In November 2004, The Bruner Loeb Forum launched a new series entitled: Placemaking for Change: Non-Traditional Models of Community Revitalization. ìNon-traditionalî is an elastic term that describes creative place-based ventures that are provoking positive changes in communities across the country. Housing, the classic community development vehicle, can't (in the absence of supportive programs and institution) stitch together the social, spiritual and economic holes in fragmented communities. Government at all levels is timid and resources for urban revitalization are scarce and getting scarcer. Traditional social institutions have lost much of their vibrancy and effectiveness. Communities across the country have responded by creating new kinds of urban places in struggling neighborhoods, inspiring new community activism, and making real impacts on individual lives and communities.

Reinventing Community Justice
Red Hook is an isolated neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, typical of inner-city neighborhoods whose overriding characteristic is poverty. Such a community may seem an unlikely place for an innovative court program. But the Center for Court Innovation (link), building on a successful precedent at Midtown Court in Manhattan, refashioned a piece of the justice system to work with community residents rather than against them. At Red Hook Community Justice Center, social programs, educational activities and support services, mandated by the Center's judge, have changed the perception of justice by guaranteeing access to alternative forms of sentencing. Fear is decreasing, drug program completions are on the rise, low-level neighborhood crime is down, and the community's self-perception is changing.

The Red Hook story begins with a simple assumptionóthat appropriate support services and access to opportunity will help offenders break cycles of crime and recidivism. Located in a remodeled parochial school, Red Hook Community Justice Center removes barriers to compliance. Given the choice between jail and drug treatment which is on site, and monitored by a judge who takes a personal interest in the success of each offender and his or her family, most offenders choose compliance. Through Red Hook Community Justice Center preventive services are also available community-wide; peer courts involve juveniles in the justice process; the court performs community service in the form of public safety and employment opportunities; and restitution for quality of life crimes is visible in the neighborhood. The Community Justice Center offers citizens of Red Hook a chance to collaborate in solving their own problems and making the system work for them.

Network Theory Meets Community Organizing
In Lawrence , MA, Bill Traynor, Executive Director of Lawrence Community Works (LCW) has developed a distinct theory of community organizing for a city with institutional inertia and little civic infrastructure. Calling it the ìnetwork theoryî of organizing, Traynor and his staff base their thinking on the belief that individuals connect to public life through strong personal relationships and grass-roots community leadership. The power of those relationships becomes the vehicle for urban revitalization. By connecting individuals one by one and two by two through organized and spontaneous activities, LCW is building a brand new self-sustaining social infrastructure that will outlast any specific project or leader.

LCW organizes around connections between individuals and institutions. The only goal is to build and bank a store of social capital. That wealth will in turn create the kinds of programs and activities that respond to community needs as they arise. Connections are created through unstructured social events, neighborhood activities and specific programs. People are engaged in planning the future at the same moment that neighborhoods are being rebuilt in front of them. In five years, the network has grown to more than 850 members who have initiated parks and infill housing projects, leadership training, job development, Neighborhood Circles, Family Asset Building Programs, and resources for educational and economic development.

 Expanding the Role of the Neighborhood School
In most places a school, even a charter school, is just a school--a place where kids spend their days and get an education of greater or lesser quality. In the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, however, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy (CNCA) is reinventing this basic institution to be a center of community building. CNCA, a public charter school which primarily serves immigrant children, focuses on language proficiency, basic skills in all disciplines, art education, and broad educational excellence. It is also a health and safety center, an arts hub, an after school program, a jobs generator, a skills and learning center for adults, and the catalyst for community pride. Visually it is a colorful, highly visible, beautifully designed oasis. Philip Lance, the Executive Director of Pueblo Nuevo Development and the primary instigator of CNCA, has overseen an explosive growth of this community-based charter school system that has expanded to 5 adjacent sites in 5 years.

