With threats to research funding capturing news headlines around the U.S., I reflect on the often-rushed processes our industry deploys and the imperative to apply a pinch more scientific method to our work. Indeed, the National Institute of Health (NIH) has supported nearly every major medical advancement of our time. If you’ve ever used a prescription drug, had surgery, received a treatment or protected yourself from disease with a vaccine, NIH-funded research has improved your life. Comparably, there’s nary a downtown in North America that isn’t impacted by the good work of organizations such as yours.
Research, experimentation and learning will always be needed when there are people – and cities – in need. Like the heroes toiling in research laboratories across the country, our industry attracted us because it gives us the chance to improve lives at the scale of the city. Often, basic human needs and wants fuel our motivations; we want cleaner, safer, more beautiful and culturally rich places to pursue our dreams.
Oh, we also want our cities to feature great storefront economies boasting the ideal blend of local and name brand operators, and to provide housing that accommodates a diverse array of households and income earners. Also, our cities need to provide safe, viable options for people to get around. Plus, great schools for the kids we maybe have, and parks for the dogs we definitely have. Did I mention offering luxury experiences, robust transit as well as rugged, character-defining authenticity? We’ll need all of those too.
Like medical researchers, city builders confront an infinite number of conditions to solve, while the distinction between solvable problems and wish-list items gets blurred. Either way, we’ve got a lot to do, and our stakeholders push us to discover the miracle breakthrough that will catapult our communities forward. Perhaps we can draw inspiration from our researcher counterparts who labor to cure diseases and enable people to live better, healthier lives. Certainly, we agree that a life well lived includes its place-based context.
Across North America and beyond, there are more than a thousand independent “urban laboratories” (that’s your organization) conducting research and experiments every day to improve place. Some of these experiments are simply projects and placemaking concepts borrowed from other places regardless of context and or comparability. Sometimes we want something so bad, such as a new retail tenant or district-shuffling transit, that we overlook unpopular details such as market feasibility in search of the short-term win. When that business shutters or the circulator finishes another rider-less route, we face the reality that some experiments can produce poor results. Our processes are often less thorough than the scientific method and its standards of reproducibility, but they don’t have to be.
IDA provides resources such as conferences and best practice manuals via its Top Issues Councils reports, and we as practitioners share a duty to apply more rigor to our own work. We are responsible for not only understanding complex problems and proposing experimental interventions, but also for testing and analyzing them for efficacy and outcomes. When our experiments yield promising results and are replicable, they are worth sharing – and could even be award-worthy.
As we diligently muddle our way through expansive work plans, processes, frenetic jobs and constantly moving goal lines – the prospect of sharing our findings beyond our Boards can feel more like mission-stray than mission-pursuit. However, when your discovery successfully expands on something that another city started, our industry is strengthened and we shift from being individual experimenters to collective learners.
Consider sharing your successful community-improving discoveries via the IDA’s Downtown Achievement Awards, and contribute your experiments and experience to our growing body of city-building research and innovation.