Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper: A Low-Cost, High-Impact Approach

San Leandro By Design is an initiative by the to engage businesses and residents to have conversations that matter and to transform us into a vibrant, sustainable and economically robust community.

http://www.pps.org/articles/lighter-quicker-cheaper-a-low-cost-high-impact-approach/

From creating new uses for abandoned buildings and a parking lot to putting chaise lounges in Times Square, “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” is a practical approach to revitalizing city spaces that are in transition. High-impact results can emerge from a series of small-scale, inexpensive improvements that occur incrementally, encourage entrepreneurial activity and bring out the best of a community’s creativity.

Can you name three areas in San Leandro that you pass on a regular basis that you wish could be different? That empty lot with a broken down fence that is often overgrown and dumping ground for Christmas trees after the holidays.... Could we turn into a park? Or a community garden?

As cities struggle to do more with less and people everywhere cry out for places of meaning and beauty, we have to find fast, creative, profitable ways to capitalize on local ingenuity and turn public spaces into treasured community places.

Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park was a temporary park that activated the space with low-cost revenue-producing uses before today’s more expensive design could be implemented.

Interestingly, many of the best, most authentic and enduring destinations in a city, the places that keep locals and tourists coming back again and again and that anchor quality, local jobs, were born out of a series of incremental, locally-based improvements. One by one, these interventions built places that were more than the sum of their parts.

The time is right to rethink the way that we do development, using an approach called “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC). This approach is based on taking incremental steps, using low-cost experiments, and tapping into local talents (e.g. citizens, entrepreneurs, developers and city staff). These smaller-scale projects are being implemented in a variety of environments, including on streets, squares, waterfronts and even parking lots.

Is it possible that we can implement small improvements with a very limited budget? If we have a group of committed volunteers willing to pitch in, can’t we create changes in our town?

“LQC projects quickly translate a community’s vision into reality and keep momentum moving. Ideas can be efficiently implemented, assessed, then tweaked and customized based upon a community’s response.”

• Leverage local partnerships that have greater involvement by a community and results in more authentic places.
• Encourage an iterative approach and an opportunity to experiment, assess, and evolve a community’s vision before launching into major construction and a long term process.
• Employ a place-by-place strategy that, over time, can transform an entire city. With community buy-in, the LQC approach can be implemented across multiple scales to transform under-performing spaces throughout an entire city.

 “We’re in the midst of an unprecedented moment in planning. Although signs of hardship are all around, we see the emergence of a powerful, networked, creative movement of people who demonstrate that incremental, place-based change is possible despite economic or political obstacles. “

What if instead of ‘FOR LEASE’ signs, we had art students create a images showing what could be happening in that space?  Picture a painted window showing people at work, or drinking coffee or shelves lined with books – imagining a bookstore in that space..... Read on for what happened in Buffalo, NY…..

“A prime example is Buffalo, New York, where a highly motivated group of people are coming together to build a creative vision and to move away from big, “look-at-me” designs and toward lower-cost, creative interventions that will bring immediate improvements to their under-used waterfront. The incredible energy of this citizen-led effort signals a shift away from the traditional master planning process and toward a new, place-based agenda to transform our cities. PPS says this represents a process that “turns everything upside down”- but people in Buffalo say it’s actually about turning things “right side up.”

In this video about Buffalo’s new vision for its waterfront, Tom Dee, the president of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, said this year is about implementation. Many of the plans “will be done before summer. You’ll see energy, you’ll see activities, you’ll see events, and you’ll see people.”

Have you visited a city when restoration work is occurring on the façade of the building and instead of a great view of scaffolding you are treated to a life size banner showing the finished product? What if we could do that in San Leandro when work is in progress? Or when commercial street level space is waiting to find a new occupant?

“There is also a growing awareness that cities succeed or fail at the scale of place.  Leaders know they have to be able to react more quickly to a city’s diverse population and changing conditions than ever before.  And that requires resiliency: adaptability, agility, the means to repair damage and remake derelict spaces of every scale. This can’t come from the top down- it has to emerge incrementally, and it has to be driven by the people who know what they need.”

“By changing the way we think about development to include small scale, incremental changes, an immediate impact can be made on local economies, transportation, architecture and in how destinations are created.”

“The phrase “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC) was coined and used by Eric Reynolds, Founding Director of Urban Space Management (USM) more than 40 years ago in his work revitalizing urban spaces that he refers to as “in transition.”  A London and New York based organization, USM’s projects, like Gabriel’s Wharf in London, shows how a multi-use public destination can emerge out of a series of small-scale, inexpensive improvements that occur incrementally and encourage entrepreneurial activity and bring out the best of a community’s creativity.

Gabriel’s Wharf, London, UK after an Urban Space Management intervention. By partnering with a local set design company to create colorful facades for the concrete garages already present on the site, this LQC face lift created a thriving destination for shopping, dining and gathering in a former parking lot.”

Gabriel’s Wharf was just another parking lot until USM embarked on a development strategy that centered on using existing buildings (in this case, concrete garages), employing a set design company to create colorful facades on the garages and then working with local artisans and craftsmen to transform them into studios where they could display and sell their work.  Most of what you can buy at this market is made by the person who sells it to you.

 “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” is a particularly effective way to make improvements to streets because it bridges the gap between the need to solve a problem quickly and the long time frame and bureaucratic processes that exists in most municipalities.

New York City might be the last place you would expect to be paired with the phrase “lighter, quicker, cheaper,” yet we want to highlight some ways in which the Big Apple is justifying those words.

One of the first changes was at Times Square which was suffering from a severe lack of pedestrian space. Under the sponsorship of the Times Square Alliance, PPS conducted an evaluation of existing pedestrian and vehicle movement patterns, surveyed pedestrians, researched relevant benchmarks from around the world and recommended short term changes that would improve Times Square as a “public space.”

A temporary experiment was conducted by DOT in partnership with the Times Square Alliance which included closing some of the vehicle lanes on Broadway to traffic and converting the space to pedestrian use — with places for people to sit, wait, and meet each other.

Choose an area in town where pedestrian traffic is high, but there are no crosswalks to slow traffic down. What if instead of the typical process of months and months of paperwork and surveys and studies, we could simply drop a few traffic barriers indicating a slow down for these crossing areas?  In less than a day, we could deliver the barriers from the warehouse where they are stored and see results.

Many great plans get bogged down because they are too big, too expensive and simply take too long to happen. Meanwhile the high cost of missed opportunities for economic development - and public life - continue to add up.

LQC projects provide a powerful means to translate a community’s unique vision into physical reality. Whether they are spear-headed by local government, developers or community activists, LQC interventions both nurture and are powered by a community’s social capital and ingenuity: the “action planning” process behind LQC can help to build a new, shared understanding of place that transcends the duration of a particular intervention to engage unlikely partners for the ongoing betterment of their community.