Just a few weeks ago, the Meatpacking District's Gansevoort Plaza was an urban wasteland.  Cars and cabs pealed through the area without regard to their surroundings, creating dangerous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.

In 2005, PPS met with local community leaders to develop a vision for the area.  Recently, several simple changes were implemented that have changed the streetscape.

Photo by Lily Bernheimer 

Traffic has been significantly slowed and pedestrians now have a place to sit in this now-bustling neighborhood!

Previous Posts:

Eve on the Street: Gansevoort Plaza Open for Business [Streetsblog]
PPS Projects: Gansevoort Plaza [PPS Transportation Projects] 

Thousands of revelers and recreation seekers came out for the opening of downtown Houston's first park, Discovery Green. The new 12-acre park boasts an interactive water feature, amphitheater, children's playground, dog run, spacious green lawns, public art works and restaurants. All the amenities are meant to draw a diversity of users. That was clearly accomplished on opening day. 

PPS facilitated a series of workshops in 2005 to gather and use community input for the design of the park. The result is a urban oasis with dozens of options for things to do in a city with few open spaces.

Guy Hagstette, Director of Discovery Green, emailed PPS saying:

"It was a picture perfect day, and something over 20,000 people showed up. . . there are so many things to do in the park. It was really a lot of fun. . . we have had scores of parents with toddlers playing on the playground and kids throwing frisbees and sunbathing. Barbara Bush even stopped by."

More information about the park can be found on the Discovery Green website.

Previous posts:
Park Could Be A Great Place [Houston Chronicle]
Houston Downtown Park Groundbreaking [KHOU]
Project Concept Plan [from the PPS Project Experience Files]

     Photo Credit (left): Lily Bernheimer

The NYC DOT appears to be moving ahead with changes that will make Gansevoort Plaza, a massive intersection at the heart of the Meatpacking District, into a comfortable pedestrian area.

While everyone is wondering how the space will shape up in the long-run, comment postings on Streetsblog show that there is no shortage of good ideas. Recommendations from readers range from the installation of a central fountain to allocating the space for a green or flea market.

Related Posts:
Community Vision for Gansevoort Plaza [PPS Project Experience]
Meat Market Traffic Patterns [The Villager]

 

A 2-acre parcel of land for sale on the Providence waterfront, now the site of a former night club called Shooters, could be an extension of the adjacent India Point Park. Residents want the site to be rezoned to prevent condo development, while the Rhode Island DOT claims it must be sold at market price to the highest bidder based on Federal Highway Administration requirements.  

Ethan Kent, PPS Vice President, recently participated in a community forum about the site and said it could become a regional draw. It'll be up to community members to push for a plan that reflects the personality of the city.

Better access to the waterfront is one of the 7 principles listed in Providence 2020, a long-term vision for the city's growth. The plan calls for continuous waterfront pedestrian access with linkages to parallel streets.

Related Articles:
Residents Ask to Protect Shooters Site [The Providence Journal]
Proposed Rezoning along Waterfront  [Greater City: Providence]

The New York Times reports on the rising tensions between the community and developers over the plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park.

"For New Yorkers long accustomed to being shut off from miles of waterfront that were abandoned, underused or cut off by highways, lots of green open space on the water seems like a good idea. To Fred Kent, an urban planner who examines parks and plazas the way a doctor scrutinizes X-rays, it is another missed opportunity for life on the waterfront. Mr. Kent, the founder of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit design and planning group, points to cities like Oslo or Stockholm where waterfronts are the backdrop to markets, museums and a range of commerce and culture.

'Putting a bunch of fields on the waterfront in the middle of a pier is not exactly the thing you should be doing on what is essentially your face to the world," he said of the Brooklyn plan, which he has opposed along with several local groups. "If Brooklyn wanted to distinguish itself as a great city, apart from Manhattan, it is the waterfront that could do it.'"

