The Lost Art of the Living Innovation Zone
With Better Market Street dead, it's time to bring back its prototype
Market Street is the talk of the town these days, but in a dreary sort of way.
What should we do with our grand yet faded thoroughfare? We can bring back cars, throw another night market, add a skatepark. If the question is “How do you solve a problem like Market Street?”, the answers will run the gamut. For a street as diverse as Market Street, that seems fitting. Yet for all the things that have been considered, there’s something that hasn’t that’s worth revisiting:
Living Innovation Zones.
A decade ago, Living Innovation Zones were spaces along Market’s wide sidewalks where local arts and nonprofit groups could activate the street to create…anything, at least theoretically. Lovingly referred to as “bureaucracy-free zones,” these spaces were intended to test possible futures for the Better Market Street Plan in flexible two-year increments.
The best iteration of the program was undoubtedly its first. Pause on Market Street was a pair of giant listening dishes (pictured above) that delivered the uncanny sensation of hearing a stranger whisper from across the crowded sidewalk. It now lives outside the Exploratorium, near their Studio for Public Spaces, which created the installation.
Pause was fun! Engaging! Playful! But most importantly it was innovative. Or at least that’s what the Mayor’s Office wanted you to believe. LIZs (as they were commonly known) were born out of the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation during a time when technological advancement was seemingly scooting alongside every San Franciscan. We could bring tech’s spirit of innovation and prototyping to the street, or so the thinking went. If Market Street was set to be rebuilt and reimagined through the Better Market Plan, why not treat these spaces as opportunities, places to try something new that could inform the future of the street?
I was reminded of this the other day when I was part of yet another how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-Market conversation. The conversation was focused on things that could be added to Market Street to enhance the experience and draw people downtown. Someone suggested flags, as is common in London. A city official responded noting that might require environmental review. Really? The Mayor and everyone else have made it clear that making Market Street work is a top priority, yet here we were with a top deputy talking about a lengthy environmental review to…install a few flags. Afterward, a few of us laughed about it, if only to keep from crying.
In many ways, this was the fatal flaw of Living Innovation Zones. What happened in the zones was innovative, but the processes that led to them were not. The permitting wasn’t necessarily simpler, there were just more people focused on it. In talking with a half-dozen people who were part of the original LIZ program, many of them made it clear that what made the program work was that Mayor Lee made it a priority. The Office of Civic Innovation didn’t know much about programming public space or navigating permit processes, but they didn’t need to. They had a mandate from the Mayor’s Office, and everyone else found a way to make it work. We need to find this spirit again. It’s time to bring back Living Innovation Zones, or a version of them that fits our current crisis.
Sadly, LIZ’s seemed to have died with the administration that created them. Sure, they technically live(d) on as part of the Groundplay program, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone utilizing them—or any part of Groundplay, for that matter. Without the Mayoral mandate, there simply wasn’t enough momentum to sustain these bureaucracy-free spaces. Eventually, the Better Market Street Plan died too, having been deemed “the plan without a piggy bank.” So it’s time to prototype again.
What we need now is prototypes for both civic spaces and the bureaucratic processes that govern them. Like most cities, San Francisco’s public realm is overseen by a dozen departments whose responsibilities are often as singular as a street pole. Each department has its own policies, processes, budgets, egos, capacity constraints, and more. Add all of it together, mix it into a place as diverse and dynamic as the public realm, and it becomes difficult to get much of anything done—especially things that are flexible, fun, playful or innovative. We have to fix this dynamic if we hope to fix Market Street, or any of our other problematic public spaces.
So here’s an idea that takes inspiration from both Living Innovation Zones and the short-lived flexibility fair it inspired, the Market Street Prototyping Festival: What if we treated each block of Market Street like a different type of innovation zone, testing out a different solution one block at a time? Put another way, Market Street has been interpreted as a linear space for a long time, designed for people traveling its length, from the Castro to the Ferry Building. With fewer people headed downtown, perhaps it’s time to focus on the width of its wide sidewalks instead. We can see the street laterally, as connective tissue for the surrounding blocks rather than a river of traffic to be managed.
Leaders will acknowledge that the street is “too wide,” but that width may hold the canvas that allows us to paint the future of Market Street, one block at a time. For instance:
I want a block that’s a park.
Another for arts.
One that partners with small businesses.
A block where the bike path meanders through the trees.
A block where all the POPOS turn into garden cafes.
Give me a block that’s zoned like Japan.
A block for night markets.
A block for the queer community. A block for families.
A block for Ikea. Bring the Swedish meatballs into the streets, you cowards.
A block for theaters. A block for music. A block for neon signs.
The possibilities are endless.
But so too is our bureaucracy.
Luckily, several groups are already thinking about similar solutions. The Downtown SF Partnership’s Public Realm Action Plan imagines a “Market Oasis” growing along the blocks near Mechanics Monument Plaza to create a lush and welcoming garden in the center of the Financial District. A bit further west, the Mid Market Foundation created the Market Street Arts plan that aims to leverage the area’s cultural institutions and vacant storefronts to form an arts district that resembles Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles. A creative hub and an oasis both flourishing on different parts of Market Street would go a long way towards revitalization. Ambitious public space projects like these always face two major constraints, funding and bureaucracy. San Francisco has the resources to solve the former, does it have the will to resolve the latter? Reviving Living Innovation Zones would be an easy way to find out.
Market Street has always been vexing. Herb Caen described it as “wide, long, stubborn, and unregenerate—a true brute of a street. A dead end with a life all its own.” Yet the current absence of life is what’s cause for concern. We took away cars, a pandemic hit, and the office went hybrid. That’s a potent cocktail for a noticeable void. Now, how do we fill it?
Almost all of the answers I’ve heard involve activating it in one way or another. Even the folks who want to bring back cars frame it in these terms. The longtime leader of Union Square Alliance, Karen Flood, summed up this position well, stating that “a little congestion is actually good for vibrancy.”
San Francisco’s citizens are certainly doing their part to try and activate the city. Take the Vacant to Vibrant program for instance: They’ve received over 1100 applications! There are thousands of San Franciscans searching for ways to contribute to the vibrancy of downtown and beyond.
What they haven’t found is a city willing to meet them halfway. If you need a lengthy environmental review process to add a few flags, bureaucracy will choke Market Street long before traffic does. Even the smartest and most well-resourced folks will tell you that the bureaucracy has been a nightmare. And every success story hinges on individuals providing herculean efforts to turn dreams into reality.
What if the city matched citizens’ herculean efforts, resolving the bureaucratic constraints that keep the vibrant city from bursting into the future? It would probably look a lot like a Living Innovation Zone.
We know San Franciscans are ready to activate and innovate. Is the city?