How would you describe the concept of “transformative placemaking?” 

Transformative placemaking is a framework for how to think about changing places, starting from the premise that place matters. Transformative placemaking refers to a specific scale of place, like a neighborhood or a district. These places are smaller than cities, but bigger than a block. It's an outcomes-based framework that explores the question, “Why do places have to change?” Place matters because it affects all different kinds of outcomes for people. Places have to change in order to create better places that work for more people in terms of their economic, health, social and civic outcomes.  

Another thing that distinguishes transformative placemaking is the question of who gets to decide what needs to change. Transformative placemaking is not a top-down approach, where experts or people with political power decide. Transformative placemaking believes that practitioners are the experts, that proximity itself is a form of expertise, that solutions are created in community, and that change at the local level will trickle up to produce better outcomes for cities and regions. 

 

A lot of your work focuses on the idea of hyperlocalism. Can you help us understand what that means and why it interests you?  

Hyperlocalism is a spatial scale that's bigger than a house or a block, but smaller than a city. I'm interested in this scale because it is not a political unit of geography. Neighborhoods don't have governments. This is the scale at which people relate to the world once we're beyond our private domain. This hyperlocal scale determines our quality of life, how we live our life, who we know. That's especially true for children, which is why a lot of the research literature about neighborhoods focuses on children's outcomes. But I argue that it's true for everyone, so I want to help make that visible. While neighborhoods don't have formal governments or boundaries that you can draw on a map, we can still make visible the informal ways in which neighborhoods are managed, and by making those informal and invisible practices visible, then we can strengthen them and make them more equitable. 

 

How do we see hyperlocalism in Philadelphia, or even within Drexel?  

Philadelphia is a super interesting example of hyperlocalism. Everyone thinks their city is a city of neighborhoods, but it’s especially true in Philly. It's a great example of how there are inequitable outcomes between neighborhoods in close proximity. But there are also initiatives happening at the hyperlocal level to try to change that. In the case of Drexel, for example, the University City District has made efforts to create a place out of this cluster of campuses and to make it work better, not just for the universities’ students and faculty, but for the other people who live nearby.  

Philly is also known for Kensington, one of the most struggling neighborhoods on the entire East Coast. And in Kensington, there are also all kinds of cool, hyperlocal new ways of collaborating, of working together to change conditions and outcomes. It shouldn't just be Center City or University City that benefit. Every kind of place needs the capacity to do this. 

 

Where did your interest in this work begin?  

I grew up in a typical East Coast city in the eighties, when cities were dying and they were super segregated. I grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood, and I went to school in the public school system of this high population loss, majority Black city. The contrast was jarring, to say the least. I've always been interested in the history of how that kind of inequality has come to pass, and how it's maintained over time. If everybody knows it's wrong, why is it so persistent?  

When I left the extremely wealthy white suburb that I grew up in, I served for two years on the city council of a very small, majority Black and brown micro municipality in Prince George's County, MD. That led to my interest in what it takes to build capacity at the hyperlocal level. I was also struck by how many of the efforts we made as a city actually made things worse instead of better. It was clear that the challenge is not just a lack of capacity at the hyperlocal level, it's a lack of knowledge about what works in order to make these places better. Even experts don't know what it takes to change. They're able to observe that place matters, but we don't have answers to really basic questions about what works to build social capital. And we urgently need the answers to those questions. That's why I decided to pursue a career in knowledge production around this topic, because of my personal experience trying to serve a place like this, and how not only did I feel ill equipped, I felt at high risk of doing harm when I was trying to help. 

 

What is the most rewarding part of your work? 

My passion is empowering the leaders and the organizations that are working at the hyperlocal level. I love lifting up case studies of what works; I love equipping those organizations with knowledge that they're looking for. I have people come to me all the time saying, "We have this exact problem you described. What do we do about it?” I love having those conversations. Everyone lives in a place. It's incredibly satisfying, wherever I go in the world, to see that the framework for transformative placemaking is very flexible. You can apply it anywhere, see what's working and what's not and draw comparative lessons for other places.