PPS recently facilitated a community visioning workshop for Pier 1, located at the end of Atlantic Avenue. There had never been any public input into the uses for the pier. The current design is for a passive landscaped space. Like many other waterfront projects around NYC and the world, the current vision for Brooklyn Bridge Park, and especially the Pier, is a squandered opportunity in place of what could be a great public asset.

Related Posts: 
Brooklyn Bridge Park Hall of Shame [PPS Archives]
Suburbanization of NYC Waterfronts [Streetsblog]
Waterfront Renaissance Around the World [PPS Newsletter, 2/07]

Streetsblog reports on the changes that have been taking place along Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. PPS worked with the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) to develop a new vision for a 15-block area last year. Some of the improvements suggested include improved parking management, higher quality design materials and more amenities for pedestrians.

The findings of the BID's comprehensive vision will be presented by Phil Myrick to Manhattan Community Board 7's Green Committee and members of the Parks and Transportation Committees on Monday, March 24th at 7pm. The meeting will take place at 250 West 87th Street, 2nd Floor.

Download the BID Vision Report here.

(photo courtesy of R. Clayton McKee)
Kids playing around "Mist Tree," a donated fountain at the new Discovery Green park.

The preview opening of Discovery Green, a 12-acre park across from the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston, showed local residents that the previously underutilized green space could be a great place to spend time, bump into old friends and hang out with the family. The challenge will be to manage the park with the type of programming that will keep people wanting to come back.

Previous posts:
Houston Downtown Park Groundbreaking [KHOU]
Project Concept Plan [from the PPS Project Experience Files]
 

As part of a project Providence, RI, PPS lead a workshop of over 100 city officials, business owners, residents and representatives of nonprofit groups about potential improvements to the city's central plaza, Kennedy Plaza.

"All over the world, people are coming back to these great squares. Once you've got a great square, the rest of your city is going to fall into place," said Kent. He and PPS envision a Kennedy Plaza that is ringed by shops, full of attractions and serves as the hub for a different kind of transit system, one based on trolleys or trams.

The StreetStars series focuses on the heroes and organizers in our communities who are fighting constructively for livable streets.

Christine Berthet, co-founder of Chekpeds (the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition), worked with TA and PPS, and was instrumental in organizing the Ninth Avenue Renaissance.

Kaiser Permanente's own Preston Maring, MD, shared his Thanksgiving menu – developed using organic, locally sourced produce – on a live ABC News broadcast Wednesday morning.

Dr. Maring, who founded Kaiser Permanente's farmers' markets program in 2003, talked about why good food is such a key ingredient in the recipe for healthy living. Dr. Maring recounted how he created the farmers' market program because he thought that his patients and colleagues could live healthier lives if they consumed more fruits and vegetables.

He opened Kaiser Permanente's first farmers' market at Oakland Medical Center in 2003. Today , 38 Kaiser Permanente facilities offer organic produce markets. Further, Kaiser Permanente's medical centers in Northern California use organic produce in thousands of patient meals each day.

Maring recently received a Kellogg Foundation Food in Society Policy Fellowship for his work creating the farmers' markets.

Watch Dr. Maring now on ABC News. You also can check out his Thanksgiving recipes through his blog.

PPS Vice President Ethan Kent was one of the presenters at the Sustainable Tourism Development Forum held in Pawtucket, RI on Thursday, October 25, 2007.

The Providence Journal
By Philip Marcelo

PAWTUCKET— Policymakers, city planners and tourism officials from Rhode Island and neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts gathered downtown yesterday for a forum on “place-making” sponsored by the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council.

“Place-making is taking a place that you can’t wait to get out of and making it into one that you never want to leave,” explained guest presenter Ethan Kent, vice president of the Project for Public Spaces, a consulting and design firm based in New York.

The half-day of presentations and small-group discussions was geared toward those interested in sustainable tourism, which the tourism council describes as development that enhances a place by using its cultural, natural, historical, human, educational and built resources to differentiate it from other destinations.

