Oklahoma City Better Block scheduled for May 18-19
Just got word that Oklahoma City organizers are moving forward with their first Better Block! It’s being presented by ULI Oklahoma, and will take place at
NW 7th & Hudson. Check their facebook page for more details and sign up to volunteer. A website will be up soon!
McComb, Mississippi launching their first Better Block
We just received word that McComb, Mississippi is preparing their first Better Block project on Main Street. Head over to http://mccombbetterblock.com/ for more information and sign up to help transform a downtown!
Article on the history of the Better Block
San Antonio’s “Plaza de Armas” just released an article on the beginnings of the Better Block project:
When Andrew Howard and Jason Roberts organized their first Better Block event in the Oak Cliff community of Dallas, it was largely an act of civil disobedience.
“We broke as many laws as we could with it,” says Howard. “We were ready to go to jail.”
Their cause wasn’t especially sexy. They weren’t targeting war crimes or racial oppression or animal cruelty. They were dissidents designing streets.
It worked. The Better Block Project has since applied its guerrilla street planning process to four blocks in Dallas, and been invited into at least 20 other cities. Previously abandoned city blocks have been permanently transformed into vibrant activity centers. Following one event, they saw vacancy rates on the block go from 75 percent to 10 percent, and active strorefronts from 25 percent to 65 percent.
On March 4, San Antonio will host the first in a series of Better Block events, sponsored by the City’s Complete Streets program.
After 10 years of working on transportation planning, Howard had seen his fill of streets designed with no thought for the local community. With the Better Block project he flipped the entire logic of transportation planning on its head: Forget traffic analyses, funding, long-range planning. Take one block, redesign it for a day, with as little money as possible, and subvert regulations. Put local small businesses and artists in the empty storefronts, build temporary awnings, seating, and spray-paint bike lanes. Focus on cyclists and pedestrians, rather than motorists. Try to build a place rather than a passageway.
Howard and Roberts invited City Council members and city staff to that first Oak Cliff event, hoping to drive home the point that many of the laws regulating building design and sidewalk use make it harder build vibrant communities. In many places, regulations absurdly forbid awnings, sidewalk seating, food trucks, and other amenities that help create lively, walkable streets. By cheaply and temporarily installing these elements, Better Block events simply demonstrate their power, rather than spending months or years navigating regulatory frameworks. The officials took notice, and gradually laws started to change.
While urban design does matter, what the Better Block Project has shown more than anything is that regulation and design patterns are only part of the picture.
“At first we thought it was this static thing; just build it and it will be perfect. But it is the process that makes it work,” explains Howard. “Place is also an energy.”
The low budget and grassroots attitude proved to be the project’s most important assets. Since the Better Block team didn’t have funding, they had to borrow materials and equipment, recruit volunteers, and engage local businesses. This process builds on and strengthens natural social networks. The local community becomes invested in re-envisioning the built environment, and the psychology around the place itself shifts. “More money, more trouble,” Howard points out.
The first Better Block event in San Antonio will be held at the corner of Broadway and Jones, and coincides with the second Síclovía http://siclovia.org/ along Broadway. Unlike those early, unsanctioned events, in San Antonio the team is sponsored by the City. But local businesses, artists and community volunteers are still lending their resources to create pop-up cafes, galleries, music venues and gaming areas.
Major change is already under way along Broadway north of downtown, with form-based zoning in effect, a streetcar line approved, and millions of dollars of new development underway. What city planners need now is an inexpensive way to model the effects of potential design changes and to alter residents’ perception of this stretch of Broadway, which has been a dead zone for decades. Better Block is an ideal way to meet these two objectives.
The project has evolved from civil disobedience to an alternative to the traditional public meeting. The Jack Fingers of the world may show up, but it’s a lot harder for them to derail the conversation with their unbridled cynicism when the event is about physically building a great place, rather than “gathering input from the community.”
The process also creates an opportunity to observe people interacting with the space. The Better Block team can see the flow of pedestrians, the spots people like to sit, the popularity of different types of retail business. Like William Whyte’s http://www.pps.org/articles/wwhyte/ method of analyzing the use of public spaces with time-lapse video, the Better Block team can observe and learn about how people actually use the space before the city invests millions of dollars in redesigning it.
The block becomes a kind of playground for imagining the city we’d like to have. Or, as the Better Block tagline puts it, creating “a living charrette.” Any citizen interested in breathing life back into San Antonio’s downtown should lend a hand.
