, and out. And now we want them to stay and linger and live there more. And there's been a big effort in Pittsburgh to bring more residents to downtown Indianapolis as well.
- [11:47]
Andrew Tuck
Just finally a question each of you. Chris. Maybe for people who go around the world or even in the US who think, oh, my God, this is what we need to be doing. We need to engage people. What's your checklist of, you know, one or two things that you need to think about if you're going to bring the public along with you?
- [12:03]
Chris Merritt
Well, yeah, it's interesting. I think there's a big desire from the public to do this kind of work. I think we did a lot of outreach and engagement to the public. And I think the public, the community around Indianapolis has been asking for this and I think wanting this for a long time. I don't think it's necessarily anything novel or new in the way that planners and designers think about cities. I think it's on a trajectory of, you know, Post World War II in America, where folks, you know, fled for the suburbs, cities kind of thought about what do we do to bring people back. A lot of it was around sports strategy, stadiums, convention centers, which is, you Know what kind of Indianapolis's strategy was. They built a mall downtown. A lot of that worked for a couple decades. I think the kind of reawakening post Covid as folks have stayed in their homes has started us to kind of think down this path again about how to make healthier, walkable, livable cities. And especially encouraging kind of local retail, local housing, better public spaces in the core of our downtown, which will remain the economic engine and the heart of our city and state. And so that investment in public spaces that connect us to each other, our community, it's part of our identity, I think, is what makes cities loved by their residents. And so I think that kind of public desire is there. It's about, I think, really getting civic leaders, mayors, community partners, all aligned under kind of one singular, ambitious vision, which can be hard in the kind of political times that we're in. And so I do think it takes a little bit of kind of ambitious, visionary leadership for creating healthier, walkable cities to be able to do this kind of work, which can take a lot of time, trust building, relationship building, then a lot of hard work to get there.
- [13:56]
Andrew Tuck
And just very quickly. And finally, Nina, 10 years time, what do you think Indianapolis will look like? Will it be the walkable city of your dreams?
- [14:04]
Nina Chase
I think it will be. I think it'll be a lot greener and more comfortable, and I think it'll be a place you'll want to take your family and walk around and hang out and spend a lot of time in. And that is very exciting.
- [14:15]
Andrew Tuck
Nina Chase and Chris Merritt, thank you so much for joining me here on the Urbanist. What is the social and political power of urban spaces? That question is central to the work of Laura Crescimano, a co founder and leader of Sight Lab Urban Studio. Site Lab grew out of a desire to rethink urban design as a social practice and go beyond the technical aspects of the field. The Studio works on many of the most exciting and ambitious urban projects coming out of the San Francisco Bay area, from redeveloping the waterfront to reimagining the downtown area for more mixed uses. Also central to Laura's recent work is the proliferation of third spaces and specifically allowing the public realm and city streets to act as these important spaces that offer a place to inhabit beyond people's homes and workplaces. Monocle's Colotta Rebello recently caught up with Laura, and Laura began by describing where the idea for Sight Lab came from.
- [15:21]
Laura Crescimano
I founded site lab in 2012 and we are a standalone urban design Practice. My background is in architecture. We're a mix of designers and planners from landscape architecture and resilience work. We began out of an interest in thinking about places, not just buildings or spaces, and thinking about how public and private meet and what holds us together, really. I was interested in the social dynamics of place and how to think about designing for that. And so we are a team of about 25, and we work on really the questions that are facing our cities as they grow and transform. So that might be sea level rise and climate change and the coastline of San Francisco and how it evolves. It might be thinking about, you know, we worked with Google on how they expand their workplace and think of it as more of a part of community and mixed use with housing or the downtowns across our country and how they are evolving after the pandemic.
- [16:26]
Carlotta Rebelo
Today, we are talking about third spaces. So can you start by describing them for us for context? A lot of our listeners might be practitioners and involved in cities, but some of them are just like myself, not a background in urban design, just an interest in what happens in our city. So how would you describe third spaces?
- [16:46]
Laura Crescimano
So third spaces build off of the idea. It was actually coined in the 80s by a theorist. You have first and second spaces where we live and where we work, but we don't spend all of our time there. And third spaces are those spaces where we connect, essentially. They could be the coffee shop, they could be the park, they could be the church, they could be the library. It's all of these places that really are what foster connection at a social level beyond our private realm.
