Daily Plan It Office of Planning & Community Development

The Daily Plan It Blog

A OPCD Blog

Unveiling the Outside Citywide Public Space Explorer: A New Online Tool to Promote Equity, Collaboration, and Environmental Justice

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In an ever-evolving urban landscape, the need to reimagine public spaces has never been more critical. We’re thrilled to introduce the Outside Citywide Public Space Explorer, an exciting new resource born from over five years of collaborative efforts across many departments, agencies, and organizations. This tool aims to bring about several transformative changes in how we plan and improve our public space system:

1. Gaining a Better Understanding of Our Public Space System

Seattle’s public space network is a diverse tapestry of different assets, encompassing plazas, trails, P-Patch gardens, neighborhood greenways, parks, and more. It’s the lifeblood of our city, offering opportunities for exercise, relaxation, community-building, and cultural enrichment. However, despite having one of the country’s best public space networks overall, some neighborhoods have historically been better served than others.

Past policies resulted in public spaces being concentrated in affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods, while communities of color received fewer investments and suffered from higher concentrations of pollution-generating activities.

The Outside Citywide mapping tools address these disparities head-on by providing a comprehensive view of our public space system. Prior to this effort, the dozens of different departments and agencies that own and manage public spaces in Seattle all mapped and inventoried their assets separately.  The Outside Citywide program changed this by putting all these assets together on one map.   Looking at the system as a whole, we were then able to gain a much deeper understanding of where the system is working well and where it is falling short. This will allow us to channel future public space investments into the neighborhoods that need them the most.

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Plazas for People Project Evaluates Privately Owned Public Spaces

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As our city continues to rapidly grow and develop, public spaces are becoming increasingly valuable places to pause, converse, rest and refresh. To better understand the usability and design of our public spaces, we evaluated 46 public spaces in greater Downtown this past summer. Read our findings and assessment of these spaces by downloading our Plazas for People document.

Focusing on Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) while using tools from the Gehl Institute, we found that 43 percent of the assessed POPS received “Average” scores, while only 15 percent score as “Good”. We’ve found that among the many types of POPS, plazas were the best performing.

Half of the sites ranked in the top ten are recent developments, built in the last two decades. Four of these five sites are in South Lake Union, where the neighborhood has an open space requirement for office buildings, stipulated through the Seattle Land Use Code. The code standards are augmented by the SDCI Design Review process to fine-tune the design results of these private plazas.

Our new report from OPCD includes recommended features and elements that would improve the usability of existing public spaces, whether public or privately owned. Based on the relatively high performance of newly developed spaces, OPCD will seek opportunities to encourage similar public space development throughout Greater Downtown and/or citywide in relevant zones.

Read more about Plazas for People on our Outside Citywide website.

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