Notes: City Innovate Summit 2015

Placemaking: Learning from SF's Design Innovations in Public Spaces

Tom Radulovich, Livable City

• Livable City
• Until recently, you could relatively simply tear out a store front and put in a garage. But you could not easily do the other way around - this put an emphasis on parking.
• SF fell victim to Euclidean Zoning: city simplification that created a lot of non-conformities with the assumption that they would disappear over time and each zone would be single use.
• Jane Jacobs who talked about cities being complex systems that cannot be oversimplified
• what generates city diversity? Primary mixed uses, small blocks (connectivity & edges), buildings at different ages, concentration (density)
• sidewalks are useful for
• safety
• contact (with strangers or people you know)
• assimilating children (allowing them to be part of the society)
• Another look at the city: City quality at eye level, the ground floor facade
• Form-based codes
• Liveable city is looking into sidewalk design as well - ensuring street frontage requirements are being met in new buildings.
• High commercial ground floor - creates a great visual separation, more separation from first residential level, and more diverse use case for shops/restaurants moving in
• open shutters so you can see into the shops
• only allow a 1/3 of street level to be parking garage
• above ground parking (parking garages) need to be built to spec of buildings so they can be converted if need be, instead of being leveled
• example: garage > coffee shop (Reveille Coffee Co.) on 18th Street
• Relaxed zoning restrictions on active uses

Brooke Ray Smith, Build Public

• Los Altos projects
• Third Street Green - Los Altos to close down a block downtown for a month and turn it into a park. Programmed with activities catered to the young families moving into the city.
• Downtown doesn't have a plaza or public space - people started flocking to it
• similar project with State Street Green because road was blocked off for construction anyways
• SFMOMA project that created a few installations all over downtown - intersection paintings, public art galleries
• After all of this popup installation work (now much is no longer there) - how do they do this long-term? This is where Build Public comes in.
• Why? Cities/neighborhoods deserve great public space - when neglected they divide communities & undermine shared values that can otherwise be fostered in public space
• New permanent public spaces & new public governance
• converting streets into permanent pedestrian spaces
• Green Benefit District (GBD) - http://www.potreroview.net/news10930.html
• IKA Model for funding > allows developers to keep some of their impact fee money and channel into an immediate improvement project (public plazas) - constructed after the building construction from the building adjacent
• example: Dogpatch Arts Plaza. Dead end street that bumps against the freeway - turning impact fees into a small plaza, adding murals, bleachers (for events), ready by late 2016
• slow streets - one-way traffic for cars today, but eventually close it permanently
• Difficulties getting these idea permanent in the city:
• Downtown enjoyed its sense of rustic, rural leisure, which has typically gone against the larger public spaces. The challenge is to show the community that you can have both.

Deborah Cullinan, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

• Do not underestimate the need for joy in public space. It's a requirement for connecting communities through public space.
• Question: with so many small projects, have we lost the capacity to do the big projects?
• We have the capacity to do both, there is now more understanding that things are no longer either or
• SF loves to polarize, which leaves us with very few options - we are either helpless or hopeless
• What's most important is the ephemeral activity to foster a more permanent change

From Science Fiction to Reality: How Making (Just About Anything) Will Redefine the Future of Our Cities

Nick Pinkston, Plethora

• Plethora: making hardware as easy as software. Allows you to lease out factory functions and tools for making parts - compiled straight from CAD into the machine

Mickey McManus, MAYA

• Internet of things, digital manufacturing, and machine learning are slamming into each other
• IoT: media coming from an infinite number of sources - bodies, homes, cars. Living within the information.
• Digital manufacturing - reality computing
• Really interesting take on 3d printing and how it can hyperlocalize manufacturing by focusing on the shipment of materials rather than completed products.
• Machine learning: computational power

##Lessons from civic innovation leaders: How to hack the system (and fix procurement)

Mark Belinsky, Birdi

Story Bellows, Director, New Urban Mechanics, City of Philadelphia

Ashley Meyers, Fellow at the SF Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation

• The road to procurement is paved with good intentions. And there's confusion between what's "legal," and what's "possible."

• "When we know what we need, [procurement systems] work well...." but new systems and objects confound the system -- it doesn't know how to handle the unknown. - Story

  • The way governments ask people to work with them (RFP) has a chilling effect on innovation and entrepreneurship.
  • Philly is putting out RFPs that say something to the effect of 'we're looking for more innovative solutions to x problem as a way to test potential solutions within the existing system

• At the federal level, people are writing RFPs with an understanding of agile methodology -- follows the rules, but allows things to change agilely

• "No idea is worthwhile if it doesn't seem insane at first. - Mark

It seems like the overarching idea is that connecting people from inside and outside government is useful -- those conversations can lead to new insights, but just having people in the same room isn't enough. There needs to be intent. Add to that a willingness to work within the system, but at the very edge of it -- obey the law and such, but push the envelope of what that might mean, in order to force something like an RFP to be more flexible than it is inherently.

• Having the right government partners is super helpful -- for example, a lawyer speaking to another lawyer will carry more weight than an "innovation person" saying the same thing.

• Risk and failure are fantastic in a startup world -- less so in government (ha!). So these risks have to be spun as less risky, better than standard processes for the government in the long run. "It feels really risky right now, and we might fail, but if we succeed, it'll be less expensive/faster/better/etc in the long run."

Strategies

• Show that something is cheaper, helps achieve a regulatory requirement, or is otherwise helpful when you want to try to scale something quickly.
• Joint procurement among cities -- for example, three cities each throw in $5K to jointly approach solving a problem.
• Built an excellent government sales team (if you're a startup) -- poach someone from an enterprise company, give them headcount, and let them do their thing.
• Find a distribution partner -- someone who already has the conference and the contracts within your target government
• Try to stay under the procurement threshold (which of course varies among cities and governments)