- [17:15]
Carlotta Rebelo
Well, let's stay on that concept of connection. I know that you've said that streets are not just infrastructure. They are indeed these platforms for connections. How do you design for connection?
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Laura Crescimano
Well, one of the things we've been seeing is that in many ways our streets have been overlooked over time. Even though they are our most fundamental public space, they are the thing we really all experience and use and need. You know, they are the glue. They connect everywhere we go, all the land uses, all the buildings. But there's a way in which I think we have neglected it or we have thought about it in a more privatized way, essentially for kind of individual vehicles. Right. So when we look at it, we see an opportunity for reclaiming streets, not just to be for mobility, but to be for that social life. We think about that in a variety of ways. In the downtown work, we looked at what are all the streets that could be thought about as public spaces? Do we need them to be dedicated to movement. Can we alternate the timing? For example, for downtown San Francisco, we did a pilot project which is called Landing at Leidesdorf. It's an alleyway, a historic alleyway that's not an essential part of mobility. And it's very special for how historic fabric feels. And so we said, let's close it during the workday to cars so that we can have events, so that we can have outdoor dining. And we selected it partly because it had a combination of restaurants and bars and businesses that were really trying to succeed in post pandemic downtown. And this gave them a bigger platform. So all of that space became a space to gather and to be people talk about pavement to parks. What can we do to get more out of our streets? How can they serve more people, more different times of the day? There's tactical. We call it like the kind of lighter, quicker, cheaper, where it's paint and seating and movable furniture. But there's also the level of capital projects rethinking the design of that streetscape, rethinking the programming and the uses on the ground floor and how different pieces connect to it. And I would say we do this as retrofit in places that exist, but it's also a fundamental part of thinking about any new construction and new developments.
- [19:31]
Carlotta Rebelo
Well, let's turn as well to one of the other projects, which is this freeway greenway in the Portola neighborhood. Looking at the images of the before and after, it's really striking, you know, the ability to find potential. So before we go into the specific project, how do you determine a site's potential for becoming a successful third space?
- [19:52]
Laura Crescimano
With that project, just to give a little bit of the context, we started working with community groups in a neighborhood in San Francisco. And that first was a process of looking at the opportunity. There was already a history there. So we always look at what are the roots or the kernels within a place itself, whether that's environmental or cultural. What are the stories that we can understand from the people that live in that place? And then we say, how can we bring that forward? And so in that case, they had a history of gardening, and it actually was majority greenhouses historically, before it became residential. And so we looked at what were all the spaces that were opportunistic. It's very much opportunism to say, where's a convergence of maybe some strengths or assets, and how can we then amplify that? Or where is there something underutilized that we could capture in that neighborhood? It was a Mix of one site left of greenhouses, these dead end alleyways that came off of the main street, and those dead end alleyways which had opportunity in and of themselves also. Then they were dead ends because they hit a highway. There was a whole buffer between the end of the buildings in the alley and the actual highway that was owned by the state. And so that was the beginning of that project, which is a greenway, because you have that buffer space that's connected to a place people are already going because it's where the restaurants and the coffee shops were. But there wasn't a place to be, a place that you didn't have to pay for seating, you didn't have to buy. And I will say the other part of this is the stewards. So in that place, we also had the community groups who had a vested interest and were motivated to make something of this. And so we worked with them to make that possible. One of the, I think, really important things about that project, it's a project I really love, and it's a community we've worked with since almost our start, so over 10 years, is that that project for us was actually not about a final design. It was actually about how much we could do to clear the path for the community to take up the space and take care of the space and make it what they want it to be. And it's really exceeded all expectations in terms of becoming not just a space, but a community project of, you know, their volunteer days and gardening and artists have crafted the gates to that space. And it started with one segment, and we're now working on the extension of it over multiple blocks.
