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