When USA Today asked Alice Waters, co-owner of the famed restaurant Chez Panisse, to compile a list of some of the country’s best farmers markets she made sure to include PPS grantee City Seed, located in New Haven, CT.

One of only two East Coast markets cited, the City Seed Wooster Square Farmers Market was noted for their focus on accessibility. The market accepts Farmers Market Nutrition Program coupons, as well as Electronic Benefits Transfer (food stamps), making it easier for low-income New Haven residents to shop and enjoy the market.

Jennifer McTiernan, executive director of City Seed, was pleased with the recognition,“We were thrilled with the USA Today article, not just because it mentioned the market that we run, but because it specifically listed that we were accessible to the community. Though I think that there’s definitely more we could do to make that more of a reality, it was exciting to see the work that we have done in that area being recognized.”

Click here to read the full USA Today article Top Ten Markets for Cultivating Organic Growers
 

 

PPS Senior Fellow Jay Walljasper discusses The Great Neighborhood Book at the The Micro Revolution: Neighbors Making a Difference event held in Chicago on September 20, 2007.

Neighbors Making a Difference
By Jay Walljasper 

"My hope that day was to showcase inspiring examples of how everyday citizens made tremendous improvements in the place they call home by putting their heads together with neighbors to conceive new ideas for their neighborhoods and then rolling up their sleeves to put these into action."

A sunny, near perfect September day took me to Chicago, where the Metropolitan Planning Council had graciously invited me to talk about the role neighborhoods play in social change. That's the message of my new book The Great Neighborhood Book (New Society Publishers), written in partnership with my colleagues at Project for Public Spaces (PPS). "The citizens are the experts," has long been the PPS mantra, based on their 30 years of experience helping communities achieve their dreams of becoming safe, lively, livable, lovable places. This phrase reinforces the idea that architects, traffic engineers, public officials planners and other professionals have valuable contributions to make towards neighborhood revitalization efforts, but when their plans turn a deaf ear to a community's own aspirations for the future, the results often fall far short of the goals.

Come to "Streets as Places", PPS's new training seminar, and learn how Placemaking can build great streets and great communities.

The course will introduce participants to new ways of thinking about streets as public spaces. It is intended for anyone who is interested in creating a great street, including transportation professionals who want to learn more about how streets can help to build communities, civic and elected officials who realize that greater economic impact can result from changing the way that roads are designed, and citizen activists who understand that the time to change is now.

Presentations and discussion will center on how streets, roads, and transit facilities can be designed and managed to benefit communities, in addition to serving mobility needs. Practical tools for assessing a variety of street typologies and case studies of cities which have moved beyond solving mobility problems to community building will be presented, and participants will be encouraged to discuss their own projects as well as share experiences and ideas with each other.

The training session will include a walking tour and discussion of some of the recent street improvement projects in New York City, an on-site Placemaking street audit, seminar-style lectures, and open discussions about current transportation issues and challenges facing cities today.

For more information and to register, visit the event homepage.

This July, PPS president Fred Kent and senior vice president Kathy Madden attended the 3rd annual Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado. This 6-day festival brought together some of the most important and fascinating ideas of our time. The presentation-, networking-, and discussion-based setting was designed to share and advance these great ideas not only among the scientists, artists, politicians, historians, educators, community activists, and great thinkers present, but to the wider world as well.

Listen to the entire audio recording of Fred and Kathy’s presentation to this prestigious group, entitled, “What if We Built Cities Around Places? The Power of 10.”

 

A few weeks ago, a group of dedicated placemakers gathered at a landmark event in Seattle, the Great Places Symposium, laying the groundwork for an even larger regional movement around the idea of place. PPS has been in close contact with the leaders of this new network, called the Great Places Forum, since its inception, and we are thrilled to highlight the Seattle region's vibrant Placemaking network, which is working to unite like-minded people across the country around the importance of place.