St. Joseph, Missouri to hold first Better Block Project
Matt Buchanan, a community development planner in St. Joseph, Missouri, sends word that a team is assembling to begin a Better Block project. The event is scheduled for May 4th and 5th at the 700 block of Francis Street. If you’re interested in learning more they’ve setup a facebook page here, and an online volunteer form here. This is a great chance to sign up to help revitalize some beautiful old buildings and restore a downtown to its former prominence.
Denver Better Block planned for W. 25th Street
Denver has officially announced its first Better Block project planned for W. 25th Street on June 9th. More details can be found on the Federal Boulevard Partnership website here.
Update from San Antonio Better Block Townhall
There was a great turnout for the first San Antonio Better Block townhall. Over 40 residents, property owners, and business owners from the Jones and Broadway area came together to learn about building their first Better Block. From this meeting, several individuals signed up to help with landscaping, construction, and developing a series of pop-up businesses including art studios, ice cream shops, flower markets, and more for the March 4th event. Property owners in the area agreed to open up their vacant spaces and contribute to bringing more streetlife to the area. This event will occur in tandem with the city’s second Siclovia (the first event brought out 15,000 people to the area), so the opportunity exists now to shine a spotlight on this block and the community that lives, works, and plays in the area.
If you’re interested in learning more about taking part in this project, please contact us at info@teambetterblock.com. We will be holding two community walk-throughs on February 4th (10AM at Maverick Park, and noon at the San Antonio Museum of Art). For those interested in taking part, please meet us in the lobby of the San Antonio Museum of Art at 200 West Jones Avenue.
Broadway and Jones Block
Better Block in the News
Better Block is off to a great 2012 with projects scheduled in San Antonio, TX, Wichita, KS, Duncanville, TX, Dallas, TX, Waco, TX, Ferguson, MO and keep those fingers crossed in New York and Boston! The momentum for community driven revitalization is growing an recently Miller-McCune and Green-Source magazines wrote about the movement. Join us for a Webinar on January 24th and get your Better Block scheduled for Spring!
San Antonio Better Block Scheduled for March 4th
The city of San Antonio in collaboration with Team Better Block is hosting its first Better Block project on March 4th. The project will focus on the 1100 block of Broadway Street and Jones Avenue in the North East section of downtown. The event will take place alongside the city’s second SiClovia and will help spotlight ways to revitalize the area. If you are interested in volunteering for the project, please email us at info@teambetterblock.com.
The first planning meeting is open to all and will take place on January 19th at the VFW located at 10 10th Street, where an overview of the project will be presented and opportunities to take part will be discussed.
The facebook invite for the event is located here.
A look back at Better Block highlights from the past year
2011 was an incredible year for the Better Block project and we look forward to all of the new projects that are in the works for 2012. The Better Block Project is only as strong as its community partners, so the real accolades belong to those who rolled up their sleeves and helped repair their neighborhoods block by block, and to the institutions who carried through on the initial success of these projects to implement long-term, permanent change. If anyone had told us a year ago that this work would be highlighted in the New York Times, receive national awards, and allow us to speak internationally on revitalizing communities we would have never believed them. We’d also like to commend the 15 other communities nationwide who developed their own Better Block projects from Philadelphia to Memphis, and Saint Louis to Cleveland. Your efforts have inspired us to keep moving forward and given us a template for learning how this work can be adopted in communities with regional differences. So with that, we present a list of some of our favorite 2011 Better Block Project highlights:
Memphis installs bicycle infrastructure from Better Block recommendations
Shortly after we published details on our first Better Block project, community leaders in Memphis, Tennessee contacted us about pulling together their own block revitalization effort for Broad Street. Their neighborhood faced similar challenges to our own with vacant buildings, car-only infrastructure, and low investment. Team members worked with their Mayor and city council and held “A New Face for an Old Broad” Better Block project that brought out 13,000 people and revisioned a block with bike lanes, pop-up store fronts, landscaping, and more. The event was a major success, and within months, striping crews made the bike lanes permanent and reinvestment has begun to take hold within the corridor.
Fort Worth installs bicycle infrastructure from Better Block recommendations
Young activists in Fort Worth’s Near SouthSide neighborhood decided to take a block of Main Street that had been vacant and ignored for years, and developed their first Better Block Project. Team members added buffered bike lanes, new store fronts, food trucks, and more to make the block a neighborhood destination. The success of the event led the city of Fort Worth to permanently include buffered bike lanes on the street while ridership levels are continuing to grow throughout the area.
