(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 516: Reimagining the Civic Commons
January 15, 2025
This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Bridget Marquis, Director of Reimagining the Civic Commons. Bridget chats with us about connecting public assets, the importance of creating metrics that matter, and better ways to think about community engagement.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA and in our archive.
below is a full unedited transcript of the episode!
[00:01:15] Bridget Marquis, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. [00:01:22] Bridget Marquis: Thanks for having me. [00:01:23] Jeff Wood: Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:01:27] Bridget Marquis: Yeah. So Bridget Marquis, I’m the director of Reimagining the Civic Commons, which is a national initiative that’s really focused on leveraging the power of public space in the public realm to deliver new outcomes for communities across the country. [00:01:42] Jeff Wood: And so how did you get interested in this topic? [00:01:44] Bridget Marquis: So I think the sort of idea of the potential and power of civic assets has really been with me since a very early age. So I grew up in this very small town in western New York population 3, 000. A one stop light kind of town and my father was deeply engaged in the local community. [00:02:05] He still is to this day. When I was in second grade, he ran for political office which was the supervisor of the town, which is in essence the mayor. And stayed in office until I was in college. So this pretty long running local public official. And at the time, I didn’t think much about it, but it meant I got a front row seat to investing in the public realm. [00:02:25] So during his time in office, he worked with two adjoining towns to preserve a reservoir to protect it from ex urban sprawl. They turned it into a local public park and really this sort of nature space for the community. It’s actually the place I learned how to canoe and paddled a canoe for the first time. [00:02:44] And he also co hosted the town’s bicentennial celebrations, which included multiple festivals in this kind of small downtown public square park space. And I think Those evening festivities stuck with me for many years. They felt really magical as a young kid to see what seemed like the whole town show up to the park for kind of music and dancing and food and just joy together. [00:03:08] Andy transformed a publicly owned area that was sort of scrubbed near the two public schools into A set of tennis courts, public tennis courts, and a series of nature hats. So I guess I think the sort of value of the public realm and the public good, sort of what we all own together being truly good is something that’s really stuck with me since that time. [00:03:32] And just a recognition that there’s this enormous potential within civic assets to bring people together, right? In communities of all sizes, obviously. Since that time, I’ve moved a lot. I’ve lived in. Seven different cities, I now find Boston as my home, but I think they’re really an opportunity to celebrate, to connect with people of all different backgrounds and really to forge stronger communities. [00:03:54] So that’s kind of what brought me into this work. [00:03:57] Jeff Wood: Are the small town politics different than the ones you encounter in a Boston area now? [00:04:02] Bridget Marquis: So where I grew up was definitely a red county. My dad happened to be a Democrat and it was probably one of the first times that a Democrat had ever won that seat, but I will say I think the politics at the local level feel very different than politics at state or federal level. [00:04:21] And so I think there were definitely, in those days, that was like 80s and 90s, right? There seemed to be not much caution in terms of voting for a Democrat for local office. Obviously now I’m in blue, blue Boston and blue Massachusetts, so that looks very different. But I would also say, Local politics sometimes can avoid some of the ugliness and polarization that happens at the national level, which I think is really beneficial to local communities that you can sort of get away from some of that crosstalk and actually try to solve local problems, right? [00:04:56] Which tend to be similar. in all different types of communities. [00:05:01] Jeff Wood: So what is the Civic Commons Learning Network and how did it get started? [00:05:05] Bridget Marquis: So we sort of came into this work with this belief that There are a lot of sort of negative trends happening across the country and that there may be a role for civic assets to play. [00:05:19] Right? So we’ve seen over the past 50 years, really, these increases in economic segregation and social isolation and distrust, and our sense is that there’s a role for the public realm and that a lot of these trends sort of manifest themselves in the public realm as well. And that when these trends had been taking place over the past 50 years, That our gathering places, right, our parks, our trails, our libraries, our neighborhood main streets, community centers, all these places that could potentially start to knit us back together as a society have, in essence, been overlooked. [00:05:53] They suffer from disinvestment in most communities. They’ve been seen, I would say, as sort of nice to have amenities, but not essential, not essential infrastructure. And when budget cuts hit, they are very often for it’s on the chopping block. Right? So. For the most part, we’ve seen this kind of civic infrastructure not be considered strategically by cities as sort of a portfolio of assets, but really seen as sort of liabilities on their balance sheets, things they have to take care of over time. [00:06:23] And they’re often operated in silos, disconnected, and don’t kind of have this shared common purpose. And so, enter reimagining civic commons, which really seeks to sort of buck those trends I mentioned. First, I would say by asking a new type of question, right, what would a city actually look like? If it was putting all of its assets to work to connect people of all backgrounds, cultivate, trust, and create more resilient communities. [00:06:49] And then second, to really invest in demonstration efforts in communities across the country to start to realize this new vision. So, we launched in 2016. The initiative’s now grown to 10 cities that participate in this. robust community of practice, which we call the Civic Commons Learning Network. And they focus on four key outcomes, civic engagement, socioeconomic mixing, environmental sustainability, and value creation. [00:07:13] And these cross silo teams in these cities are really working towards those outcomes through strategic investments in shared civic assets, right? So really trying to see public space as a solution to some of these really and so that’s kind of one of the big challenges that we face as a country and to do it at the local level with local team members that are working again across these silos to kind of get this work done and that’s kind of in a nutshell, what civic commons is. [00:07:42] Jeff Wood: From at least, you know, reading materials and understanding what you all do, it feels like connecting all of those things is important to like bringing it all together. It’s not