The three-day conference brought together leaders from a variety of professions and fields to "celebrate and advocate for the necessity of placemaking in the vitality of our downtowns and suburbs, rural landscapes and villages." Among the many positive results of the symposium was the drafting and signing of an unprecedented document called the Great Places Declaration. The forward-thinking spirit that this declaration embodies should be celebrated as a huge step forward for Placemaking networks everywhere, and we at PPS are delighted that the Seattle region is fully embracing the movement and the challenges that come with it.

A Landmark Symposium Sets the Stage for Greater Change

Billed as a working "think tank," the Great Places Forum brought together the Seattle region's Placemaking leaders July 19-21. Participants included a wide-ranging group of leaders from the fields of urban planning, municipal government, environmental studies, architecture, real estate development, international sustainability, and community organizing. Organizers billed the symposium as a way to "celebrate and advocate for the necessity of placemaking in the vitality of our downtowns and suburbs, rural landscapes and villages."

PPS's Fred Kent, Kathy Madden, and Ethan Kent attended the symposium, along with other leaders from organizations like the Trust for Public Land, the Cascade Land Conservancy, and the Urban Land Institute. Public sector leaders were also present, from Seattle City Planning Director John Rahaim to representatives of the Seattle Department of Transportation and many other municipalities.

Two PPS board members, Ron Sher and Don Miles, have developed the Great Places Forum along with Karen True, its current director. Their work has created new opportunities for great public spaces to emerge and flourish in the greater Seattle region. PPS has been a part of this planning process, and we laud the Great Places Forum as huge step toward a more open, productive dialogue about place. If people and organizations with experience in Placemaking discuss and share their understanding of what makes great public spaces, their ideas gain the momentum necessary to reach more individuals, communities, and places worldwide.

The "Great Spaces Declaration"

The leaders who attended the Great Places Symposium closed the conference by signing a document called the Great Places Declaration, their shared statement of intent to foster a network of people and resources to support the creation of great places. The document voiced the basic principles and ideals that these leaders shared:

"We assert that Great Places act as a magnet, drawing people together to live, work and play in complete and sustainable communities, allowing us to preserve natural spaces and enhance the health of the planet."

They also outlined a clear statement of intent for the future of the movement:

"We affirm these ideas and together pledge to create new policies, systems, and initiatives to shape Great Places for the enrichment of future generations."

This is language that evokes responses, shared thinking that fosters innovation, and action that gains attention. The next step is to turn these bold declarations of intent and collaborative networks into real, tangible action. PPS is proud to see this kind of raw potential taking a tangible, constructive path among professionals in the Seattle region.

Moving forward

The Great Places Forum has not stopped with the 2007 Great Places Symposium. What happened this July has laid the foundation for the upcoming "Great Places Day and Conference" in July 2008. The conference, which will be preceded by two days of hands-on workshops, will be a "grand festival and celebration of 'Great Places.'" Through this much larger, outreach-based event, the Great Places Forum hopes to engage a gathering of thousands of members of the general public around the importance of Placemaking. International speakers will communicate the importance of Placemaking for the "core well-being of our society," and conference plans include opportunities for Placemakers at all levels: international, national, regional, and local.

These far-reaching plans offer enormous potential and a significant hope for those of us committed to seeing the cause of Placemaking spread to as many active, engaged minds as possible. The Great Spaces Declaration and the Forum's plans to continue spreading the word for the Placemaking movement exemplify one of PPS's 11 Principles of Placemaking: You are never finished. We to watching this movement take shape in the greater Seattle region and the nation as a whole, and look forward to seeing it complement our own work in Placemaking.

Project for Public Spaces Vice President, Ethan Kent, writes about Melbourne's successful new public space development, Federation Square, and a Placemaking training course that he helped lead, which included many city staff, local developers and "place managers."

 

Three urban planners from PPS visited Churchhill County and Fallon, NV, in an effort to inventory and assess local gathering places and destinations around town. 