NCTCOG 2011 CLIDE Award
During the Summer of 2011, the North Central Texas Council of Governments recognized the Better Block Project with their prestigious CLIDE (Celebrating Leadership in Develpment Excellence) award. The jury chair was renowned architect Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
2011 National ASLA Award for Communications
In November of 2011, Team Better Block alongside SWA Landscape Architects was awarded a National ASLA award for Communications for the Better Block project in Oak Cliff. The noted ASLA jurors heralded the effort as “ “a 21st-century version of what the Chicago World’s Fair did in 1893.”
Walk21 Conference in Vancouver
The Better Block Project was featured in its first international forum at the 12th annual Walk21 Conference held in Vancouver, Canada. The success of the presentation spurred organizers to give the project a more prominent focus at their 2012 expo in Mexico City.
CNU 19
Better Block organizer, Andrew Howard, headed a Nextgen breakout session where the Better Block was featured alongside other models in Tactical Urbanism that are beginning to take hold across the nation.
$1 Million dedicated to area improvements around first Better Block
In December 2011, a city of Dallas TIF board dedicated $1Million to improvements around the King’s Highway area of North Oak Cliff, several of which were direct recommendations from the first Better Block project held in April of 2010. Infrastructure improvements include bicycle infrastructure, a pedestrian plaza, and traffic calming elements.
Ross “Build a Better Boulevard” Challenge
In July, we announced our first “Better Block Challenge” where we invited teams to take segments of an 8 block avenue in Downtown Dallas and revitalize public and private spaces to improve walkability, economics, and safety. The project was also the kickoff to the City of Dallas’s “Complete Streets” effort and brought out hundreds of volunteers who helped revision bus stops, outdoor markets, bicycle infrastructure, and more. At the end of the day, the University of Texas at Arlington won the top prize for most innovative solution for block improvement by developing a large shade structure and music stage using only reclaimed materials. Click here to view a video segment of the project, and here for an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by noted Architect Professor, Ellen Dunham-Jones.
South Dallas Grand Avenue Better Block Recap
Grand Avenue Better Block Project
The rain stayed away, and the temperature was perfect for last Saturday’s Better Block project on Grand Avenue in South Dallas. Team Better Block along with a handful of volunteers and city staff set to work realigning the four lane block of Grand Avenue in front of RL Griffin’s Blues Palace #2 and converting the roadway to make room for a wide pedestrian esplanade, on street parking, and maintaining two lanes for vehicle traffic. The overall effect created a safer street which accommodate pedestrians, and slowed vehicle traffic to turn the area into a destination. Intersection bulb-outs were created using straw wattles, and movable bollards were brought onsite to direct pedestrian traffic while giving the area a walkable feel.
Temporary bulb out
One of the more exciting projects incoporated into the street was taking an existing parkway and converting it into a bioswale, or rain garden. This feature takes the water runoff from the adjacent parking lot, and allows the pollutants to be trapped by aggregate allowing cleaner water to sink into the soil. Vegetation surrounding the rain garden can also be naturally sustained by the collected water which creates a more aesthetically pleasing corner. Below are the steps the team took to buildout the rain garden:
Unkempt parkway before work began
A simple plan for developing a rain garden
Work begins, digging a trench to lay out aggregate and collect water
Reclaimed stones to be broken up and used within the rain garden
Laying the stones
Completed curb, with native plants, covered in decomposed granite.
This project is one of the first of its kind in South Dallas, with the work taking approximately 4 hours. If similar buildouts were done in parkways throughout the city, we’d see a dramatic decrease in the pollutants that run into the Trinity River. Our hopes are to incorporate more of these projects into future Better Blocks.
On the day of the event itself, we worked with local area churches and barbeque shops. The culmination of the Better Block was to host a Gospel BBQ with the neighborhood to show off our “Complete Street”. Afterward, city council members, staff, and residents all came out and had the chance to enjoy the space as a true community destination. A woman from East Dallas who had attended the event talked to us about how she felt like the area really had something unique to offer and that she didn’t need to travel the world as much when exciting destinations like this existed in her own backyard. This was exactly what our team was working to develop…spotlighting that we have all of the unique and remarkable people and places needed to make a great place, we’re just lacking the walkable, people-focused amenities that tie the pieces together and make for a great destination.
Special thanks to Texas Trees Foundation, Landscape Forms, Hall Development, ICDC, RL Griffin, Ryba Design, HALFF Associates, Kimley-Horn, UNIQ, Texas Coffee School, Skye McDaniel, Tom Fisch, Valleycrest, Urban Turf, Cumberland Presbyterian Church Choir, Cornerstone Baptist Church Choir, Cornerstone Praise Dancers, Teal’s BBQ, Precious BBQ, and our awesome team of volunteers for helping us pull together a great project!
