2022 AIA Communities by Design Reimagining Petaluma SDAT - Report - Page 54
Petaluma DAT
Moving Forward –
Turning Aspiration into
Action
efforts, the community needs to prioritize projects. The
people who best know which projects should be given
precedence in order to achieve Petaluma’s larger goals
are already in the community: City leaders, community
residents, business folks, and staff, among others.
Petaluma is entirely capable of enhancing ongoing and
generating new endeavors.
The team acknowledges that the recommendations
presented within this report are ambitious; if they were
easily achievable, Petaluma would have undoubtedly
already accomplished them. Community leaders
explicitly charged the DAT to produce an aspirational
vision, and the team attempted to rise to that challenge.
The time the team spent in Petaluma revealed the city to
be an innovative, ambitious place, filled with motivated
and savvy community members. The initiative and
grassroots leadership shown by the group of volunteers
who sought out and brought the DAT to town are
indicative of the overall community commitment towards
positive change present within Petaluma. The onus for
the implementation of the community’s vision cannot
and should not fall simply on the shoulders of the city
government; the community must be involved every step
of the way. The power of an intensely motivated group
of engaged citizens should never be underestimated, and
by harnessing that energy the team sincerely believes
that Petaluma can go well beyond the recommendations
present within this report, becoming an inspiration and
case study for other communities with similar ambitions.
To help decision makers make more informed decisions
about where and what to do next, it may be useful to
offer some criteria that can be used to make these
decisions.
Next Steps
Prioritize Implementation Efforts
Petaluma has a number of neighborhoods that already
function as 15-minute areas or that are lacking only a
few elements to fully meet the criteria. Likewise, ongoing
efforts to decarbonize the city and improve transit and
connectivity are resulting in positive change. To continue
building and expanding the momentum of these
Criteria to Consider in Choosing Projects
The following are factors that should be considered
for various types of projects that can help advance
Petaluma’s objectives.
• Engage committed partners for selected larger
scale endeavors (private, non-profit, institutional,
other public entities.)
• Engage community members (residents/
businesses) early in the process, particularly in
larger scale projects. Allow the community to help
prioritize endeavors.
• Identify the greatest needs where you can make a
beneficial impact.
• Are the economics of the project viable with existing
public/private resources or will it require new ones?
If the latter, how readily can these be secured?
• How much risk are you willing/able to take –
particularly on larger projects?
• Each significant project needs dedicated
staff. Larger projects may also mandate
interdepartmental and/or agency commitments
• Find initial projects that can be done relatively
affordably and expeditiously, and that have visible
positive impact.
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• Find public improvements that will help leverage
additional private investment (e.g., street trees
leveraging building façade improvements).
Getting Started: Tactical Projects and
Programming
Everything Petaluma does should reinforce the
community’s identity, values and aspirations for the
future. There are many examples of simple peoplefriendly interventions that Petaluma can engage in to
promote the realization of its vision and to continue
building the engagement of its citizenry. Some of
them require virtually no resources, while others
require volunteers, materials, and modest financial
commitments. The following examples are illustrative,
but Petaluma should decide what it might take
inspiration from and create its own unique path that fits
the community identity.
Many small-scale interventions can use existing
industrial/waste materials and volunteers to build
opportunities for public gathering and a stronger,
people-friendly public realm. For instance, “chair
bombing” has become a popular phenomenon in many
communities. Chair bombing involves using donated
wood pallets to build chairs and then program a public
area as a people-friendly gathering space, especially
in neighborhoods that do not already have any such
easily accessible amenities. These kinds of creative
ideas are easily scalable. In Christchurch, New Zealand,
volunteers came together to build the “Pallet Pavilion”
as a public gathering and event space following an
earthquake event that left many properties vacant and
in need of activation. In Houston’s Fifth Ward, local
artists gathered lumber from housing demolitions
and built the “Fifth Ward Community Jam”, a small
amphitheater which quickly became the main civic space
in the neighborhood and is programmed for community
events throughout the year. These interventions do not
require a tremendous amount of physical space and can
be easily scaled to fit into any underutilized corner of
a neighborhood. Each neighborhood could design and
implement its own distinctive installation, thereby further
enforcing their own unique identity within the larger
community. It’s also an accessible and fun opportunity
in which to engage residents of a neighborhood who are
perhaps otherwise less inclined to participate in public
processes.
In Tampa, locals organized street festivals to reclaim
the public realm for people and test new ideas regarding
street design. Through the Better Block initiative,
communities all over the world have engaged in
community-driven pop-up street design interventions
to reclaim public space and create a more humanfriendly neighborhood context. These temporary
interventions can serve as proving grounds to test for
future more permanent improvements to the public
realm. In Philadelphia, officials remade their industrial
waterfront with seasonal pop-up parks, filling the spaces
with gathering areas, music, food and games. The
Spruce Street Harbor Park serves the community in the
summer, with hammocks and industrial containers used
as vendors. The WinterFest program takes over in the
colder months. Both programs have been so successful
that they have transitioned from pop-up parks to
perennial seasonal offerings that enliven the area and
produce economic benefit.
Neighborhood residents should try out ideas, let
their collective imaginations run wild, and channel
their inspiration. The beauty of small scale temporary
interventions is that if experiments don’t work out or
are deemed impractical, it’s easy to move on to a new
idea. Community leaders should beware the reflexive
“no” no that might greet ideas; the communities that use
innovation and pursue out-of-the box ideas or seemingly
audacious goals are often the pioneers who develop the
solutions of the future.
