Creating PorchLights: A digital platform to activate the public realm
Tl;dr: Over the past several months, what started as a research question resulted in the development of PorchLights, a web app to help individuals and organizations build and manage neighborhood projects (think little free libraries, gardens, pop-up markets and porch concerts). This tool guides an individual through every step of the build process including procuring a permit, locating funding and maintaining a project. In parallel, it offers organizations the ability to oversee their portfolio of neighborhood projects. If you’re an individual looking to build a project in your neighborhood, click here to get started. If you are with an organization and looking for support to co-design these projects for your neighborhood, manage your portfolio or engage with your members, reach out through this form. Now … Onto the story of why and how I built PorchLights.
Waking up to a “New Normal”
When the pandemic first hit, along with the rest of the world I experienced a surreal first few weeks adjusting to the (over-used by now) “new normal”. I watched my favorite stores close in Washington D.C., flinched when someone walked too close, and settled into a new routine of wandering around my now-quiet city. I felt uneasy at the lack of vibrancy I had come to know so well.
The first few weeks were tough — But then, as we so often do, our community adapted.
In a heroic act of coordination and resilience, DC’s government responded quickly to the growing need for a flexible public realm. The District’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) introduced pick-up and drop-off zones to support increased delivery capacity for restaurants, permits were fast-tracked to grant restaurants the ability to expand their seating into “parklets”, and slow street signs were peppered across the District to expand pedestrian walkways. Across the country, institutions modified their policies, regulations and requirements to rise to the occasion and serve their constituents.
I watched as these changes took place overnight. The way we engage in our proverbial backyard was transforming. Barriers that felt insurmountable to build in the public realm (e.g. permitting, funding, procuring parts) suddenly became a footnote in the face of public health concerns, economic instability and community needs.
While institutions were evolving, individuals began to take note of their neighborhood-level surroundings. In a recent CityLab article on “The One-Minute City”, the authors emphasize that residents have reduced their travel radius to a block-level and are now spending time on daily walks, shopping local, and reframing their view of the streets as not only a means of transportation, but for eating, socializing and entertainment.
I started to think about the implication of these changes. I wondered what a neighborhood and, in effect, a city, might look like if individuals felt more empowered to directly build local infrastructure that reflected their concerns and collective values. In my final semester of my Masters in Urban Planning at Georgetown, I decided to focus full-time on developing a new paradigm for individual ownership of the neighborhood.
Developing a Research Approach
“The neighborhood is the basic unit of human civilization [..] where our lives unfold day after day — meeting friends at the coffee shop, chatting with neighbors on the street, going about our business in stores, parks, gathering spots, and our own backyard.” — Jay Wallsjasper
Healthy and engaged neighborhoods are the building blocks of a happy city. They enable economic opportunity for local business, provide social connection for residents, and are where individuals find themselves spending most of their time.
Historically, the process to develop neighborhood improvements has been reserved for institutions like a city’s office of planning, a business improvement district, or community non-profits. These improvements may be thought of as “placemaking”, which is a coordinated effort to enhance public space through programming, infrastructure improvements and management that results in happier and healthier communities. Placemaking efforts often include the redevelopment of parks, transit infrastructure, streetscapes, or pop-up infrastructure.
The current process often requires specialized knowledge, resources ranging from building materials to designers, navigating the permitting process, and influence in the local political sphere. So, although individuals are not explicitly barred from participating in placemaking efforts, these barriers often dissuade or disable the individual from starting or completing a local project they want to see built. The responsibility for neighborhood development then naturally falls on local institutions to dictate the types of projects and manage the development of these projects.
The model is deeply flawed. It results in institutions forced to prioritize projects based on their own resource constraints and mandates while it leaves the individuals who live or work locally limited in their ability to influence their public backyard.
This model leaves a gaping hole in the development of happy and healthy neighborhoods. It misses the opportunity to develop hyper-targeted place-based interventions that directly serve the needs of a neighborhood. Due to the reliance on institutions and the inability for an institution to serve the needs of all constituents, neighborhoods miss out on physical and programmatic projects that can support their direct needs. Therefore, I focused my research on the following two questions:
- What could a tool look like to mitigate this divide and encourage residents and institutions to work together to build local projects?