just the individual kind of silos of the goals you all have, but connecting them and bringing them together as one big piece. [00:07:54] How important is that to make sure that everything, and especially you have trail networks that you’re talking about as well. So thinking about the actual physical, but also maybe the administrational connections that happen to make this move forward. [00:08:05] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, I think it’s both. So I think we think of the civic commons or civic infrastructure as this networked system of assets, right? [00:08:13] And when you think about it that way, it has a lot more power than when you think about an individual park or an individual trail, or even a network of trails or a network of parks, right? I think it’s that Layering because all of those different assets are really the experience a community member would have in a place. [00:08:31] And so thinking about them as that system of assets as an urban planner, I feel like you might naturally do this. [00:08:36] Jeff Wood: Yes. [00:08:37] Bridget Marquis: It’s really important, but it doesn’t happen naturally, right? So governments are structured in silos and they operate in silos. Oftentimes a library system might not even be within the city’s. [00:08:48] Structure at all. It might be a county system or it might be sort of operating as a quasi governmental entity. And so I think the call, right, is to think about this work both physically as a network, and then when you think about operationalizing that network. Thinking about how you knit across those silos, both within City Hall, right? [00:09:09] Planning, economic development, public works, parks and rec, all those different silos. And then also I would say beyond City Hall, and there’s a lot of good examples of this in our teams of working with community development organizations, with non profit public space managers and bids and residents, right? [00:09:26] And to really think about this network of space. As also a kind of a way to connect and collaborate across all those silos, knowing that the ultimate outcome is about stronger communities and kind of pushing up against these trends that we’re seeing. [00:09:43] Jeff Wood: It’s something that we see in our work as well and thinking about how all these things are connected. [00:09:47] I mean, one of the things that I’ve been focusing on lately is thinking about the transportation and housing systems in the context of like healthcare and to get people to health appointments that need transportation, right. Or to spend less overall on healthcare. care, some of the folks that need the most often if they just had housing, they wouldn’t be spending so much of the healthcare systems money on the individuals and they would be helped out over a longer period of time, rather than just, you know, going from emergency room bed to emergency room bed. [00:10:09] And so all these things are really connected. And so I appreciate the approach that you all are taking in terms of thinking about these as a network, not just the physical side, but that administration side. So I do appreciate that a lot. We also had folks from the Government Finance Officers Association on a couple of years ago to talk about asset inventories and creating public wealth and kind of following the ideas that Doug Detter had put together in his book. [00:10:29] But I’m wondering if your focus is similar to this general idea of value creation from public assets and maybe how closely or how not closely they’re connected. [00:10:37] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, I think there’s definite connections. I would say the ambitions for civic commons. And I always come back to those four outcomes, right? [00:10:46] It’s like, Really being outcomes oriented and thinking about the value, I would say, as a multifaceted value of investing in these types of assets, not just a dollars and cents on your balance sheet type of value, but thinking about them as potential drivers for these outcomes that are for you. kind of larger than even communities, but are definitely key to a stronger society. [00:11:14] So we need more civic engagement. We may need more trust in institutions. We need more trust among fellow Americans. We need more public life. You know, socioeconomic mixing, we need more people to be connecting across difference regularly and to find some joy in that. Environmental sustainability, right? [00:11:31] Climate issues are coming up every single day, and we need to be able to put as many efforts as we can to work to be prepared for what that climate change looks like, and potentially to help, you know, stave it off. And then value creation, and in our terminology, we’re thinking particularly at the neighborhood level. [00:11:49] How can these investments create new value in communities and make them better places to thrive? Right? So being thoughtful about, I know you brought up housing, right? That when we’re making these investments, that there is an attention to affordability and to ensuring that residents are able to remain and really enjoy the fruits of their labor and the fruits of the public’s labor in terms of investing more strategically in these civic assets in their neighborhoods. [00:12:14] So. I think there’s connections. I would say we are pushing into an area of thinking about kind of larger ambitious outcomes for these types of assets, as well as thinking about them as being more valuable in general to cities. [00:12:31] Jeff Wood: Is it hard to convince people to disaggregate from that kind of that financial base, because it just feels like, you know, city budgets are what they are and people talk about the financing and funding of these projects and how much they’re going to cost the city. [00:12:43] We know you and I know that there’s more to investment that you’re making than money and how much is actually on the ledger. There’s, you know, uncounted benefits that come out of it. So is it hard to kind of separate those two things and be like, Hey, there’s more benefits to this than just what shows up on the budget every year. [00:13:00] Bridget Marquis: I think most urban leaders know it in their inherently understand that there’s more than just that value. Right? And I would actually say when you look politically, if you look at what congressional members, for instance, will put into their earmarks, oftentimes it’s civic infrastructure, right? It’s these types of projects. [00:13:18] So they know inherently that Okay. These are good for communities that it’s good for their voting, right? It’s good for their turnout that they are the types of projects that I think inherently they feel benefit the public beyond that kind of dollars and cents argument. I think 1 of the challenges we have is. [00:13:38] flexible dollars, right? Like what dollars can go into this, right? So part of our work is actually we have a coalition that meets regularly that’s called Percent for Place that’s focused on how can we unlock more federal funding for investing in civic infrastructure and kind of allowing this type of infrastructure to be an eligible use for a number of different federal programs. [00:14:00] And I think. When communities received federal funding through ARPA that was very flexible, a lot of them put money into