Mayor Curtatone

The last decade of change has been shepherd by Mayor Joseph Anthony Curtatone. Curtatone served as an Alderman in the City of Somerville for 8 years before becoming Mayor in 2004, at the age of 38. He was a popular-at-large Alderman, said to bridge Somerville old timers and new progressives.

As Alderman, he was chair of the finance committee. As he explained, “We weren't managing for results…we had a budgetary process where nothing was aligned with outcomes or measures…there were no goals and objectives…there was no accountability. No transparency…we would make decisions on a crisis basis” [15]. The City of Somerville relied on a traditional line item budget until Curtatone led the transition to a performance-based budget.

In the spirit of collaboration with civil society that Curtatone is now known for, he engaged Harvard students to help revamp the city's budgetary process. CommonWealth Magazine, a political observer, explained, “This curious collaboration – all the more striking because of Harvard's rarified reputation and Somerville's sometimes unsavory past – was designed to introduce to the city a new form of financial management known as activity-based budgeting” [16].

Managing for Results

As a Mayoral candidate, Curtatone ran on a platform of management reform [17]. He sought out best practices in the public and private sector and aimed to apply them to municipal government [15]. One of the primary goals was transparency, as emphasized by the budgetary reform.

In Somerville, as in other urban centers, “citizen expectations of innovation in public services continue to grow, while budgets shrink” [4]. To improve citizen services while working to bring the city's budget from the red, Curtatone focused on data-driven management, looking to revolutionary programs such as CompStat in New York and CitiStat in Baltimore [17]. Soon after Curtatone entered office, Somerville became the first city in the United States to operate a 311 constituent service center and Connect CTY (also known as a reverse 911) mass notification technology [18].

In Smart Cities, Anthony Townsend acknowledges the benefits of implementing data-driven management “as a triage tool for stretching scarce city resources” [4]. However, he warns against seeing it as a holy grail – citing the exposure of police maneuverings to affect CompStat as one cautionary tale. To prevent such manipulation, Townsend recommends that data need to be “sufficed throughout” City Hall, a notion Curtatone continues to champion.

SomerSTAT

Arguably, SomerSTAT, Somerville's data-driven performance management system, served as a transition technology, introducing a smart city lens that is now seen to be “embedded in the culture of (City Hall)” [19].

SomerSTAT is described as an

an initiative that helps Mayor Curtatone supervise the work of city departments and use timely data to inform decision-making and implement new ideas. Four SomerStat staff study financial, personnel, and operational data to understand what's happening within departments. Then, in regular meetings with City department managers and other key decision-makers, SomerStat helps to identify opportunities for improvement and then track the implementation of those plans. The meetings have become an ongoing conversation among city managers on where the city should be headed. Each meeting allows city managers to better understand how the City can streamline and improve its services to its constituents [17].

While the SomerSTAT team initially collected and analyzed data, they did not see themselves as “masters of the data,” but as facilitators leading a collaborative process [20]. Rather than take a “gotcha STAT” approach to data collection, Skye Stewart, current Director of SomerSTAT aims to see the total operations across departments in City Hall, positioning the team, “to identify the pain points across all departments” [20]. Indeed, George Proakis, the Director of Planning for Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development (OSPCD), observed that “STAT has let the Mayor build a very nimble Mayor's office. Previously, there was no interdisciplinary policy staff” [19].

ResiSTAT, a data-driven decision-making program, brings SomerSTAT out into the community both virtually and through regular community meetings. Rather than pushing data out, touting achievements from City Hall, it is designed to strengthen residential ties to City Hall and serve as a two-way process. Data on neighborhood level issues, from waste disposal and snow removal to the city's first report on wellbeing and the municipal budget, are presented online, through a website, listserv, active blog – the “online community forum” – and biannual ward meetings [21, 22]. By “empowering citizens with data” and making Alderman, city staff, and often the Mayor available at meetings, Somerville facilitates active engagement down to the street level. Decision making through ResiSTAT set the stage for the neighbourhood planning that Somerville is now known for, the smart governance practice reflects a culture “pickled in the idea that transparency is king” [23]. It is a prime example of an innovative government program that “will create new ways for citizens to make their voices heard, giving them the ability to provide input into regulations, budgets, and the provision of services” [6].