Camino Nuevo Charter Academy serves both children and parents in this largely immigrant community because it has responded to a range of community issues. Freed of the many restrictive regulations that often hamstring traditional public schools, Pueblo Nuevo built an innovative structure, asked the parents to volunteer time, and returns the investment by offering community services and resources. Emphasis on language acquisition helps young students access other opportunities and they in turn draw their parents into the school community. CNCA students are getting increasingly high test scores; their families are accessing opportunity through the school and developing a renewed commitment to the community. Through its expanding network of charter schools, Pueblo is expanding the role of the public school and making it a key to the revitalization of the community.

The Urban Marketplace
Farmer's markets have become ubiquitous in the last few decades, providing supplemental income for local farmers and better choices for consumers. But the daily municipal market, which thrives in Toronto and Tunis as a vital commercial and social institution, has largely disappeared from American cities. One holdout, miraculously returned from extinction in the 1970's, is Pike Place Market in Seattle. Tourists know it and residents patronize it. But few realize that it is the epicenter of the revitalized community surrounding it.

Carol Binder is the Executive Director of the quasi-governmental management agency for the market which is charged, by public referendum, with preserving and enhancing the commercial health of the market and the social health of its neighborhood. It allows only local vendors to sell their goods at the market, subsidizes smaller, fledgling businesses with rents from established businesses, offers emergency relief for farmers, and distributes surplus food. But the less visible aspect of Pike Place Market is its mandate to support the people of the surrounding residential community. Through its Foundation, it develops low-income housing, runs service programs for children, youth and seniors; offers preventive care for the healthy, medical services for the sick and, of course, food for the hungry. Through Pike Place Market Foundation, and other markets across the country (Greenmarket in New York ; Portland Public Market; San Francisco Farmers' Market) the urban agora is being redefined to support local growers, raise consciousness about healthy fresh food, and to support the surrounding community.

Government with Vision
When the Mayor of Washington, D.C (Mayor Anthony Williams) and the chief planner (Planning Director Andrew Altman) share a vision ("A Vision for Growing an Inclusive City"), municipal government can lead with imagination. Altman paints a picture of creation and rejuvenation in the forgotten Near Southeast along the Anacostia River. The apparent symbiosis in the DC plans is a team that has the patience to know public planning takes time, and the impatience to create immediate results. The Anacostia plan will reclaim a derelict riverfront for its neighbors, enhance an important natural resource, and introduce a new mix of uses to a community characterized by disinvestment. Like Denver (South Platte River Greenway), Providence, Hartford, Chattanooga and other cities around the country, waterfront reclamations provide a spark for introducing new public amenities that welcome the entire community, not just a privileged few.

It will take a long time for the Anacostia vision to materialize. Over time, whole new neighborhoods; new streets, houses, bikeways, transportation, schools, community centers and cultural institutions will emerge. Knowing that it must nurture community ownership of the plan to achieve success, the District sponsored public participation and comment on the vision, and then sought pubic confidence by hiring locally to build the first public pedestrian ways, consistent with the community vision. The District plan paints a vision for development with a broad brush, and one that will require vigilance and determination to protect a long-standing residential population while encouraging new investment and transformation.

It's a Movement
How are these examples useful in thinking about the future of community development? Surely these projects are not interchangeable, specific as they are to the places, moments in time, and personalities that created them. However each place offers key ideas that can travel and adapt as they draw on the unique resources of individual communities to make new urban places. The Center for Court Innovation, for example, has been adapted to other urban settings in New York State and across the country. The Red Hook model of community justice is even being introduced in Liverpool, England. Camino Nuevo, the shining star of the Los Angeles school system, is being studied by other school districts with similar issues. And so, without minimizing the significance of local identity, there are themes echoed throughout these projects that suggest that it is time to take a look at new models of community transformation.

 1. Re-Invent Familiar Institutions
Social institutions can grow stale and moribund. The projects and places presented in this Bruner Loeb Forum re-invent ineffective institutions to respond more robustly to new challenges facing communities. People respond when familiar institutions do unfamiliar things. Schools, courts, markets, community organizations, and local planning departments: these familiar players can perform unconventional roles.