parks and greenways and community centers and other civic assets, right? The civic commons. That’s what a lot of them were investing in at that time. So I think it’s a little bit less about making the case and perhaps a little bit more about thinking strategically and thinking differently about where Funding flows could come from, because I think they’ve made their case in a lot of ways. [00:14:28] And there’s a ton of research out there, right? That shows a lot of the different ways that they can deliver value. [00:14:33] Jeff Wood: That seems like such a huge thing. I mean, you mentioned ARPA. I mean, it seems like such a huge thing that came from that is cities all of a sudden had money that they could spend on things that were important, but maybe didn’t fit in their overall budgets. [00:14:43] I mean, we just talked to Ryan Kelly in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and basically he was saying, well, we had did this TODN commercial program. And basically we wouldn’t have been able to do it unless we had this extra ARPA funds. You know, otherwise it would have. Faced like really increased scrutiny and it did a lot of really good things. [00:14:55] And most of the time people think about TOD and housing, but this was like a new commercial idea that’s going to be kind of a model for around the country to think about these things. And so when they got that extra money, maybe from ARPA or the infrastructure bill or some of the other bills that have been passed recently, what did you see come out of that? [00:15:10] Because I feel like with that extra funding, there were a couple of innovative ideas and people looked at things differently maybe than they would have otherwise. [00:15:18] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, I think it was a great opportunity to see priorities, right? And to say, okay, if you actually had flexible resources, what would you invest them in? [00:15:27] And I think it highlights the negative trend of status quo ruling. Because I don’t think that communities looked at those resources as being, obviously they were new, but I don’t think that they saw them as free. So I don’t think that they looked at them and did things that they didn’t think were important with them, right? [00:15:49] I think they chose things that they thought were really important. They were going to try new ideas. They were going to move some things that probably had been on their list for some time but they hadn’t been able to find the financing to make them happen. But I think what it points out is that so often our local budgets are tied up in status quo budgeting, and that I think there is an opportunity to look at our own local budgets and say, okay, yes, this is how we’ve been spending these resources for some time. [00:16:21] look at what’s happening that’s new, or look at what we did with ARPA, what can we learn from that to then actually readjust how we’re budgeting our general fund or our capital budgets on a regular basis? Because I think it gave them the ability to do things that would have been much harder to swing with the general fund. [00:16:39] But at this point, every city should be doing that, right? What did we use ARPA for? What was successful? And how can we apply that to our general fund budget more regularly? [00:16:48] Jeff Wood: Yeah, there’s probably a lot of good lessons in there that we’ll be learning about in the next 5 10 years, I imagine. As, you know, more information comes out, as more people find out about what happened and things like that, I think that’s really cool. [00:16:58] I know a lot of DOTs don’t necessarily think this way, but I feel like streets are public space as well, and I think a lot of folks listening to this podcast probably feel that way too. I’m wondering, what are some of the ways that you’ve seen streets be involved in some of the discussions that you’re having about the civic commons and about bringing people together? [00:17:13] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, so one of our communities, Detroit, was very thoughtful at the beginning of the process. And when they define their civic commons, all of the civic commons kind of demonstrations look different based on local context. So Detroit selected to focus on this neighborhood called Fitzgerald. It’s on the city’s northwest side. [00:17:32] And it’s, in general, focused on turning sort of vacancies into this asset as a new model for neighborhoods across the city. And one of those assets is McNichols, which is a commercial corridor. And they were very insistent that they wanted that commercial corridor to be part of their Civic Commons work. [00:17:49] And we, as kind of the initiative, said, great, we’re open to having that kind of expanded notion and thinking of the street as part of the Civic Commons. And I think they’ve redesigned that commercial corridor to prioritize people, right? So they expanded sidewalks, they put in bus bump outs, they’ve done bike lanes. [00:18:07] And also they built a Storefront community hub called Homebase, which is this kind of active local hub that’s run by the Community Development Corporation that’s, that’s housed there, but then access sort of this easy storefront location for block club meetings or other sort of neighborhood oriented gatherings. [00:18:26] They do small markets in the space, et cetera. And I think it’s that layering that I mentioned, right? We talked about this as kind of a systems investment. And I think in that neighborhood, along with that commercial corridor investment, right, where they saw the street and the commercial businesses on it really as potentially part of their civic infrastructure. [00:18:47] They also have a greenway that runs just a couple blocks south of it that they created out of vacant lots. They have a new neighborhood park that they created. And I think it’s that circulation among those assets that’s really encouraging. But I think streets can certainly be part of the civic commons. [00:19:02] And I think when they’re not, right, often they’re actually the problem, right? They are the issue where you can’t. Easily be connected to the neighborhood park, or they are dividing up greenways in ways that aren’t helpful. So I think it’s wise for teams when they’re able to, to engage their DOTs or streets departments in thinking about this element of that asset type that indeed. [00:19:29] Thinking about streets, not just as transportation corridors. But as places for people to connect right as part of the social life of a community I think that’s a huge win if you can bring that angle into the work [00:19:43] Jeff Wood: you mentioned the social life of the community I think that kind of ties into something else which is like the loneliness epidemic and how your work is connected to that I’m wondering how we should think about what the surgeon general told us about loneliness from kind of that spatial lens from your perspective [00:19:57] Bridget Marquis: So, along with the U. [00:19:58] S. Surgeon General’s report, there’s been a lot of kind of studying of this trend and it’s pretty clear that in the U. S. we really don’t interact with our neighbors regularly, right? So, stats say that a third of us don’t interact with our neighbors at all. [00:20:13] Jeff Wood: I do, but I guess I’m rare. [00:20:17] Bridget