Dragging Chairs Around

You can't just build it, you have to throw a party in it.

Last summer, before I moved to London, I came across a novel block party in a leafy corner of Brownstone Brooklyn. Someone, I’m assuming the City government, had closed half a block and jammed it full of firetrucks, ambulances, garbage trucks, and police cars for kids to climb on, sit in, and touch. This was probably the biggest event on the 4-8 year old social calendar that summer. Kids were losing their shit, I mean Santa’s village levels of joy.

“Why don’t kids play outside anymore?” You sometimes hear people lament, never mind all the cars, real and imagined crime concerns, and screen-based media we’ve inundated them with. The irony of this specific block party was in showing the joy that can occur when you remove traffic from a public street, while also showing that cars and trucks friggin rock to most kids.

But I don’t want to talk about a firetruck as a viable alternative to iPad Minecraft. What I took away from this particular scene was the importance of party planning to city life. Planners, architects, and designers can be guilty of building-determinism. If we make the space really nice then nice things will naturally happen. But a well-planned space isn’t guaranteed to succeed, and a badly planned space can succeed despite itself. It’s not enough to mess with the built environment, you have to actually invite and nurture activities, things to do, things to watch. You need to plan a party.

Planners and public space designers sometimes call this the program, or what activities happen on the site, what is there to do. The difference between a space and a place is that one is known for being able to do something—There is a there there. Fred Kent of the Project for Public Spaces says a good place has at least ten things to do (by his admission, the exact number is arbitrary, but the intent is sound). I like to think of programming as passive or active. Passive programming is spontaneous and can happen without the intervention of the place’s administrators. People playing chess on a park table, picnics on a grassy field, talking around a table and chairs — these are all activities that must be designed for but once the table, field, and chairs are in place they can pretty much happen on their own. As the name suggests, active programming requires a bit more conscious planning. This is a fancy term for something you already know. Your farmer’s market is part of an active program, as are festivals, parades, etc. These things require permits, staff, and production, and are often temporary or seasonal. Yet even though they may be temporary they are vital to our understanding of places. What is Rockefeller Center without the yearly tree lighting? 5th Ave without parades, Union Square without the farmer’s market? Or Columbia Road without flower sellers?

For some places, programming isn’t just nice to have, it’s how the space survives. Bryant Park is probably one of the most programmed spaces in New York City and an excellent case study. In the late 70’s the park was essentially an open-air drug market, with high-profile murders and muggings occurring in the walled-in square. A non-profit Corporation was formed in 1980, using donations and funds from local businesses and property owners to help clean up and secure the park. Over the next decade, the Corporation widened entrances, reduced walls, and generally opened up the park so that illicit activity couldn’t be hidden in dark corners. It also started to rigorously program the space, first by attracting restaurant operators and building food kiosks, then concerts, then finally the winter market and ice rink that the space has become famous for. I took a quick look at the Corporation’s 2022 report. Of roughly 24 million dollars in revenue, only $2,500,000 came from levies on property owners. The rest of the money came from sponsorships, event licensing, rent paid by concessionaires, and other usage fees. A whopping 14 million dollars alone came from the Winter Village market. Bryant Park is an extreme example of a public space that essentially runs on programming — its ability to maintain itself is dependent on its ability to throw events that generate value and sponsorship.

Is this a good thing? The Corporation emerged when the City government was so bankrupt that the Parks Department was all too happy to relinquish management of the space. Services we expect from our city, like trash pick-up and security, are now funded by the Corporation which needs to act entrepreneurially with its space. Because the Park needs to be constantly throwing events to survive, it isn’t exactly a relaxing place to be. I used to work out of the NYPL building adjacent to Bryant and there was always a workout class, concert, or some other event happening smack in the middle of the lawn. When a space is rigorously programmed, it can get in the way of the more passive, or organic activities that may take place. My two cents are short of a massive increase in funding for the Parks Dept, the corporation is making the most out of the system it exists in, and in the ecosystem of Manhattan green spaces, there is room for a more actively programmed park (tranquil Central Park is 17 blocks away). Still, even Bryant has its passive pleasures. The Corporation worked with placemaking granddaddy William H. Whyte on its initial renovation, who recommended the addition of 2,000 movable chairs. This doesn’t sound particularly innovative, but Whyte had a theory about movable chairs:

“A wonderful invention— the movable chair. Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make room for groups, move away from them. The possibility of choice is an important as the excercise of it. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put. This is perhaps why people so often move a chair a few inches this way and that before sitting in it, with the chair ending up about where it was in the first place.”

The above is from Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, the book that probably made me want to become a planner, and one I think would be fascinating to anyone even mildly interested in city life (it’s also short!).

I saw his theory in full effect one sunny winter day when this guy dragged a chair into the path of the sun for some lunch-break vitamin D.

Sitting in the sun may not be a concert or market but it is an activity you can plan for and around. Whyte set up time-lapse cameras above the plaza in front of the Seagram Building and found in the cooler spring months people followed the sunlight like cats, sitting in the wedge of light that moved across the plaza and avoiding seating areas outside of it.

What Whyte’s work shows is how thoughtful you can be about even seemingly simple things like seating. It’s no surprise then that place management and programming has become a mini-profession within the wider planning field. Many organizations like the Bryant Park Corporation are probably more likely to employ people with event production and operations experience than urban planners. However, it requires more than operational excellence to program a good space. Going back to last week’s post about audience, whether to set up a tennis, pickleball, or basketball court on a blacktop isn’t just a question of different equipment and requirements, but potentially also a question about class, gender, and quality of life impacts (at least one person I know has literally moved after a pickleball court opened outside their window because they couldn’t stand the noise of the ball). In London, I became acquainted with the case of Finsbury Park, tucked into a diverse but gentrifying area of North London. The local council had committed to throwing large concerts drawing up to 40,000 spectators in the park. The revenue from these events made up a huge part of the park’s budget, not unlike Bryant Park. Researchers at the University College London observed and interviewed several groups in and around the park. Many groups, joggers, tennis players, and residents among them, decried the “over-commercialization” of the park. They disliked the noise, the crowds, and the fact that large parts of the park became closed for concerts. There is also the tension between the programming of the concerts, many of which cater to the audience of UK rap and dance music, and the affluent neighborhood springing up around it more likely to use the park for tennis. The programming of space is never divorced from questions about its social role. Is the park an idyllic green space for residents? A cherished gathering area for fans of a specific music genre? Can it be both? I think these questions are why programming is where both the art and science of planning shine. It is both dead simple and totally innovative to delight hundreds of children in a neighborhood by simply parking some big-ass vehicles on a closed street. Wrapped up in what activities happen in a place are also questions of how we fund public life, who gets to have parties and who doesn’t, and the social role of space in our cities. But I don’t want to make this sound overly academic. My wish is that everyone tries their hand at making something happen in a public space. As I’ve said before, much of the best programming is done by everyday people doing things like cracking open fire hydrants and dragging barbecues to the curb. Next time you move a chair into the sun, realize you’re doing it too.