Neighborhood Planning

In anticipation of the construction of seven new Green Line subway stations, Somerville launched a series of station area planning efforts in 2012. The first of these plans, Gilman Square, was the testing ground for this approach to planning. The planning process had a number of objectives – most notable to ensure that the local community had strong control over the future of their neighborhood as development pressure increased with the oncoming transit. The Gilman Square Station Area Plan went on to win the Congress for the New Urbanism New England's Urbanism Award for its innovative public-engagement methods as well as it visionary plans for the future station area.

Close interaction with the local community allowed the planning team to collaborate with several long-time property owners. The resulting plan creates a new public square at the intersection of three of the neighborhood's most important streets. Once the station is constructed, it will open directly onto this new Gilman Square resulting in the creation of a remarkable new public space that will include both public and private redevelopment projects, a new park, and prominent civic tower (Figures 12.3 and 12.4). In order to accomplish this feat, land trades between public property, both street right of way and existing open space, and private land will need to occur, new streets must be constructed, and the city and the transit agency will need to work in close coordination. This complexity would not be possible without a shared vision established though the SBD process fueling years of implementation ahead.

Prior to the SBD Gilman Square process, no one expected this type of result. No one had considered a new civic space, let alone discussed how one might be built. The SBD method was able to uncover real hidden value for the community. Exploring value creation opportunities that change the public right of way has now become a common task in all neighborhood-planning projects.

In Davis Square, an existing transit-served neighborhood in Somerville, public space is short supply and an important public amenity that the city was looking to improve. While researching previous planning efforts, the Somerville by Design team tackled an unsuccessful, previous plan to convert a small public parking lot into a new plaza (Figure 12.5). In the spirit of Tactical Urbanism, the team decided to resurrect this idea and temporarily convert the space during the course of the multiday design charrette (Figure 12.6). The 12 parked cars that are there most days were removed in exchange for food trucks, live music, and circus acrobats (Figure 12.7). With the installation of comfortable seating and ongoing programming, it was only a matter of minutes before local residents began to use the new public space (Figure 12.8).

The plaza was not intended to be a spectacle. The team used it to attract the public into the planning process while testing the idea of converting parking to a public plaza permanently. By locating the studio space for the charrette in an empty storefront adjacent to the pop-up plaza, the planning process drew stakeholders who normally do not attend planning events into the creation of a long-term vision for their neighborhood. Through traditional public meetings, plan presentations, and town hall style debate, the previous public review of the proposed plaza was unsuccessful. Tactical Urbanism, coupled with crowdsourcing tools such as Twitter and Facebook, enabled the team to produce the pop-up plaza in a few weeks and to facilitate a conversation about the space in real time. Together, these tools allowed for a more sincere discussion about what the plaza could do and how it could serve the neighborhood resulting in overwhelming support of the permanent conversion of the parking lot to a pedestrian plaza.

The creative class that resides at, works at, and visits Union Square, another Somerville neighborhood, has made it one of the Boston region's most coveted. It is a center for the arts. It houses one of the country's largest maker spaces, Artisan's Asylum. It will also be one of the first neighborhoods to have a new Green Line subway station constructed. Tensions are high in anticipation of this new transit. In 2014, the city launched its most intensive neighborhood planning effort to date to establish a clear vision for the community in advance of the rail arriving.

In addition to addressing concerns about the potential radical changes to the community's character that the transit access could create, the neighborhood planning was tasked with creating a vision for more than 40 acres of land identified by the city's comprehensive plan as transformation redevelopment. How do you accommodate new transit-oriented development to take advantage of the new subway station and plan for the creation of a regional job center with millions of square feet of new development, all while preserving the authentic character of an innovative and art-oriented community? This question would test the limits of what was possible with the smart approach to planning that is SBD.