Marquis: And I think we’ve designed our communities in ways that make opting out of public life much easier than opting in, and I don’t think that’s improving, right? [00:20:25] So I think the pandemic maybe elevated that, or at least made it more apparent to people, but I also think it’s encouraged more people to, you know, Work from home, perhaps, which means they might not be out on the sidewalk, you know, meeting other people, or they may just be spending more time at home. And there’s a lot of research out there now, post pandemic, that’s kind of exploring that kind of human doom loop. [00:20:47] Jeff Wood: Human doom loop. Yeah. Yeah. I think Diana Lynn was talking about that. Yes. And I [00:20:50] Bridget Marquis: think that’s a real concern that we need to take seriously, right? As a human beings, we Need social interaction, right? It’s just baseline. And there’s a lot of great research that shows that even very casual interactions, you know, you walk in your dog and you bump into someone or you’re at the park and you’re sitting on a bench and someone walks by and you say hi. [00:21:13] Those very small interactions can be really beneficial to mental health and to people feeling like they’re part of a community. And so I think that we discredit the public realm sometimes as a solution set for this, right? So a lot of the solutions are like, Call a friend or, you know, they become very individualized solutions for the loneliness epidemic. [00:21:34] When I think if we think about how we are designing our communities, civic commons is where people have the opportunity to engage with others. In a very sort of low stakes way, parks open all you can go for a walk if they’re designed in ways that encourage a lot of different types of uses to happen in shared space and like a smaller segment of space, you get those natural bump ups to happen. [00:21:59] I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the civic infrastructure of place to be elevated and to be really invested in strategically to. Overcome or at least be part of the solution for this epidemic of loneliness and I would say we have some really good kind of stats to demonstrate that from some of the work that’s been going on in communities. [00:22:23] So I mentioned the work in Detroit and we’ve been measuring this work over time. And 1 of the things that they’ve seen is that. The neighborhood residents following this kind of deep investment in the public realm that was done in a way that was very engaging to those who lived there that they’re connecting with one another more often. [00:22:43] So, in 2017, sort of when the work started more than. One in five Fitzgerald residents said they’d never spent time socializing with their neighbors. Now only 5 percent say that that’s the case, right? So that social isolation move, like, pretty dramatic change. And on the flip side, the proportion of those who hang out with their neighbors at least once a week increased 12 percentage points to 69%, right? [00:23:07] So I think just in terms of social connection, By having a park down the street, right, that you can walk to regularly, it gives you a place to possibly run into your neighbors. I also think there was a change in the level of perceptions of safety in that neighborhood. Again, investments in the public realm can help people feel safer. [00:23:29] There’s a lot of evidence around that. And it can actually decrease gun violence and other types of violent crime. And I think that the Feelings of safety also will encourage you to, you know, spend more time right out and about. So I think that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and I think the public realm can play a big role in it. [00:23:48] Encouraging people, right? It needs to be beautiful. It needs to be inviting for folks to want to step outside and interact with other people. And I just don’t think it’s gotten a lot of attention until recently, that that could be one solution to this challenge that’s really I think only growing and that we need to deal with in a very real way. [00:24:10] Jeff Wood: Is part of that managing those spaces a little bit better than maybe they have been in the past? You know, if you build a park and just leave it there, it might not work the same as if it’s under better management or, you know, we think about William H. White and his work in Bryant Park in New York City. [00:24:23] So, you know, kind of that evolution of parks as something that not just sits there, but maybe you need to do a little bit more to make people feel welcome and maybe encourage community. [00:24:31] Bridget Marquis: Yes. I think staffing of the public realm is something that goes very undervalued and that’s really critical to encouraging more people to engage with one another, to spend time in the public’s realm. [00:24:44] Right. And I think programming is definitely important. There’s a lot of people that spend a lot of time thinking and doing programs, and I think it’s certainly important and there’s a lot that can come from that. I also think just. Literally having staff in places that have an ambition around encouraging social connection, encouraging socioeconomic mixing, right, advancing trust with local government or with the institution that’s managing the place, those types of ambitions for staff, I think, can start to change. [00:25:14] sort of how people interact in space. Memphis has a great example. So Memphis River Parks Partnership manages a series of park assets on the Mississippi River and have done both, you know, design transformation and a lot of capital project work, but also have really transformed their staffing model. So where they originally had sort of these staffed in silos, there was a security team, there was kind of the staff. [00:25:41] Maintenance team, et cetera, and now they have these rangers, park rangers, not the ones that carry guns in state parks, but rather they’re really sort of ambassadors both for the city in terms of wanting people to extend their stay and connect and go have, you know, a dinner in a restaurant in downtown. [00:25:59] But also for the space and for creating connections. So they wear these shirts now that say, hi neighbor on them to really promote this idea of neighborliness. And that that’s kind of the culture of the riverfront. And they have these sort of shared, I would say cultural norms within their staff of, you know, we’re going to greet everyone when they come in, no matter who it is, we’re always going to greet them. [00:26:22] We’re going to, you know, help them with directions if they need it. You know, just really being thoughtful in terms of what the role of staff is and to switch it from being primarily one of security, which I would say is kind of the norm, right? It’s like the policing of the public realm to one of welcome, right? [00:26:41] To one of wanting people to feel like they belong, wanting social interaction to happen, that that’s really your goal. Like you’re almost like a concierge or, you know, this, a totally different type of public space management. I think that’s really. Useful in terms of thinking about loneliness, thinking about connecting across diversity, right? [00:27:01] Who’s managing that? Right? I mean, it’s really helpful if you have staff that are kind of in it with you and don’t just