Activating Community Spaces Through Events and Positive Habits
This article was reposted, in slightly different form, from the Practice of Place blog, which focuses on the art and science of creating thriving public and shared places. It is shared here with permission. All pictures were provided by the author.
Pumpkin Carving at 50th and France commercial district. Musicant Group on behalf of 50th and France Business Association.
How important have events been in the lives of cities and human settlements? There is much evidence that they were not merely a feature of some of the first cities, but their organizing principle. Some of these cities were relatively permanent, while others had huge ebbs and flows throughout the year that mapped to religious and seasonal calendars (See: "The City in History" by Lewis Mumford and "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow).
Events have an important role to play in creating places that foster stronger interpersonal relationships, supportive communities, deep feelings and commercial vitality.
However, just as thinking that only changing the design of a space will allow us to achieve our desires and goals is a major trap, so too is thinking that events alone can significantly change much about a place, a community or a commercial district.
When discerning how to spend our limited time and capacities to best bring a place to life, where do events sit within our priorities?
The Importance of Habits
In our pursuit of any aspirational goal within a place, the formation of positive habits is our path. Why? Here’s the logic:
If people have positive and useful experiences in a place, then they will use it more. By frequently using the space, they establish habits and routines. These habits are the foundation that supports enterprise and relationships, both between people and the space itself. These relationships are non-portable and create locational value, both socially and commercially.
Thus, the formation of positive habits involving a place unlocks the reliable frequency of use that allows relationships to be formed, provides certainty for commercial activities, and allows the place's use to expand more easily over time without being overly dependent on special or extraordinary factors.
A Hierarchy for Habits
From this vantage, we can develop a hierarchy of prioritization, or a sequence of experiences to focus on creating in a given place:
Daily Occurrences.
Weekly Happenings.
Monthly Specials.
Seasonal Celebrations.
Annual Traditions.
Each one of these can be habit forming — an annual tradition that occurs for decades or more can be a powerful driver of activity, meaning, community and commerce. Certainly, we can think of the impact of the Christmas holiday on our personal, family and economic lives.
But why the hierarchy? Why would a space that successfully delivered only monthly or seasonal events be less ultimately successful than one that provided robust and positive daily experiences without any larger, less frequent events?
Let us posit that relationships are built one interaction at a time and that each interaction is represented by a thread. The density of these threads then grows over time. Within a place, many interactions can take place during a visit, creating a relational web for each person.
What scenario would lead to the strongest web? To the most dense web? To the most resilient web, should one source of interaction and relationships go away? The daily visitor who has positive experiences develops a more rich, dense web of relationships much more quickly than more periodic patrons.
Event Series Are Better Than Big Bangs
Once we’ve established a solid foundation of everyday experiences, what comes next? The hierarchy tells us to move to the next most frequent experience: weekly or monthly events series. Why? It's because a goal of any event should be to drive visitation to the place when there is no event happening.
Regular events, rather than big, one-time affairs, are the best way to achieve this. There are a few main reasons why:
They build a sustained audience: The repetition of events allows an audience to grow through greater awareness, rather than having all your eggs in one event-date basket. Those who attend a regular event series are able to start forming their own positive habits with the event and the place itself.
They nurture the ability to learn and adapt along the way: The frequency and repetition of regular events allow a larger sample size to learn what is actually working and what is not, and it gives them the time to make adjustments.
They develop synergies: More frequent events allow for more synergies between the event and the surroundings of the place to form. The consistency allows other actors to play off of and with the events over time — developing new, richer webs of connection and activity. Conversely, a big event can often have so much of its own gravity that visitors can hardly experience the features of the place where the event is occurring. And the lack of frequency makes tie-ins riskier and more disruptive for outside actors.
They form a narrative: The frequency and consistency of events provide ongoing fodder for positive conversations and building a positive narrative about a place. It's the difference between “There’s always something happening there” and “I go there for that one event.”
The added impact of experiences and relationships forged on a daily or regular basis through event series is that they project forward. Past recurring behavior is a strong indicator of future behaviors. The habits, memories and emotional bonds that are made between people and the physical environment of a place are non-portable. Even if an identical set of uses and experiences were delivered in an equally convenient location, the memories and personal relationships could not be transferred.
As long as a baseline quality of experience and utility is in place, people want to go where they are used to going and where they have positive memories.
To summarize, a place that provides a positive experience all the time is going to be active and thus more socially and commercially valuable than a place that is mostly empty with a few large events.
So, follow the hierarchy to form those habits!
Max Musicant is the founder and principal of The Musicant Group, an interdisciplinary firm whose mission and service is to create places where people want to be, as well as its Practice of Place blog. Through partnering with communities, businesses and organizations of all kinds to integrate design, events, operations, communications and organizational capacity building, the firm has demonstrated that every space can and should be a great place. Musicant received an MBA from Yale and a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
