Lean Placemaking for Cities by Mariela Alfonzo - The Lean Startup Conference 12/9/14
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You may not know that cities, like startups, can run experiments to test new initiatives. Urban design expert, Mariela Alfonzo shows us how she has applied Lean Startup to urban planning to and created a tool that helps cities generate and test their hypotheses effectively.
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Lean Placemaking for Cities by Mariela Alfonzo - The Lean Startup Conference 12/9/14
- 3. Photo by: @munirhamdan on Flickr
- 4. Photo by: Emilio Labrador on Flickr
- 7. HELLO My Name Is
- 12. DENSITY CONNECTIVIT Y FORM PROXIMITY PARKS & PUBLIC SPACES RECREATIONAL FACILITIES PEDESTRIAN & BICYCLIST AMENITIES TRAFFIC SAFETY AESTHETICS PERSONAL SAFETY STATE OF PLACE INDEX DENSITY CONNECTIVIT Y FORM PROXIMITY PARKS & PUBLIC SPACES RECREATIONAL FACILITIES PEDESTRIAN & BICYCLIST AMENITIES TRAFFIC SAFETY AESTHETICS PERSONAL SAFETY TM 0 100 ECONOMIC VALUE $ $$$
- 15. Photo by: @svjohnson on Flickr
- 20. MARIELA ALFONZO MARIELA@STATEOFPLACE.ORG @STATEOFPLACEORG STATE OF PLACETM
Editor's Notes
- This is my hometown, “Weh-che-steh” Mee-ya-Mee, where my most exhilarating memory is playing an ersatz game of frogger as I tightroped down pencil-thin sidewalks, dodging cars as I crossed strip-mall lined highways, all to get a chicken-teriyaki sub. It’s also
- a failed product. Back then, I wasn’t a researcher, entrepreneur, or Lean Startup evangelist - I was a consumer. I consumer of place. An unsatisfied consumer of place. But my “Weh-che-steh” story isn’t unique
- And this is why. Cities are zombies – of the startup kind: “an organization or company that’s operating, but not growing;” one that is “in a state of limbo: not dead, yet not exactly alive.” Unfortunately, it’s an epidemic.
- Cities have spent so much damn time in the building, forget about not grasping the customer problem, they totally misunderstood who their customers were. They designed cities for cars, not people. As consumers, we’re paying the price; and cities are left with unsustainable products.
- For cities, getting out of the building typically means mailing out a “notice of public approval.” Best case scenario – an angry mob shows up protesting the product. Worst case, no one shows up and the doomed-to-fail product – THIS - gets approved.
- And even when cities do engage with the public, it’s usually way after putting out a request for proposals from that in and of itself often presupposes the solution. This trickle-down placemaking process is broken.
- It doesn’t have to be this way. This is the Highline in NYC. It’s widely successful, with nearly 5 million visitors a year. It started as a grassroots project with customer development at the very heart of it: a community-led design competition.
- Cities must move from an entrenched This Is How We Do It, build it and they will come, we know best, mentality, to an evidence-based framework. They need to recognize that while people might not be able to design the solution, they’re the experts when it comes to their pain points.
- Cities need to learn from what people and places are telling them. Cities need to be more like Lean startups. Cities need to get the heck out of the building! In other words, cities need to
- It enables cities to get out of the building and into the block. We quantify what people love about cities & identify ways to make them better – in the most efficient way. We start by collecting over 280 built environment features – like street trees, parks
- My entire career, I’ve obsessively analyzed the crap out of how streets impact people – I’m an “fun” person to take a walk with. But only recently did I realize I’d built a Lean Startup tool for cities. My startup, State of Place is more than just a data analytics platform
- sidewalks– you name it, we measure it – and aggregate that into the State of Place Index. But the key is we train the community to collect the data. Cities get objective data about communities’ physical problems and have an in-built customer development platform.
- So building upon State of Place’s data analytics and decision-making framework, cities can create an informed falsifiable problem hypothesis: For example: 30 out of 50 residents feel there are not enough green spaces within close walking distance to their homes.
- After running customer interviews to validate that hypothesis, use State of Place to identify a good MVP like a pop-up pocket-park – by transforming a couple of parking spaces into a temporary park. While pop-up uses have become more common, what’s unique is that an MVP
- is just a means to an end – cities should not fall in love with them. Instead, use the MVP to test yet another hypothesis – this time about product-market fit: the pop-up pocket park will attract at least 150 visitors over the weekend. If this benchmark isn’t met,
- Conduct further customer interviews to understand why: only 50 people visited the pop-up pocket park because it was hard to find; the true problem wasn’t a perceived lack of green space but rather a lack of knowledge of and difficulty accessing existing green space.
- Finally, learn the art of the pivot. The real solution: create better signage for and provide a safer pedestrian crossing and access routes to the existing green space– not only easily saving over $1m, but also truly solving the problem
- So again, cities need to be more like Lean Startups – the promise is the same: if you build something (someone actually wants or needs), they will come. If you get out of the building, you’ll know what that want or need is. State of Place
- is simply adapting Lean Startup methods for use in Lean Placemaking to help deliver places people love. And the parallels are endless. Lean Startup can change everything. Let’s work together to make that happen – for cities or otherwise. Thank you very much.