see their role as, you know, policing the space or just keeping it clean, right? You need more than that. And I think it’s exciting to see the model that’s developing in Memphis. [00:27:18] Jeff Wood: It goes into that idea of belonging, I think there’s a piece and I think it was the urbanist, which is a Seattle based publication, which talk about the homelessness crisis, figuring out how to allow people to feel welcome in spaces again, and think about the ways that they could connect them with the resources that they need, but also just kind of like not have people feel like that they need. [00:27:37] Didn’t belong in a space and I think that’s kind of an important point to think about because we have all these public spaces But if you start, you know excluding certain elements of society certain people in society Then you might end up excluding even more people over the long run. And so there’s that point of it as well [00:27:52] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, I mean, I think belonging for all is really important, right? [00:27:55] and I think the public realm is where we can Make that happen. So I, you know, I talk a lot about these outcomes, and I think this work is really about both. How do we encourage, right, more investment in these types of assets, right? So making that case, but I think the alternate side is like shifting practice among people who are everyday thinking about parks and recreation, for instance, to kind of put a different ambition on their work, a different mission, right? [00:28:24] So if you’re Mission is belonging, right? Like how you manage a space, what programs you decide to offer are going to look radically different than if your mission is, you know, recreation, just recreation. I guess that’s what excites me about the work a lot of times is that it’s this kind of push pull right where we’re like, both trying to encourage more investment, but also trying to move this field to be. [00:28:50] More ambitious about what they could achieve and sort of bigger thinking in terms of the kind of challenges they might take on and how it could benefit all of us. [00:28:59] Jeff Wood: What’s some place that you wouldn’t have thought was a civic space before you started this work, but now you see it as one? [00:29:05] Bridget Marquis: Hmm, that’s a good question. [00:29:08] I guess I might point to the storefront space. That one in Detroit is really sweet in that it makes me realize Many of our communities, commercial corridors, right, have commercial spaces that are not thriving currently. And I do think there’s this. Potential for some of those spaces to become these sort of civic assets, right? [00:29:33] They don’t have to be named a library or community center to serve as a civic space and to serve as that role. So, this kind of community hub, it’s got a lot of glass out front, right? It’s very much a. And I think there’s something really attractive about that kind of transparency, you know, what’s going on inside. [00:29:50] You can see inside. It’s very welcoming in that way. It’s right on their commercial corridor, which is 1 of their focus areas. And so it allows them to kind of play this very kind of micro civic. Space role, which I would say is maybe a sweet spot for cities to consider, because I think a lot of times we have sort of these institutions, right? [00:30:11] Which aren’t always feeling super welcoming to everyone always. And we don’t necessarily have that sort of smaller space where people might gather with some neighbors of 15 neighbors or 20 neighbors, right? And it’s very welcoming and it feels right sized for that kind of gathering. So I do think there’s, that would be one example of something that I don’t necessarily think I thought of storefronts that much beforehand. [00:30:37] And now I think every commercial quarter I go down, I think, oh, maybe they need a home base in this neighborhood. And I think as a resident in Boston, right, sometimes I wish we had a home base, right? I don’t always want to go to the coffee shop and pay four bucks for a latte to, you know, hang out and meet someone or just do some work on my laptop. [00:30:57] I think sometimes. These kind of spaces, having them be free and open, like they can come in a lot of different scales. And I’m not sure in this country, we’ve really experimented with the more micro scale. That could be really interesting. [00:31:11] Jeff Wood: That’s super interesting. We have here in Noe Valley, in San Francisco, right where I live, we have this place called now we call it town square. [00:31:17] It never was originally a town square. It was just a parking lot that was owned by a church and it had the farmer’s market on the weekends and things like that. But eventually they turned it into like this own town square. And actually. It’s now infamous for this toilet that people have been talking about in the New York Times and everything that cost a lot of money to put in. [00:31:32] I don’t know if you’ve heard, you’ve heard, yes, you did hear about that. So that’s that our town square actually. But it’s been really interesting to watch cause I’ve lived here since 2006. And so it’s been interesting to watch since that went in. How it’s changed the space now across the street. [00:31:45] There’s a coffee shop and there’s like kind of a little parklet that takes up, you know, two parking spaces where people sit, but on the other side of the street, and you can just cross the street really easily because it’s really narrow. But on the other side of the street, there’s this place where, you know, nannies take the kids that they’re taking care of moms and dads take their kids to go to the slide. [00:32:00] And on the weekends, there’s the farmers market. And we had a Christmas tree lighting there. And There’s just like all these little activities that can be done. There’s movable chairs and all that stuff. Right. And there’s just all these little activities and people meet in the morning and the afternoon, they have business meetings there. [00:32:13] And it’s just like a small little space. It was like maybe like a 10 space parking lot. It wasn’t even that big, but it’s changed kind of, I feel like the center of the neighborhood and it’s been really interesting to see that. And it’s really interesting to hear you talk about that because I feel like that’s the type of space that we’re talking about taking like maybe five parking spaces in an area and turning it into something with a slide and. [00:32:33] A little bit of chairs and tables and pervious pavement and just make it into something that really feeds the community’s needs for connectedness. [00:32:42] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, I think those smaller examples sometimes thing really well. It’s interesting. So a lot of our teams have done side of pilots and then move to permanent investment, right? [00:32:53] So they’ve, they’ve piloted things to kind of see what works and make changes before. And I would say Memphis’s pilot was this smaller park called, what they now call River Garden, and they designed it in a way where they have sort of multi age climbing structure that’s not really a playground, so adults feel like they can climb it too. [00:33:17] They have tables and chairs for eating. They had a little coffee cart. They have, They