In Union Square, the planning team expanded on the typical SBD approach in four phases. The first is coordinating not only the planning team but also key members of the local community. Several events were hosted to crowdsource how to plan with the community; the idea is to plan for the planning together. This effort aims to educate the community on the process, ask how it can be made more sympathetic to local neighborhood conditions, and reiterate that there will be a beginning, middle, and end.

A small group of “community connectors” were organized in Union Square. Their role was to utilize their existing communication networks – through their various blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, and email lists – to push the planning team announcements further. This group also included the busybodies that every neighborhood has – people who know everyone, talk to everyone, and are generally the nods in the social fabric of the community. Supporting this naturally occurring communication network in the real world with digital assets allows the planning team to reach wider and deeper into the community than is typically possible. When you answer the “who, what, when, where, and how” questions together with the community, trust is easier to establish and it allows for a more genuine understanding of the community.

The second phase in Union Square consisted of helping the community establish a vision for their future through a series of community workshops. The community braved the worst winter on record to help make a better plan. Dozens of neighbors attended a neighborhood walking tour of Union Square on a Saturday morning at 7 a.m. in January with below-freezing temperatures and 2 ft of snow on the ground (Figures 12.9–12.11). They worked together in a space without heat but with translation services in four languages, conducting visioning and community mapping exercises. Long lauded for their facility with community engagement, mapping has become a much more powerful tool with the use of Google Earth and mobile apps that bring the technology to constituents to manipulate.

The third phase was hosting a multiday design charrette. The key is to bring the designers to the community by setting up a temporary studio where they are able to receive real-time feedback from stakeholders. The charrette concluded with a comprehensive pin-up of all the ideas drawn and developed. Setting up a fully functional design studio in a temporary space that can support the work of dozens of consultants for a week used to be a much more expensive undertaking. In Union Square, the studio took place in a recently vacated post office. By utilizing inexpensive printers, cellular Internet hot spots, and cloud file-sharing services, an old post office was transformed into a fully operational design studio in only a few hours. The technology that allows for multiple consultants, from different firms, to plug into the studio instantly did not exist 5 years ago. Integrating this technology into the process has allowed for resources to be reassigned from administrative cost to higher value programming such as Tactical Urbanism installations or broader stakeholder engagement. This use of project management software and cloud services also allows the city to select a network of consultants to work collaboratively without the need for cumbersome project administration.

The fourth and final stage is to capture all the discussions that folks have following the charrette by hosting a series of plan open houses. These events usually have live music, local food, and a casual atmosphere to encourage discussion. They are designed to be fun events. In Union Square, one of the open houses was held in an underutilized parking lot transformed into a public courtyard with food, seating, and a bike repair kiosk. During the open house, new and refined plans are posted, encouraging conversation both between stakeholders and the planning team and among neighbors. At this stage, it becomes clear which ideas the neighborhood has embraced as their own that, irrespective of the plan document, will take on a life of their own.

These open houses conclude with the publishing of a draft plan, which is open for public comment online, beginning another discussion with the community as detailed elements of the plan are debated through various threads. This phase of the process usually includes another tactical intervention demonstrating several improvements conceived of in the plan. This type of short-term action helps keep what can be a long process for the public fun and interesting while providing the planning team a last point of feedback before publishing the final plan.

The draft of the Union Square Neighborhood Plan received the Comprehensive Planning Award from the American Planning Association's Massachusetts Chapter in 2015 further demonstrating the impact that this innovative approach to neighborhood planning is having on the region. The SBD method would not be possible without the deep support of the city's leadership at the highest level, their commitment to an iterative approach that is not always predictable, and their use of emerging technology to seamlessly connect the project team to the selves and to the community.

Technology in the Somerville by Design Process

Proakis says Somerville is continually looking to technology to support a seamless dialogue, where “technology isn't replacing that (community) interaction but augmenting it so it becomes more meaningful.” In 2014, Proakis was awarded Planner of the Year by the Massachusetts Chapter for the American Planning Association. Proakis believes that “as a City we do more public communication using technology than anyone else I know” [19].