 2. Invest in people
Change lives. Do things that will materially and spiritually change people's lives, and these people, in turn, will create and sustain change ñ physical, social and economic. The Justice Center works individually with defendants, crafting solutions. Pueblo Nuevo accepts failing students who live in the neighborhood, teaching them skills and building their confidence one at a time. Lawrence CommunityWorks organizes neighborhood dinners that build networks which in turn create new leaders. In Seattle the urban market provides sustainable support services to local merchants and those merchants create a sustainable community. In the end, it is individuals, working individually and in groups, who have the power to change their communities.

3. Think Sustainability!
The fix needn't be quick, but it needs to be sustainable. Success may be small or even intangible for the near term, and hard to measure. But, if the community owns the process they are invested in its success. This means they own the outcomes, and the potential for further reinvention. Social capital keeps communities growing.

Lawrence CommunityWorks organizes hundreds of activities to connect individuals and build networks. It expects no specific outcomes; it counts on sustainable relationships of value to engender new social and political action. Camino Nuevo graduates students with language and academic skills, whose parents benefit from job training and health care. At the same time more people then choose to invest in the community and plan to stay there. Red Hook provides a safe and welcoming center for offenders and community residents alikeóit is a haven of community pride and a model for belief in the justice system which translates for many residents into a new commitment to Red Hook.

4. Embrace Change
The leaders of these new forms of community development are firmly committed to the lengthy complex process of including a wide range of community members in the discussions about strategy and new initiatives. Change and success in turn, lead to new challenges. Organizations need to find a way to perform routine work very efficiently so they can continue to observe changes and devise new responses. Healthy communities are fluid and so are their leader's visions. When the Center for Court Innovation sees the impact of its work making changes in the quality of life, it works with community members to respond to other issues that may emerge. Camino Nuevo made incremental neighborhood change through vastly different avenues before the idea for the charter school system evolved from many discussions with neighborhood residents. Creative leaders must remain faithful to their vision, yet remain flexible enough to keep their organizations relevant.

5. Accept risk
When investment is made in people and process instead of projects, outcomes are unknown. Failures may occur. Future leaders may misuse success. Today, in Red Hook, the active and coercive intervention of the justice system is invoking positive change; in the future there is a risk that a different cast of characters might be less successful, or that the considerable power of a community court judge could be applied less effectively. Lawrence CommunityWorks cannot know the outcomes of their network organizing; results aren't immediately measurable or even observable. This new wave of community development strategies accepts these risks in return for building social capital and investing in the potential of a broader, deeper and more permanent cadre of community development activists.

6. Action Speaks Louder than Plans
Planning takes time; action draws people in and helps them believe in the plan. Action tests assumptions, validates ideas, creates relationships, builds trust. In Red Hook, the residents, not the planners, chose the site for the Justice Center. Long before the building opened, they saw positive change when the Center introduced an Americorps program, and young residents were paid to improve safety and appearance. Camino Nuevo provided job training through its own janitorial company, and dance lessons for youth in a storefront church before the new school was complete. One reason so many local residents are now involved in neighborhood planning in D.C. is because communities that have engaged in this fashion have already begun to see physical changes and public investment.

7. Enlist your Government
Protecting the public interest and supporting entrepreneurial social investment are not opposing goals. With well designed partnerships, local and state government can become major players in creative community development. Camino Nuevo, for example, is funded by the Los Angeles Unified School Districts, which applauds its ability to act responsively in ways the District as a whole has a hard time accomplishing. Anacostia plans are of such breadth and scale, no individual organization alone could make it happen. Local government often attracts idealistic leaders who welcome creative community building. Look past stereotypes, look past history, and you may find responsive people in government who make vital partners in the process of revitalizing our cities.

8. Summary
In each of these urban projects, we see examples of a new approach to community development. It is more responsive to individual local situations, more entrepreneurial, more flexible. It embraces change and constantly looks for new strategies. It values process, but also knows the importance of producing positive new results for people. Most importantly, this new approach seeks positive outcomes even if it means changing traditional approaches to reach those results.