- What would a neighborhood look like with community-led projects?
To answer this first question, I interviewed placemakers, residents, academics, government employees and creatives; conducted research on best practices surrounding tactical urbanism; and performed a geospatial analysis on Washington D.C’s place-based challenges.
This research uncovered the core challenges a tool would need to overcome to encourage a new model of neighborhood development.
Unpacking the Challenges
Based on interviews and research, both institutional actors and individuals identified the below barriers as the most challenging and prohibitive to building effective neighborhood projects.
- Getting started: Individuals must overcome a knowledge gap including the permitting process, funding opportunities, site designs, procuring parts and building physical site fixtures.
- Mobilizing a community: Individuals have day jobs, families and ranging priorities. Given that their sole focus isn’t on neighborhood development, they can’t start making improvements alone. They need support gathering resources, volunteers and approvals from neighborhoods and need help building and maintaining the project.
- Tracking project progress and feedback: Once individuals build their projects, there are usually gaps in maintenance efforts, data collection and feedback, which are all components that drive ongoing and future success of a project.
Introducing PorchLights
With these core challenges in mind, I designed and built PorchLights, a neighborhood web app to help residents build and maintain local projects. These projects can range from short-term programs like a Porch Concert, or larger, long-term physical projects like an Urban Garden or a Little Free Pantry.
Overcoming the starting paralysis: The web app’s core capability is the replicable “Urban Kit”. An Urban Kit provides comprehensive instructions and guidelines for individuals tackling specific projects in their neighborhood. Designed by partner institutions, these kits outline the impact of a project, a description, and dedicated instructions to build. These detailed steps range from procuring permits to accessing funding and instructions on how to build. Institutions can then disseminate these kits to their members or make available to the public to be replicated and modified for individual needs. Individuals replicate these kits as a baseline to modify tasks, assign project volunteers and assign specific deadlines and goals. If an individual wants to build a local project but doesn’t fall under a supporting institution or an urban kit doesn’t exist for that project type, they can use the “Custom Kit” which comes pre-populated with general recommendations for placemaking best practices.
Building a tribe of placemakers: Once the individual overcomes the challenge of getting started and getting clear on a project plan, they’ll need a team to support them. This team may be neighbors, surrounding businesses, or artists. PorchLights allows the individual to join relevant organizations or build a project-specific team. The individual can then collaborate with other members of an organization or use the project management capabilities to assign specific tasks and share project reports with interested volunteers. The ability to participate in project teams and organizations allows a project lead to solicit feedback from leadership, get support as needed, and be transparent about the build and maintenance status.
Tracking progress and feedback: The final challenge often cited by organizations and individuals is determining whether a project worked. PorchLights puts the emphasis on submitting recurring reports related to your project’s progress and maintenance requirements. Institutions can provide “recommended data points” in the urban kits they design. If the individual uses the PorchLights “custom kit”, they’ll get general recommendations for good data points to gather, including:
- How many beneficiaries did your project support?
- How did you make this project accessible to the community?
- What was the core impact of the project?
- What is your community saying about this project?
Over the past several months I’ve iterated on the design and specifics of the app, but the core value of this platform has remained the same. PorchLights equips individuals with the tools they needs to successfully improve their community through neighborhood projects and programming.
Adapting my Assumptions
As I’ve gone through this experience of building my (first ever!) app, I had a few realizations.
1. There is a variety of use cases that benefit from this new model
While my priority was initially focused on individual empowerment, it turns out that institutions can also benefit from this platform. Institutions need a centralized system to support their own placemaking efforts and are looking for a platform to:
- Manage their portfolio of projects that involve multiple community stakeholders,
- Effectively communicate about project specifics,
- Engage the community about new project ideas and ongoing efforts, and
- Without fail, always need better data.