- [22:13]
Carlotta Rebelo
I wanted to turn to another project, and this is one that I've had a chance to visit. I was in San Francisco last year, and as part of that trip, I had the tour with some people involved in the Port of San Francisco to hear about this waterfront resilience program. Now, this is a really ambitious project, and this is all about planning for the sea level rise and creating a shoreline that is resilient. And what is striking is, you know, visiting the area of the Ferry Building, the Embarcadero, seeing how much it really does work as a third space, how much people use the streets, the plazas, as a way of connecting. So the idea that if a project like this wasn't in place, that might disappear is quite scary. Tell me about this particular project.
- [23:00]
Laura Crescimano
It's interesting because if you look back at the history, San Francisco's waterfront before the 1989 earthquake, the Embarcadero was actually an elevated freeway. The city was cut off from the waterfront. It was not a third space. Right. It was a struggling vestige. And with the earthquake enabled the opportunity, which I think every crisis also creates opportunities to rethink that street. And at that time they took down the freeway, it opened up a new era. The Ferry Building was renovated and created into a wonderful local marketplace that is really a draw internationally and locally. It's a kind of a rare thing. And you have this waterfront that creates an opportunity to have an extended experience. And you can link experiences. Right? So you don't just have one destination. I think that's what's really important when we think about streets as social infrastructure and creating the linkages of public spaces. Now we face a new era where we understand enough about seismic. This began out of looking at the risks around earthquake and the waterfront and then folded in the questions of flooding from climate change and sea level rise. And this is working multi agency Port of San Francisco, also with the U.S. army Corps. That's the federal agency that deals with the most major infrastructure questions in our country. And, and this also is one of those questions of there's an engineering problem to solve, but there's also an experience and an identity and a kind of livelihood of the city question what do we want it to be? And so it's not just a question of how do you protect the edge. It's a question of what is the experience of the waterfront, how the city meets the water. And it also is a question of the Embarcadero roadway. So that is one of those things that we don't want to think just in the vertical of like a wall. You could put up a wall. Right. But no one would be satisfied with that as a. So it is a question of what is the opportunity to reshape that public experience, to push even further into connecting with the water and activating and creating opportunities for social spaces, for parks, but also for uses. You know, we have museums and other institutions are along the waterfront. And so we are working with the port and a large scale team and the Army Corps to say how do we do both and how do we stage that over time as we understand the evolution of sea level rise?
- [25:28]
Carlotta Rebelo
How crucial is that intersection between, you know, climate, conscious design and placemaking?
- [25:34]
Laura Crescimano
You know, I don't think you can disconnect them because climate is not an abstract science. It is a real felt thing on the waterfront. At king tides, the water overtops the wharfs. And so you actually see the water. You glimpse what we're talking about, and I would say in other conditions, we experience the wildfires, we stay indoors when it's smoky from wildfires, we experience the rising temperatures. So these things are part of our experience of place. So I don't know a way to design without that being a part of the conversation and understanding that we are not fixed in time, that there are trends and we need to think strategically about how to evolve and adapt with them. So it isn't only solving for today, which is hard, and that's part of urban design, I would say, is that we're not trying to always formulate a conclusion. We're trying to create a framework to allow many different people over time to shape the place for the needs.
- [26:37]
Carlotta Rebelo
Third, spaces have sort of evolved from being cafes, libraries, places built for people to meet to as we've been discussing streets and waterfronts, what do you see as being, you know, next in this space? Evolution of shared civic life.
- [26:55]
Laura Crescimano
I think we still have a lot of work to do on streets and public spaces and the connection of those to ground floors as well. And what is the opportunity to think more holistically about what are the uses that interact with our public spaces and how we support them so that they aren't subject to each property owner's imperatives. For me, one of the things that's always been vital about these spaces is not just the social or the economic recovery, which is important, but also that they are our civic spaces and so that they support simultaneously the day to day life and, you know, getting an ice cream and going to a playground, but also that they are the spaces where we protest, that they are the spaces where we see each other and where we connect across differences, even just in passing. And so whatever that next thing is, I hope that it continues to support a true public nature.
- [27:53]
Andrew Tuck
My thanks to Laura Crescimano there in conversation with Monocle's Carlotta Rebelo. And that's all for this week's episode of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new editions of the show every week. And you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, design, architecture and urbanism too. Just visit monocle.com the Urbanist is produced by Carlotta Rebello and by David Stevens, who also edits the show. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening, city lovers.