Get to Know Ben Shardlow, Director of Urban Design at minneapolis downtown council & Downtown Improvement District

Article by Becky Fillinger, photos provided

Ben ShardlowBen Shardlow has a lot to teach us about Minneapolis’ plans for innovative urban design, placemaking (keep reading to learn what that is) and community engagement around all of it. And, he welcomes the opportunity to meet downtown residents. Many of our readers have ideas to improve our downtown – set up a coffee meeting with Ben.  

Q:  What’s a typical day like for you as Director of Urban Design for the Downtown Improvement District (DID)?

A:  Every day is unique! The projects I work on and my role in them vary quite a bit. Sometimes I’m leading one of our projects, sometimes I’m advocating for our goals to be met in another organization’s effort. Either way, it’s collaborative. Almost everything we do is through partnerships, whether it’s working with the City on transportation, Park Board on trees, or arts and cultural partners on placemaking. That makes relationship building very important, which means lots of meetings. Heaps. Fortunately, I’m one of those oddballs who prefers meetings to just sitting at my desk.

Q:  You presented recently at the Minnesota Design Team's Annual Retreat, on the topic of community engagement through the lens of art and placemaking. Please tell us all about this notion.

A:  My presentation focused on the form of community engagement I enjoy the most: learning together by doing.

Traditional community engagement is necessary but challenging. You need a process that brings together technical experts and stakeholders who know the local context to agree to a shared definition of a problem, a potential solution, and the expected result. It’s possible for community members to disagree with any of the three, and for the process to devolve into speculation and mistrust. Please be nice to urban planners, it’s not as easy as it looks!

Placemaking offers alternative strategies. If you’re curious about the term, I’d encourage looking up Project for Public Spaces – they do a better job describing placemaking than I will here. The gist of it is that people and how they experience places should be at the center of how we design and run our cities. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised! Another key premise of placemaking is that successful places tend to have a recipe of features and activities that you can follow to make your own place(s) better.

The Living Bus Shelter project

Using placemaking strategies, you can try small experiments in public space to test a theory in a local context, see what happens, and get feedback from the community on actual experiences versus hypotheticals. It’s prototyping, essentially. We’ve used this technique throughout downtown. As one example, there was a bus stop on 7th Street that had high ridership and no bus shelter. The dialogue around a permanent shelter wasn’t very productive, so we got permission to place a temporary, artist-designed shelter and gather feedback. People liked it, and it opened the door for the really high-quality Bus Rapid Transit shelter at that site today.

Q:  You designed the Tactical Urbanism Initiative (TUI) for Minneapolis. How was it implemented? Can you bring us up to date with the Initiative? Is the City still collaborating with the partners?

A:  That initiative was the genesis of a lot of the placemaking projects we did from roughly 2013 - 2017. We used placemaking tactics to address sites of special concern for real or perceived safety – looking for underlying reasons why those sites weren’t successful and tried experiments to improve the experience people had in those places. We assembled an advisory committee – mainly with representatives from government agencies whose approval we needed to do the experiments, but also from social service and neighborhood groups.

The Alley Project in the 900 block of Hennepin

It was a lot of fun. We did a lot of experiments and learned a lot about ways we can positively improve the physical environment downtown and address localized concerns. The bus stop above is one example of a “TUI” project, but there were many more. We eventually stopped using that framework to do these kinds of projects because we had learned enough about how to work this way, and now we just engage adjacent stakeholders around individual projects. For example, we’re leading The Alley Project, a beautification and activation of the alley behind The Chambers Hotel, FAIR School for the Arts, and the University of St Thomas. We’re doing that project in partnership with Modern Day Me, Helping Hand Companies, Hennepin Theatre Trust, TENxTEN, and many others. The DNA of that project is very much aligned with how we approached TUI, but it’s a new context with new partners, and it’s informed by the years of work that preceded it.

Q:  What is the downtown council’s Intersections 2025 Plan?   

A:  The minneapolis downtown council has produced a visionary plan for the future of downtown every 10-15 years, with the 2025 Plan being the most recent. It was published in 2010 and includes ten major initiatives for downtown. I was in grad school at the time, and I remember being really inspired by the plan. I took it as a clarion call for downtown to grow and become a more livable, beautiful, connected, and humane place. Honestly, it became a major reason why I sought out work at mdc/DID, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work on implementing many of the initiatives in the plan. The plan has held up surprisingly well and is still a useful reference point for evaluating proposed changes to downtown. You can see how the green corridors idea has come to life on streets like Hennepin and the goal of leading the nation in transportation options has led to building out a network of protected bikeways for people biking of all ages and abilities – including a spot that I love at 4th and Hennepin where two such bikeways intersect. Really exciting.

With that said, it’s almost 2025 - that date no longer sounds futuristic! There will be announcements about a new planning effort before too long, and I’m excited for that.

Q:  How may citizens participate in your group’s initiatives?

A:  One, if you haven’t stopped into the DID’s Nicollet Office at 651 Nicollet Mall, Suite 105 - please do! We run a community space on the ground floor of Gaviidae, and it’s a great resource for getting information about what’s going on downtown. A number of us office there, so it’s normally pretty easy to get connected with the person working on the topic you’re interested in.

Second, we’re partnering with downtown residents on monthly Service Saturdays and other programs through the warmer months of the year so that neighbors can get acquainted and we can all contribute to a greener and cleaner downtown. We’re working on some fun incentives, too. If you’re interested in that, please check our volunteering calendar as the season ramps up or just reach out to me.

Q:  How may we follow your news?

A:  I’d suggest following Minneapolis DID on Facebook and Instagram, signing up for our newsletter, or just reaching out to me personally at bshardlow@mplsdid.com. I regularly have coffee meetings with downtown residents and love to make new connections.