Leap Night was a one-night winter festival on a vacant site in Cleveland. Photo courtesy of CUDC.

Terry Schwarz wants to save our cities– and she is prepared to do it in a bear suit.

Schwarz, a senior planner at the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) and adjunct professor at Kent State University, has been coordinating creative temporary uses of vacant land through Pop Up City, an initiative of the Shrinking Cities Institute at the CUDC.  Events have included the February 29^th Leap Night, a one-night winter festival on a vacant lot complete with a snowboard ramp, bonfire, music performances and, yes, bear suits.   Schwarz’s work has centered on developing more sustainable models of development and addressing Cleveland’s vacancy problems through art, creativity and community engagement.

Terry sat down to talk with me before her presentation, Ad Hoc Urbanism: Adventures in Temporary Use, sponsored by the Community Design Collaborative as part of DesignPhiladelphia.

How does vacant land become an asset rather than a burden?

Shrinking cities provide a laboratory for experiments and finding ways for all cities to adapt. Shrinking cities have more land then they know what to do with and these vacant lands provide an opportunity to start from the parcel level and then scale up.

Why temporary reuse? What’s the point?

Temporary use is a way to showcase real estate and show that a property has value and is appealing. It leaves people with a happy memory of that place. Plus, it’s fun! Temporary use also provides a form of social capital and addresses fragmentation in distressed cities by creating a portable place of inclusion.  Pop Up City sometimes creates these moments of inclusions, although it can’t permanently solve social problems.  But, for a day, people are going outside of their comfort zone and interacting with different people.

Temporary use is a good way to get community engagement because people don’t get just drawings. People can understand better when they actually experience and see something.  It also provides a way to touch more people.

How do you bring together diverse groups of people and use design to be inclusive?

Part of attracting different people is about programming and getting people in the community interested. For an event in Cleveland, we brought in a group of high school Double Dutch performers, which attracted kids in the neighborhood- and then their mothers eventually came out.

Building relationships takes effort and you have to make people feel specifically invited. Put yourself in their shoes.  Design tends to be elite and we need to get over that, like finding funny and embarrassing things.  For Leap Night, we wore bear suits!

What lessons have you learned from your work?

Cities do not have to obliterate natural processes; instead we need to integrate human systems with natural systems. We could tie land use to water and natural hydrology and coordinate development with infrastructure and transport.  Philly is leading the nation in stormwater management and if they can show and quantify how green infrastructure improves stormwater management then maybe we can adopt those practices in Cleveland.

What is the role for designers in community development?

As designers we cannot solve communities’ problems but we can help people figure things out and solve them for themselves. We need to believe that the community has something to offer and they will give you as much as you give them.

People often know what is missing and what they need in their community even if they don’t know the specifics. Then the role of the designer is get to those deeper needs and provide several answers and the community can then say more like this or more like that.  You have succeeded when you have made yourself irrelevant because the community has embraced the ideas and they will fight for it and take it on.

What are your impressions of Philadelphia? How does it compare to Cleveland?

When I come to Philly I want to move here. It has the best of both worlds- the post-industrial blight that I work with in Cleveland and the beauty, great architecture and downtown feeling of an East Coast city. I see parallels between Philadelphia and Cleveland with the amount of vacant land, but Philly is not totally the same as some areas have maintained themselves.