Phil Myrick, vice president of PPS, and Elena Madison, assistant vice president, presented a list of sites they felt could be better utilized in Fallon. The team, which also included farmers market expert David O'Neil, toured downtown and the county and polled local residents on needed changes or additions to bring people together and to the downtown area.

As cities are building new parks at a rate not seen for 100 years, the debate about what uses and activities to put in them is growing. 

Phil Myrick, a PPS Vice President, comments on how PPS helped create a program of uses for a new park in Houston that will generate buzz in a long-forgotten area of downtown, in this article from the Wall Street Journal.

 

Seattle's Occidental Square is making a comeback!

The square had long been an empty, dreary, underused space.  But recent renovations have brought new pavings, bocce ball courts, and a series of special events that are bringing people back to Occidental Square.

Read more about PPS's involvement in the turnaround.

Photo taken by Dan Gonsiorowski

Seattlest recently visited the square on a sunny afternoon.
 

Local politicians - lawyers among them - will be staging a mock trial Saturday on whether to set free a wooden bench near the Surrey Central SkyTrain and bus loop in Surrey, British Columbia.

The idea for the bench trial came about after public spaces guru Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces, toured Whalley and spotted the bench, encaged by an iron fence, and marveled at the waste.

There are 4,400 farmers markets in the United States, more than three times the number in 1994, with an estimated sales volume of $1 billion, according to the Department of Agriculture. But not one is quite like Crossroads in Takoma Park, funded in part by a grant awarded by Project for Public Spaces and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The City of Greensboro held a ribbon cutting ceremony on December 1, 2006, to celebrate the opening of the new Center City Park, and the park has already been widely accepted by the community, and host to several large events and festivals.

Read more on how PPS worked with the City and community members to create a vision for this new park.

In order to foster ideas on how to reclaim 9th Avenue from Lincoln Tunnel traffic, the Clinton/Hell's Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition (CHEKPEDS) sponsored a six month community input process designed by Project for Public Spaces.

Community Board 4 will hold a vote tonight on adopting report findings as "the official community vision." If that happens, the report will be incorporated as community input in the federally funded engineering study of entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel.

Speeding is down at an intersection in Ramsey, NJ, where temporary traffic calming devices were installed at the end of last month.

Modifications to the corner were just one of the changes suggested by Project for Public Spaces during a study of the streets around a train station that opened in 2004.

Fred Kent believes that you can have the most attractively built community in the world, but if people don't come together to mix in public spaces, it's just dead space.

His theory is that attractive, non-automobile dominated public spaces layered with multi-use functions will pump vitality back into communities that have become too isolated.

On Tuesday, May 22nd, Cynthia Nikitin, Vice President with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in New York City, will speak in Cleveland Heights, OH on the topic "Main Street at Work: Shaping Neighborhood Commercial Centers around Places." The event will be held at Forest Hill Church, 3031 Monticello Blvd. (corner of Lee Blvd.) at 7:00 p.m. Free parking is available behind the church.  

In her talk, Ms. Nikitin will discuss how the key to revitalizing neighborhood commercial corridors and retail districts is to re-imagine them as a series of dynamic linked destinations, managed as a whole. Examples will be presented of downtown neighborhood main streets that have turned themselves around by reorienting around the notion of "Place."

As a seasoned project director of PPS, Cynthia Nikitin has more than 20 years of experience in public art administration, public space management and programming, creating transit centers as public spaces, civic buildings as community assets and facilitating workshops for community and transportation professionals to add greater value to communities with public space projects. PPS is an international non-profit organization that creates the public spaces that build and sustain communities.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is jointly sponsored by FutureHeights and the Cleveland Chapter of the Ohio Planning Conference. For more information, call (216) 320-1423 or email info@futureheights.org.

For more information, download the event flyer here.

Brian Ray attended PPS's training course "How to Turn a Place Around," and writes a review of his experience learning a new approach to designing great public spaces.

 

Linda McIntyre, Detroit native and writer for Landscape Architecture, returns home to see whether Campus Martius lives up to its billing.