Initially I assumed institutions would be interested in streamlining their efforts to support members with project development, but the reality is that the fragmentation of placemaking efforts also impede institutions’ ability to carry out their own projects. This finding demonstrates that this model benefits not only the individual looking to make improvements, but can also support institutions in achieving their own placemaking objectives.
2. Different neighborhoods have different priorities
Some neighborhoods struggle with food insecurity. Others struggle with a lack of public space or parks. Some may grapple with the digital divide or traffic safety concerns. Every neighborhood has a different composition of ages, family demographics, socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic makeup and a commercial/residential split. For organizations interested in designing urban kits for their constituents, it is important to design projects that respond to:
- The needs of the community based on existing assets (e.g., access to grocery stores, availability of public space, digital infrastructure or existing transit routes);
- The reality that community members’ abilities, resources and privileges will vary (e.g., access to funding, access to institutional support, access to land or public resources). This will inform the specific recommendations and steps an institution should provide;
- And finally, critically, do residents not only want this project, but are they able and willing to contribute the time and energy to co-build these projects?
Deeply understanding the composition and reality of a neighborhood matters when designing solutions and should be a core consideration from the outset.
3. There’s room for everyone
Placemaking has many different names and faces: Tactical urbanism, DIY urbanism, Transformational Placemaking, Creative Placemaking. These are terms that demonstrate the burgeoning field of creatives and organizations looking to make long term neighborhood improvements. There will always be dedicated organizations developing new suggestions for design standards, equitable development, community engagement strategies, funding tools, and enhanced permitting processes.
PorchLights is designed to serve these placemakers and individuals by providing a consolidated tool focused on project execution. That means every Urban Kit is designed with the support of an institution and redirects the individual to external resources wherever needed, rather than attempt to silo an individual into one digital ecosystem. For example:
- When individuals are ready to pursue funding, we point them to In Our Backyard for a crowdfunding tool;
- When users are ready to design and build, resources should point to the Tactical Urbanism Guide and Better Block for materials considerations and best practices;
- When individuals are ready to apply for a permit, they should be redirected to a city agency’s tried & true document for submitting effective permitting applications.
Civic tech solution shouldn’t operate in a vacuum when there is such an abundance of supportive institutions, research and agency support that can aide in the success of a neighborhood project.
So… What’s Next?
Recall that when I set out to build PorchLights, I laid out two questions: What could the tool look like, and what would happen in neighborhoods where individuals led these projects?
This article highlighted some key findings and the early development of an app to respond to the first question. To answer the second, I’m looking for some adventurous volunteers. If any of the below resonates with you, keep reading.
- I am an individual and a hobbyist musician who would love to host a porch concert when it gets warmer! (Or want to build an urban garden, little free library, pantry, food drive, etc.)
- I’m a local business owner and looking for creative ways to activate the space in front of my store and engage with my neighbors
- I work as a placemaker and want to encourage my constituents to build more independently to free up my resources and time
- I work as a placemaker and I need support tracking my portfolio of projects and capturing relevant data for my projects
- I’m a property manager looking to engage with my residents in a meaningful way to support their interests and sense of community
- I’m a creative and an artist and I struggle with wanting to focus on the design and build, but get stuck repeating process-recommendations to my clients or lacking insight into their build stage
For the individual, good news! You can get started today at app.porchlights.org, set up an account and create a project using one of our six templates or create a custom project.
If you work with an organization or are a creative placemaker, let’s chat about designing the right urban kit for your members or constituents! Fill out this form to get started.
Finally, this is just the beginning of exploring this space, and I’m committed to transparency as I go through this journey. I will be sharing deeper findings as it relates to placemaking, civic tech, equity and public space. As I move past academia and into implementation, I want to close with a big shout out to Georgetown’s Masters in Urban Planning program which allowed me to explore this topic and connected me with some wonderful advisors and faculty including Uwe Brandes, Rich Bradley, Ellen McCarthy, Dan Carol, Chris Pyke and many more.
Stay tuned for additional (and hopefully shorter) articles coming soon!
Articles, Links and Organizations mentioned:
1. CityLab’s Article on the One-Minute City
2. Street Moves
3. IOBY
4. Better Block
