LOA has
worked with many clients to analyze their retail markets and develop retail
retention and business attraction strategies. Our approach, developed over nearly
twenty years of field work, has always acknowledged that communities -
particularly underserved urban communities - cannot and should not be
understood by market data alone. The syndicated data that is available is often
inaccurate and misleads retailers or investors who use it to believe there is
limited opportunity for new business. To combat that perception we developed a
more holistic approach to inquiry covering four main areas of:
- Physical Environment
- Business Environment
- Administrative Capacity
- Market and Demographic Data (Residents, Workers and Visitors)
We call this
the “Commercial DNA” approach because it helps us understand the fundamental
and distinctive qualities and characteristics of each commercial district -
much like our DNA is what makes each of us unique.
Each time we start a project, the first step we often take in
our analysis is to conduct a thorough site visit of the commercial district.
Rain or shine, snow or sleet, we head out to do an assessment of the physical
environment. There are a number of things that we take note of on our site
visits. This includes the accessibility of the commercial corridor to residents
and visitors, and the conditions of streets, sidewalks, storefronts, buildings
and finally, public spaces.
Public spaces in commercial
districts can be some of the greatest assets in terms of driving and retaining
foot traffic downtown. When it’s warm and nice outside, people are
automatically drawn to being outdoors and if a public space offers them the
opportunity to sit and enjoy the beautiful weather and atmosphere downtown, then
they’re likely to stay outdoors a little longer.
In addition, when these spaces
are located adjacent to or across from businesses, then a spillover effect
might result in increased foot traffic and visibility for these neighboring businesses.
A preliminary economic impact study of small, local businesses surrounding
Sunset Triangle in Silverlake, Los Angeles, showed that “In general, responses
indicated high levels of business confidence” following the installation of the
public space. This was based on responses to a longitudinal survey that asked
merchants about anticipated changes to revenue, debt, profit, number of
employees and number of customers for the year subsequent to the public space
installation. In fact, the majority of businesses within the two-block
catchment area anticipated an increase of the size of their customer base; an
increase in revenue; and an increase in profits.
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| Sunset Triangle Plaza Economic Impact Study (Source: People St) |
In another example, the
non-profit organization Great Streets SF conducted a study in 2010 of the
Divisadero Street Parklet, located in front of the Mojo Bicycle Café in San
Francisco, and found that the number of pedestrians increased by 13 percent,
particularly on weekday evenings. The study also found that many businesses
adjacent to the parklet experienced revenue increases after the installation of
the public space, and in a few cases, created jobs as a result of increased
demand. Great Streets SF however used a different method to come to the same
conclusions as Sunset Triangle Plaza. Instead, direct observations were used to
count pedestrians and stationary activities before combining the findings with
pedestrian and business perception survey results.
 |
| Divisadero Street Parklet (Source: Flicker, Photo: Great Streets SF) |
Urban designers and planners all
over the country have increasingly been using William H Whyte’s revered method
of direct observation to understand human behaviors in different urban settings.
This methodology was made popular by his work titled “The Social Life of Small
Urban Spaces” and continues to be adapted by organizations around the world. While
it was originally created to study social behaviors, Great Streets SF and
plenty of other organizations concerned with economic development are using
this method to understand the relationships between public space activities and
downtown business vitality.
So how do you start assessing public spaces in your commercial
districts?
The process of direct observation
often starts with a simple matrix like the one below created by Los Angeles
Department of Transportation (LA DOT) for its People St program. The matrix
allows observers to systematically note down each type of public space user
(male or female, young or old), the activities they partake in (eating,
drinking, shopping, vending, sleeping, sitting, using a mobile phone), and group
sizes. These variables of course can be adjusted depending on the priorities of
the study.
Interpreting the observations
The tricky part of this analysis
is showing how public space impacts local businesses. The pedestrian counts and
business perception survey data can point to overall visitation rates to the
public space and its adjacent businesses. But what happens when you start visualizing
this data on a map to show even more detail of where people are sitting and
standing within the public space and for how long. This analysis then starts to
become interesting for adjacent businesses fronting a public plaza or parklet
as they are able to capitalize on signage placements, product placements and even
outdoor seating for food and drinking services to capitalize on existing
behavioral patterns in their districts.
On top of filling in the matrix
shown above, I’ve also found it useful to print a simple base map of your
public space and its immediate surroundings so that each observer is also able to
spontaneously sketch patterns of movements and static positions observed within
the public space. When everyone’s sketches are compiled and overlaid, these
maps might bring to light common findings on areas conducive to various types
of activities including vending, movement, rest, or even performance.
In 2015, as part of a public
space study conducted for an international planning class in Tokyo, Japan, with
Professor Jonathan Martin of Pratt Institute, I used a similar matrix to the
one produced by LA DOT to conduct my own direct observations of a public space.
The Ookayama Station Roundabout,
as I called it, was a public space used by various age groups. This was largely
due to its unique location next to Tokyu Hospital, a large chain supermarket,
and one of the most respected colleges in the country, Tokyo Institute of
Technology. Users were moving quickly through the public space to get from the
metro station to the various anchors and retail offerings on adjacent alleys,
or roji as it’s known in Japanese. Despite
the great number of users, pedestrians and cyclists were able to harmoniously
share the sidewalks and station plaza and it appeared to be a thriving public
space that interacted well with neighboring businesses.
Other than diverse patterns of
movement, a large portion of users were also observed to be static and resting in
the plaza under the shade of trees that were furnished with benches. The comfortable and inclusively-designed benches
that were low in height accommodated the elderly and disabled as they sat
enjoying long meals purchased from nearby quick marts and limited service
restaurants.
As I started sketching these
observations on a map, and taking note of how long users were lingering at each
spot and what they were doing while lingering, the sketches on the map began to
look more and more like a type of density map that very clearly showed some
user ‘hot spots’. The bigger circles on the map you see above depict popular
locations within the plaza that people stood or sat in for longer periods of
time (15minutes or more). These largely correlated with the locations of the
trees and benches and although the smaller circles showed less time spent in
the specific location, at least it indicated that users of the public space
were using the location for about 5 minutes to do other activities like park
their bikes or wait for crossing lights.
These visuals of user hot spots
within public spaces can be especially useful to neighboring businesses that
would like to understand where their customers are coming from or leaving, where
store signs should be facing to capture attention of passersby, or whether public
space users are already stopping along the periphery to browse storefronts of
adjacent businesses. And if not, there are a myriad of actions that businesses can
take to increase visibility from certain directions (e.g. blade signs) and also
to bring their service and products out further into more populated sections of
the public space (e.g. licensed push carts).
Cyclists and customers in private
vehicles too are important to observe in this process although they are not
immediate users of plazas or sidewalks; they pass through the commercial
district on adjacent streets and alleys and should be remembered in the
equation!
As the weather starts to warm up,
grab a base map and an observation matrix and start assessing the public spaces
in your commercial districts. Find out who’s already going there, what they’re
doing there and if the surrounding local businesses can further leverage and
improve on these existing assets.
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