"If PPS ran television commercials for its philosophy of placemaking, one could be filmed at Campus Martius Park."

PPS is working with neighborhood associations, community boards, and the Manhattan Borough President in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, to address traffic, pollution, and the degradation of street life on 9th Avenue.  Thor Snilsberg presented PPS's report to the community, which included three proposed redesign plans for 9th Avenue based on community feedback gathered at a series of workshops.

Project for Public Spaces worked with the Town of Poughkeepsie and Vassar College to develop traffic calming recommendations and other improvements to Raymond Avenue and the Arlington Business District.

Construction was completed in the Spring of 2007, and a portion of Raymond Avenue now features a roundabout, medians, and new crosswalks.

Photo © Otto Yamamoto

For more on this project and additional photos, click here.

"One participant described the “Placemaking Game” with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) as, “one the best events he had ever attended.” Hyperbole? We’re not sure, but one thing is for sure: the enthusiasm, delight in participating, and belief that it’s possible to create a dynamic public riverfront in Memphis was contagious."

Read more about the workshop attended by 134 people on the website of Friends For Our Riverfront.

PPS led a Placemaking workshop in Solana Beach, CA, on March 17. Participants focused on areas around Cedros Avenue and Highway 101. Suggested improvements included wider sidewalks, more crosswalks on Highway 101, and sitting areas around the pedestrian bridges.

The event was filmed and will be a part of a documentary produced by University of California, San Diego Television, and is due out in September.
 

135 people attended a Placemaking workshop led by PPS at Memphis' riverfront.  The participants suggesting adding amenities to the parks that overlook the Mississippi River, such as public water fountains, more cafes, food and beverage vendors and bicycle racks.

PPS is working with the Grand Army Plaza Coalition in Brooklyn, NY to help improve the area for pedestrians.  PPS held a workshop attended by 50 community members and discussed a vision for the dangerous plaza.

This video of the workshop from StreetFilms.org features PPS's Kathleen Ziegenfuss and Ethan Kent.

This interview with Fred Kent appeared in the February 2007 issue of Urban Land:

"As an internationally known advocate for public spaces, Fred Kent, founder of the New York-based  Project for Public Spaces (PPS), sees cities - and the people who inhabit them - through the measured senses of an urban provocateur."

Although New York prides itself on its public life, New Yorkers inhabit a public realm that pales beside what it could become. "After working in cities around the world, we've developed a rich understanding of public spaces that begs to be put to use back in our home town," explains PPS President Fred Kent. "New York can benefit from our experience and become an even greater city in the 21st century."

Museum Mile Festival, 5th Avenue 

Read this special issue of PPS's newsletter Making Places, which includes the city commentary, New York great public spaces and hidden gems, and the places that provide the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Listen to Fred Kent discuss what makes a great waterfront on San Diego's KPBS.

At a public meeting in Tempe, AZ, PPS Vice President Phil Myrick recommended that the city create a network of pedestrian walkways to connect the area's destionations.

Image (c) Andrea Bloom / The State Press

Kathy Madden, Senior Vice President of PPS, is participating in Planetizen's Interchange series.  Read her first entry, which looks at several major new museums in European cities that are brutal, dehumanizing buildings surounded by dead spaces.

Fred Kent and Kathy Madden led a group of planners, architects and community activists in Placemaking training session in developing public spaces that are appealing and safe.

PPS facilitated the first meeting of the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project in Hell's Kitchen, New York, attended by over 130 members of the community. The project will focus on transforming Ninth Avenue from a traffic-choked, polluted highway, to a community-oriented Main Street.  Aaron Naparstek brings us his take on the meeting on Streetsblog.

PPS staff members Fred Kent, Cynthia Nikitin and Ethan Kent traveled to Dubai to train a group of the city's leading real estate developers in Placemaking.  The largest city in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai has experienced explosive growth in recent years, emerging as the region's financial and cultural capital. Ethan explores the transportation situation in the rapidly growing emirate in this entry on Streetsblog.