Form Follows Relationships: Redefining the Practice of Placemaking
I am excited to share that, over the last six months, I have been working on a book synthesizing our experience over the last dozen plus years of working with clients and communities of all kinds to “create places where people want to be”.
At the core of my investigations I have centered on two central questions:
Why are there so many public and shared spaces that provide a relatively poor visitor experience and why does this seem to be the norm rather than the exception?
Is there a root cause of why some places are successful and others not?
In reflecting on the hundreds of activations, thousands of hours of care, and many dozens of advisory projects through The Musicant Group, I found that it was not design, it was not the amount of money, it was not the number of events that led to a successful place. No, the key indicator was:
A successful place and project was a function of the incentives and locus of responsibility of the entities that held authority within those places.
What we kept finding through our projects was that to a remarkable degree, there were far more people and actors that were actually de-incentivised to make improvements that enhanced the human experience of a place, or even the bottom line. Conversely, those that had incentives to make improvements that benefited community and commerce often lacked the authority or knowledge to make the necessary changes over a meaningful amount of time to do so.
A common example is the archetypal arrangements between commercial asset managers, property managers and leasing brokers. The asset manager has the purview of the whole but isn’t involved in the life of the space they are responsible for. The broker understands client needs, but has no authority or responsibility for the customer experience. The property manager is responsible for the total operations of a building, but doesn’t benefit from good things happening and is severely punished for negative events.
Another is the relationship between designers-engineers-project managers and public sector facility managers. Here, the design team holds all the resources, but is confined to make changes during a very short time period - thus depriving them of deeper site and user knowledge and adaptations. The facility manager cares for whatever is done, but often lacks the authority, resources or incentives to make incremental improvements based on the ever changing needs of a place and the people that use it.
I’ve come to see even more clearly that the experiences we have in our built environment are a function of how we relate to each other over time.
Form follows relationships.
If we don’t change how we relate to each other, we’ll never achieve the types of thriving communities - and the types of spaces, connections, feelings, and services - we truly desire. No amount of design, community engagement, events, pilots, focus groups, or reports in isolation can solve for the way we relate and work together.
Incentives and accountability hold the key to places where people want to be.
Redefining the Practice of Placemaking
How could a place based organization start to attune itself to foster relationships and places? What is needed is a more dynamic relationship between the realms of place and people, both internally and externally; a new framework of practice which sees organizations continually cycling through the process of discernment, implementation, and evaluation that span the artificially separate activities of creation and care.
A potential road map would be:
A benefit of this approach is that you don’t need to wait around for new capital dollars to get started and keep going. Individuals, groups and organizations all have the capacities needed at this very moment. What needs to change is the questions we all are solving for and the way we work together. No small thing, but it’s something that’s in your power, our power, to make happen.
You are the change we need to create places where people want to be.
Sincerely,
Max Musicant
Principal & Founder of The Musicant Group
This Model in Practice: One Discovery Square, Rochester, MN
How might this model translate into actual practice? Here’s an example of how we partnered with with organizations at One Discovery Square project to bring this burgeoning innovation district to life:
Project Summary: The Musicant Group worked with developer-builder Mortenson to center Discovery Square as an industry-leading place for innovation and collaboration, with a focus on making it a fertile meeting ground for Mayo Clinic researchers and non-Mayo entities to connect. Through design advising, regular activities, topical learning lunches and other engagements, the space became the go-to 3rd place for interdisciplinary connections. These efforts accelerated demand to be in the district and support the expansion of the campus through the addition of a new and larger connected building: Two Discovery Square.