Technology is used both in the service of community-led dialogue and to facilitate the design process. The municipal team relies upon web-based technologies to interface with one another and the Somerville citizenry, enabling collaboration that, while rooted locally, attracts talent beyond the city limits. Consultants work across platforms, using Asana to manage projects with the City Team and Slack, an instant messaging application, to communicate internally.

At the center of the Somerville by Design, internal process is Dropbox. The cloud-based file-sharing services have allowed the city to establish project folders that team members from multiple offices and, sometimes, spread all over the country to seamlessly share files with simple version control. This virtual server is the bedrock of the method, and without it, this approach would be far more difficult.

A typical planning department's familiarity with graphics software stops at PowerPoint. The use of Adobe's Creative Cloud has been another cloud-based solution that has allowed for the city's planning staff to not only work in the sources files created by the consultant team but also to become key contributors to the creation of deliverables by using InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop collaboratively with consultants. The use of this platform is now required by all offices working on SBD projects. Somerville has invested in their staff in a smart way by placing them at the center of creating the multiple deliverables required by this iterative planning process.

In additional to the internal project management and production technology, the integration of a number of externally focused platforms has been needed to further support this sincere approach to placemaking. In order to truly create a transparent planning process, the planning department needed to set up their own communications platforms so that information could be transmitted in real time to the various stakeholders engaged in the multiple planning efforts occurring throughout the city. OSPCD hosts a WordPress Blog and uses the freedom of the blogosphere and an SBD Twitter account as disruptive tools both to push information out in real time and as a tool for engagement. They also developed and managed their own MailChimp email list; most departments and even teams within their own departments have their own listservs [28].

All these tools were activated outside the City's Communications Department and established communication channels. OSPCD staff were not experts in communications, but by integrating this technology into the SBD method they have acquired, sometimes through trial and error, the essential communication skills needed to maximize the impact of these social media platforms. These tools now facilitate and promote honest dialogue about the future of the city.

Establishing these communications platforms has allowed for the increased use of online surveys and polling to further understand the community's preferences. These platforms have varied from free series such as Survey Monkey to premium ones such as MindMixer. The use of these tools requires that OSPCD juggle sometimes a dozen accounts at a time, with some staff spending up to a quarter of their time on outreach [28].

Furthermore, OSPCD staff seek emerging software to meet their needs. For example, Senior Planner Dan Bartman spent years looking for a web-based platform to gather public feedback through the planning process. Through Internet searches and listserv queries, and after rejecting possibilities that would need to be rebuilt from the ground up and adapted, he discovered MarkUp. With an eye toward advances in the field, Bartman realized the City of Los Angeles was using MarkUp to collect feedback on documents for the Re:CodeLA project. Built by Urban Insight, Re:CodeLA's web design consultant and the planners and programmers behind Planetizen.org, MarkUp was not designed and deployed to be a stand-alone product. OSPCD persuaded Urban Insight to launch OpenComment – a rebranding of MarkUp – with Somerville and Somerville by Design as its first customer and early adopter [29].

Staff emphasized the heightened accountability that follows government forays into social media and open technology. Previously, for instance, remarks made at a conference out of town largely lived and died there. Today, OSPCD and the Mayor's office live-tweet highlights and engage in conversation via Twitter, with experts in the field as well as engaged Somerville residents who use the forum to hold staff members to a new level of accountability [30]. Remarks are picked up and monitored, raising the level of dialogue and breaking down barriers between the community and City Hall. At community meetings, residents expect staff to be up to the minute with information from Open Comment, to access all relevant documents in real time, and for any hard paper designs or surveys to be quickly uploaded for public access. Constituents can live-stream community meetings online, review public documents with ISSUU, participate in open conversation with MindMixer, and submit feedback via Open Comment. However, as Senior Planner Melissa Woods noted, on any given issue, people regularly join the conversation mid-process, explaining they were unaware of the ongoing dialogue.