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This is my hometown, Wehchesteh Meeyamee, where my most exhilarating memory was playing an ersatz game of frogger as I tightroped down pencil-thin sidewalks, dodging cars as I crossed strip-mall line highways, all to get to a chicken teriyaki sub.

Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

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Page 1: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

This is my hometown, Wehchesteh Meeyamee, where my most exhilarating memory was playing an ersatz game of frogger as I tightroped down pencil-thin sidewalks, dodging cars as I crossed strip-mall line highways, all to get to a chicken teriyaki sub.

Page 2: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

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 Wechesteh story isn’t unique. And this is why.

Page 3: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

Cities are zombies – of the startup kind: “They’re operating but not thriving; they’re in a state of limbo: not dead yet not exactly alive. Unfortunately, there’s an epidemic of these soulless – placeless – cities.

Page 4: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

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 built cities for cars, not people. And failed to harness the power of place – of placemaking – to enrich our lives

Page 5: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

For cities, getting out of the building means sending out a notice for public approval. Best-case scenario, an angry mob shows up protesting the project; worst case, no one shows up and the doomed-to-fail project – THIS – gets approved.

Page 6: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

The fallout is more than just primary-colored storage units amidst residential neighborhoods. Urban highways, desolate public spaces, no-name suburbs, elite enclaves, pedestrian no-man lands, don’t make for lovable places. They make us fat, unhappy, isolate us, harm the environment and cost us money.

Page 7: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

But the thing is that even when cities do engage with the public, it’s usually way after sending out a request for proposals from experts, that in and of itself often presupposes a solution. This trickle down placemaking process is broken

Page 8: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

But it doesn’t have to be this way. This is the highline in NYC. It’s widely successful with over five million visitors a year. It’s a grassroots project that started with customer development at the very heart of it: a community-led design competition

Page 9: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

Cities need to 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.

Page 10: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

Cities need to listen to what people and places are telling them. Cities need to be more like Lean StartupsCities need to get the heck out of the building. Cities need to adopt Lean Placemaking. This is where my startup can help

Page 11: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

State of Place is more than just a data analytics platform - it enables cities to get out of the building and into the block. Our app collects data on over 280 built environment features – like street trees, parks, sidewalks – you name it, we measure it.

Page 12: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

then aggregates that into the State of Place Index, which quantifies what people love about cities; diagnoses communities’ physical needs categorized into ten urban design dimensions, and predicts economic performance. But the key is we train the community to collect the data.

Page 13: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

State of Place not only factors in a city’s goals, capacity and budget, but also community – or customer – inputs. Cities get an in-built customer development platform that helps produce evidence-based hypotheses about problems that communities care about.

Page 14: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

For example, State of Place allows cities to easily generate falsifiable problem hypotheses like 30 out of 50 residents believe there is not enough green space within close walking distance of their homes. Cities would then run customer interviews to validate that hypothesis,

Page 15: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

run State of Place analytics to identify potential minimum viable projects, and then select one that addresses the problem from a physical and community perspective, and is poised to maximize return on investment, like transforming parking spaces into a pop-up pocket park.

Page 16: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

Cities would then use this MVP to test yet another falsifiable hypothesis, this time about product-market fit: the pop-up pocket park will attract at least 150 people over the weekend.

Page 17: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

If this benchmark isn’t met, cites would conduct further customer interviews to understand why: only 50 people visited the pop-up pocket park because it was hard to find. The real problem wasn’t a perceived lack of green space, but rather a lack of knowledge of and difficulty accessing existing green spaces

Page 18: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

Finally, cities could use State of Place to implement the pivot and identify the real solution: create better signage for and provide safer pedestrian access routes to existing green spaces – not only easily saving significant amounts of money, but also truly solving the problem

Page 19: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

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.

Page 20: Lean Placemaking: How (and Why) Cities should adopt Lean Startup principles

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. Thanks very much.

@STATEOFPLACEORG

[email protected]

MARIELA ALFONZO

STATE OF PLACETM