have fire pits that they can fire up in the evenings when it’s cold out, they have sort of this sweet spot within the park, the bigger park, where people really gather, right, and that they design it in a way where those are all really close to each other, so that it is indeed not just parents taking their kids to go climb, but also a person who’s getting coffee and having lunch and, you know, someone who’s there to just sit on a Torch swing style and enjoy the river to just kind of be around one another. [00:33:54] Whether they’re going to really interact a ton is a different question. But I think that being in close proximity, right, that sometimes our parks are so big and so spread out that there isn’t really a chance for bump up. So I also think even within a larger investment, right, just thinking about creating those pockets of density, which is what I’m hearing in your town square and what I think the home base does too. [00:34:17] It’s like this. You know, how do you create this small space of density to encourage those bump ups or those relationships to happen? And then you can, you know, design the rest of the space around that perhaps. But I think there’s some real insights in terms of scale that, again, we don’t always think that way. [00:34:37] Jeff Wood: A lot of the projects that you all work on in different cities around the country, you put together data and metrics about outcomes, and I’m wondering how that’s been helpful to you to kind of get the numbers behind things, and also kind of tell the story of the places that you’re helping out. [00:34:50] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, so we designed this measurement system when we started back in 2016. [00:34:55] In part because when we went around and asked, as we were planning this initiative, we went around and asked different parks and recreation departments and library systems and things like what they were measuring. And it was mostly sort of operational data, right? So a lot of parks and recreation departments, one of the key measurements was number of acres mode. [00:35:14] Which, if you’re thinking environmentally, you might think that should decline, right? But if you’re just thinking about sheer amount of parkland, you would want that to increase. So you’re like, so that one of your key metrics is something that you might not even know which direction you want to move in, right? [00:35:28] And then in libraries, it was like number of books circulated. You know, just data that was like Maybe it helps you with operationalizing something, but it is not telling a compelling story to anyone outside of your entity, right? Your organization, and it’s certainly not making a bigger case for why to invest, right? [00:35:46] So we knew going in, we wanted the system to be something that we thought would help tell these stories, right? Help tell stories of impact and help make a difference. broader case for why this stuff matters, right? So we took those four outcomes. We have a set of signals that were created underneath each of those outcomes, and then a set of metrics that we think together these metrics moving indicate that indeed the signal’s moving and then that together yields the outcomes shifting. [00:36:14] And I think the, it’s been extremely helpful on a lot of different Avenues, right? So first, we now have final, I’m going to call them final in quotes, metrics reports for three of our initial cities, Akron, Detroit, and Memphis. And when you flip through them, you can see all these different changes, whether that be data points related to trust, data points related to social connection, data points related to diversity. [00:36:41] data points related to kind of access to nature and climate. So these issues that I would say, for the most part, we aren’t very good at measuring in this country at all. So it gives you kind of these different types of reasons to make these investments. Secondly, When we did the measurement work, most teams hired local residents to actually be data collectors on the ground. [00:37:05] And I think that process of having local residents measuring their own neighborhoods and their own neighbors was really valuable. So there’s a really fun story from Detroit. So there was a woman named Stephanie Harbin, who’d been a local sort of black club leader for many years. She was very engaged in the community. [00:37:25] She signed up to become a data collector. And when they were early on in the design phase for McNichols commercial corridor, you know, bike lanes were on the list of things. And she wasn’t really big on bike lanes. But as part of data collection, she did observation mapping. So she went out there and stood on different corners of McNichols to do bike and ped counts and try to understand how the street was being used. [00:37:48] And what she observed was that, indeed, she thought none of her neighbors biked, right? She was like, this isn’t for us. We don’t need bike lanes. But what she saw was, like, there’s actually a lot of people in this neighborhood, in the adjoining neighborhood, that bike, and this street is so unsafe for them to bike, right? [00:38:02] Like, there is nothing, and it was, I want to say it was four lanes, and it was, you know, fast moving vehicles, and people were going, you know, 55 or 60 on this street, and it’s supposed to be a commercial corridor, right? So she changed. Dramatically because she was the one out there doing the counting and saw it with her own two eyes that indeed her neighbors needed a safe place to bike. [00:38:23] Right? And so I think by engaging the residents that happened. She also later on was part of this ULI panel when they did an event in Detroit. And she stood up and, you know, was part of this panel and was like, our data, like, she claimed that measurement work as hers. And I think that’s really powerful. [00:38:43] They saw over the course of the project, an increase in trust in local government. So it doubled from like 12 percent to 30 percent over the project period. And also on the opposite end, the percentage of people who said local government can almost never be trusted. fell from 39 percent in 2017 to 13 percent in 2023, right? [00:39:04] So that distrust moved significantly. And I think part of it is engaging those residents in this data collection, right? It’s a, it’s a huge trust builder, because they’re the ones collecting it. They understand it. And I think oftentimes that’s not how we would see it, right? We would think that would be a burden. [00:39:22] You know, they got paid. It wasn’t free. It wasn’t volunteer labor. But them owning that data, I think, did nothing but improve the transparency with local government and that relationship building. So, I think there’s a lot of reasons to measure, but that one I found particularly powerful. [00:39:39] Jeff Wood: Well, so we also happen to have a copy of Transform Your Practice, the community engagement card deck. [00:39:44] I’m wondering where this idea came from, and what brought it together? Because it’s an interesting set of cards and information about the process of community engagement and how people see things. [00:39:53] Bridget Marquis: Yeah, so I would say from the very beginning of reimagine civic commons, when we talked about the outcome of civic engagement, people often would sub in community engagement. [00:40:03] We’re like, well, we want you to think about community engagement for a different purpose. That it’s not just community engagement to engage the community, but indeed to To build trust, right? To increase stewardship and advocacy, to think about that aspect of this work as leading to an outcome beyond itself, right? [00:40:24] So, moving people from this kind of check the box approach to community engagement to something that’s really meaningful was something that was kind of always on the agenda for the initiative. And back during the pandemic, we were unable to gather in person, and so we actually launched a series of virtual working groups that included one that was around sustaining robust engagement and That group through a series of conversations. [00:40:53] So it was a lot of different practitioners. One of the co chairs is the head of the Ohio and Erie Canalway Coalition trail organization in Akron, Ohio. Another is the head of a parks advocacy nonprofit in Memphis, Tennessee. And this working group over the course of probably 18 months started having these conversations about community engagement and kind of the myths of community engagement that we have these sort of ideas of how this thing works when we do public meetings that are really not true, right? [00:41:23] And so kind of the check the box reason to have public meetings isn’t really what you get with them. And so that there is a real desire to change community engagement and to give the field, I think, a different starting point. A way to ask different questions about why they do things the way they do. [00:41:40] And so through this series of conversations, when they came out of it, they were like, well, we don’t wanna write a white paper. Like what could we do that would actually be useful too? practitioners because that’s who we are and we think that’s the audience we want to talk to. And they came up with this idea of this kind of interactive card deck that kind of both puts the myths out there, puts out some challenges that I think a lot of people face when they’re doing community engagement out in the world. [00:42:06] And it kind of provides ideas or inspiration for different ways to go about that work or new ideas for their work. And they then subsequently put together a handful of short case studies to just give examples of like when you do change your practice, this is what it can look like on the ground. But it’s been a really fun card deck that we launched about a year ago. [00:42:29] It was funny, we did a Next City webinar at the very beginning of this year, and the chat was just blowing up. I’ve never been on a webinar that’s been that active on the chat, and I just realized. All these people are trying to do these public meetings and trying to do community engagement. And there’s just so much enthusiasm to doing it differently. [00:42:49] And a lot of times you just need that pathway, right? So I think what’s been useful within Civic Commons is that because we were sort of able to provide some flexible dollars for communities to do things differently, is that a lot of them were able to not do traditional community engagement, or at least do that plus a lot of other things, whether that be potluck dinners or You know, bounce houses and hot dogs, you know, a million different ways to just get people out and talking to one another and talking to different people on the team as a way to kind of do deep listening, to build relationships, to just do things very differently. [00:43:25] And I think through all those experiences, the synthesis of that is this card deck that we hope provides kind of inspiration and some new approaches for folks who are doing this work. Day in and day out, it’s hard work and it can feel very unfun. And I think part of that too, is just like, how do you make it more joyful? [00:43:44] Right? Because when we think about, you know, building community, it should be joyful. But I think sometimes we’ve kind of narrowed it down to the worst of the worst public meeting. And I think it’s, it’s helpful to give space to those practitioners and say, there are ways to do this differently. And let’s help at least inspire new questions. [00:44:06] Jeff Wood: Do you have a favorite myth or a card on the deck? Can I tell you mine? Yeah, [00:44:11] Bridget Marquis: go ahead. [00:44:12] Jeff Wood: There will be a golden moment of harmony. No community is homogenous, so perfect consensus should never be the goal of engagement. Focus on building relationships, trust, and accountability with a diverse range of people. [00:44:23] I just, I was thumbing through these a few weeks ago and I saw that one. I was like, yeah, we always are trying to get this mythical creature of Everybody’s on the same page, but usually isn’t that way. People are so diverse and they have different ways of coming at things and you might not ever get like a consensus, but you might get a path forward. [00:44:40] Bridget Marquis: Exactly. And I think that consensus is a really rough thing to even shoot for. I mean, this is such complex work and there’s so much nuance happening within the public realm that if you needed everything to reach consensus, we would never do anything, right? And one of my good colleagues, Alexa Bush, who’s with the Kresge Foundation, soon to be back in the planning department for the city of Detroit, often talks about the Inherent and invisible cost of the status quo. [00:45:12] And that sort of reminds me of that statement of if we need to get to consensus to move forward with something different. We’re not going to change. We’re never going to innovate, right? We’re going to get stuck with whatever we have because it’s. Because that’s the status quo. And so, like, we have to be comfortable with sort of discomfort, right? [00:45:33] And that it’s never going to make everyone 100 percent of the time happy. But you’ve talked to enough people with different diverse ideas and different perspectives that you feel confident that this is still for the public good, right? And I think sometimes we get trapped in this idea that everyone has to agree in order to move forward. [00:45:52] And oftentimes, I mean, what we’ve seen in the work on the ground in Akron and other places is if you’re able to pilot something, as opposed to talk about it at a public meeting, you actually can see like, oh, look it, everyone’s good with this, or like, this needs to change. And it’s so much easier when you’re just watching people interact with something in real life versus debating it on a drawing board for, you know, a year and a half. [00:46:17] And so I do think this kind of co creation process, which is really what I would say that card deck is really about, and what a lot of the civic commons work on the ground is about, it allows you to move things forward, to innovate, to do things differently, in part because it Every step of the way, you’re kind of, you’re engaging those residents in the work. [00:46:38] It’s just different than just doing public meetings, right? It’s kind of the way to the golden moment, even though you never have to kind of have it with head nods. You can have it by seeing everyone enjoying a fabulous lakefront that you’ve just Installed you know, new porch swings and grill pits around and now everyone’s really happy and using it, right? [00:46:59] So, I think it allows you to sort of move beyond and advance things without necessarily having 100 percent agreement in advance. [00:47:10] Jeff Wood: So I interrupted you. Did you have a favorite card? [00:47:13] Bridget Marquis: Hmm. I think the truth telling of that basically the community shows up. The myth is that the community turns up, right? The community in quotes. [00:47:23] Practitioners assume a representative group of people will participate in the engagement process, but research shows that people that attend public meetings are much more likely to be unhappy or distrusting, right? So I think Anyone who’s joined a public meeting, right? Whether you are the person putting on the public meeting or just an attendee and a participant, right? [00:47:43] We know this is true that people at the mic are generally angrier than the average resident, right? That that the people who show up. Are often the ones who are against whatever the meeting is about, because it’s much harder to motivate people who are for something or sort of just the silent majority of, like, no opinion to motivate them to show up to a meeting. [00:48:07] That’s usually not at a convenient location or time. And so I think that myth to me is something that I would say pushes up against. Why we even have requirements for public meetings that operate in this way when we know that, in essence, it’s drawing out a very narrow, often repetitive group of community members, as opposed to the larger community, and oftentimes those folks will say they speak for the community, right? [00:48:39] But they’re speaking for their own point of view. And I think there’s just a real challenge in this myth in that. There’s so many opportunities to talk to a lot of different people and make sure that you are getting diversity versus, you know, pure numbers. And I think that’s an important lesson coming out of this is just to know that there’s an opportunity to, if you do community engagement differently, to really engage a diverse group of people and probably come up with a better solution than you would if you just, you know, do the standard public meeting. [00:49:16] Jeff Wood: Last question, what do you think people should know about your work and what you’ve learned over time before they jump in feet first or head first into a process of rethinking their community assets? [00:49:28] Bridget Marquis: One thing that we learned very early on through the work in Philadelphia, which was our pilot, was that be very thoughtful about tackling a set of assets that are in proximity to one another. [00:49:40] So I think oftentimes there’s a desire to do things everywhere at once. And I think with this work, you really do need to create this kind of density of investment, these layers of investment. And these kind of high quality experiences in the public realm to start to shift local perceptions, local behaviors, right? [00:50:00] That it’s not just one thing. And I think because of that, it also means you should look to work across silos, right? So I know earlier we talked about thinking about involving your streets department. And I truly believe that kind of the broader the silos that you can get engaged, the more impact you’re going to be able to have in this work. [00:50:21] And then alongside that, I will also put a little asterisk. One thing we also talk a lot about and have learned is that Well, you want to work broadly and across a lot of different silos, start with the Coalition of the Willing. Right? So you need to get started somewhere. I think a lot of people will say, oh, if we only had a better mayor, if we only had a better planning director, right, we would do this. [00:50:48] And I think that’s not really necessary. https: otter. ai Come from all different types of organizations, step into the kind of convener role, so like the leader of the collaboration role in our communities, it didn’t, didn’t have to be the mayor, didn’t have to be the planning department, right? It’s different in different cities. [00:51:06] And to me, that’s a real challenge and opportunity for people to say, okay, we don’t have to wait for that. One role to be the right person, we can do this with the roles that we’re in, right? Find people who agree with chasing these big outcomes, right? Who really see the potential of the public realm and get some quick wins, right? [00:51:26] So I talked a lot about this kind of idea of pilots and prototypes. I think those quick wins that we saw in Akron, for instance, the city early on was more of like a rubber stamp. Entity at the table when they first started Akron Civic Commons and by, you know, the last few years have been investing heavily, both with ARPA dollars, but other dollars and also be really active in the collaboration and in kind of building, rebuilding the trust on the ground and communities. [00:51:55] And so I think. Sometimes they need you to de risk some things, right? They need these opportunities. They need to see some small wins so they can say, Oh, we can get behind that. Like we see where you’re going. And, and, you know, that is a good thing for the public. And we want to be part of that and we want to invest alongside you. [00:52:12] So, and I think, you know, I feel like I’m beating the drumbeat of outcomes, but I would say that is the other, I think, key to the recipe. Is to really be laser focused on these outcomes and to think about ambitious goals for public spaces and with those ambitious goals means you need to be really thoughtful about the quality of those spaces. [00:52:35] You need to be really thoughtful about your staffing models, right? Like we discussed and to know that I think when you are able to do that. You’re able to kind of shift these really needy challenges that we’re facing across the country. I just, to me, it’s like, there’s no greater urgency or sort of opportunity to look at this. [00:52:58] Network of potential public space as a way to counter these challenges, because I think what we see across the country, right? These are not getting better on their own. And I think public space and the public realm have very unique traits that allow them to deliver on increasing trust. Increasing social connection and increasing connection across diversity that I think we all need in this country. [00:53:24] And I just can’t think of anything more urgent that I’d want to be working on. [00:53:30] Jeff Wood: Where can folks find out more about what you’re working on? [00:53:32] Bridget Marquis: Our website is civiccommons. us and there are many resources available there. Whether it be the card deck that you can download white papers and other booklets. [00:53:43] And then we also have a medium publication that you can get to from that website that we put out bi monthly articles that showcase work on the ground in cities all across the country, both within our network and beyond. [00:53:55] Jeff Wood: Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? [00:53:58] Bridget Marquis: I am on LinkedIn Bridget Marquis. [00:54:00] That’s probably the best place. [00:54:02] Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, Bridget, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:54:05] Bridget Marquis: Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. It was fun.
