The General Services Administration (GSA) and Project for Public Spaces are currently partnering on an initiative to improve federal plazas that extend into urban communities in 24 American cities.  The partnership has resulted in a free publication titled Achieving Great Federal Public Spaces: A Property Manager's Guide.

The tools and initiatives developed through this partnership have recently made impacts in cities of Syracuse, NY, and Denver, CO.

 In Denver, the Byron G. Rogers Courthouse plaza had become a sterile and inefficient locale during the Timothy McVeigh trial.  As part of the plaza's revitalization, the city added an "ambassador" to assist in directing visitors, as well as new benches and planted flowers.  The once hectic waiting area to enter the building's security checkpoint has been enclosed under a light-filled atrium that now includes a calming water feature.

 In Syracuse, The GSA involved the surrounding community for input on upgrades to The Plaza at the James M. Hanley Federal Building, a long-time locale for weekly live music, food and entertainment on summer evenings.  The Plaza's upgrades include an oval green space, as well as benches, picnic tables and improved signage.  The new design also incorporates design elements from the nearby, recently upgraded Clinton Square Corridor, creating cohesion between the two spaces.

 Incorporating local communities is key to decision-making.  "The broader outreach, the better," says Project for Public Spaces Vice President Cynthia Nitikin.  "It's all sort of also geared toward having these federal buildings or municipal buildings or civic institutions start coalescing into districts and civic centers. This process is really about civic institutions taking a lead once again in helping revitalize communities."

Related Articles:
Achieving Great Federal Public Spaces: A Property Manager's Guide [PPS Project Experience]
Improve Your Building's Public Spaces[Buildings Magazine]

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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."

Kathy Madden, Senior Vice President of PPS, is participating in Planetizen's Interchange blog series.  In her second entry, Kathy answers the question, does a building need to be old or look historic to create a sense of place?

Kathy compares the ground floor design and management of Country Club Plaza in Kansas City and Rockefeller Center in New York.

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.
 

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 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.

Congratulations to the San Jose/Guerrero Coalition to Save Our Streets, co-recipient of the 2006 Grand Award, given by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in San Francisco.

The Coalition of neighborhood activists successfully transformed a dangerous 6-lane arterial into a traffic-calmed street with wide medians, safe pedestrian crossings, and bike lanes. PPS worked with the Coalition to create a Neighborhood Plan, to further redevelop the neighborhood's streets into great public spaces.

Read more about PPS's work with the San Jose/Guerrero Coalition to Save our Streets here.

Less room for cars translates to more room for bicyclists. (Photo: Noah Berger)

The City of Greensboro held a ribbon cutting ceremony on December 1, 2006, to celebrate the opening of the new Center City Park.

In 2003, PPS worked with the City and community members to create a vision for what this new park could be.  PPS facilitated a Placemaking workshop where participants developed a range of both short-term opportunities and a long-term vision plan. The new park was envisioned as an opportunity to revitalize Downtown Greensboro, and to create a community gathering place that will be a destination for residents.

 
Image (c) David Wharton 

Greensboro blogger David Wharton wrote a great description of the new park, comparing it to PPS's list of the ten qualities of a great park.

PPS conducted a community meeting in Hilliard, OH, to explore possibilities for the development and redevelopment of public spaces in the city.  The residents and attendees again and again turned the discussion to the plight of the city's historic downtown business district, and what could be done about the lack of pedestrian activity in that area.

Cynthia Nikitin, Vice President of Project for Public Spaces and Director of the Civic Centers Program, discusses the importance of involving the community in revitalizing cities and neighborhoods, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

PPS is seeking a Transportation and Placemaking Project Manager in its transportation line of business. Candidates should have experience in several of the following areas: transportation and land use planning and/or policy, TOD,  transportation facility design, public participation and facilitation, community development, redevelopment and real estate development  market analysis. The selected candidate will report to the Vice President for Transportation and work with other VPs, project associates and interns on a range of planning, research, and marketing projects, including land and community development projects and general and specific plans for communities, cities and counties.

Read more about this position at: http://www.pps.org/info/aboutpps/jobopenings

In 2005, PPS began working with the City of Mississauga to help grow a lively downtown that appeals to a growing downtown population.  Even before the ink was dry on our final report and concepts, the city had formed a new department, Building a City for the 21^st Century. The department has been busy implementing recommendations, empowering residents to become leaders in City projects, and organizing the "My Mississauga" program of outdoor events. Activities and events range from Farmers markets to Vintage Car Club Thursdays.

Mississauga's immense effort in its downtown has even convinced us to remove it from the PPS Hall of Shame!

Some photos from this summer's "My Mississauga" events:

 

 

For more information on PPS's work in Mississauga, see the Placemaking in Mississauga project experience. 

Several dozen people converged on New Glasgow this week to learn how to change their communities from places they couldn't wait to get through to places they didn't want to leave.

Reduce traffic volume and make room for happier citizens, urged workshop leaders from the New York-based Project for Public Spaces. Kathy Madden, Cynthia Nikitin, and Kathleen Ziegenfuss trained about 50 provincial politicians, municipal planners, librarians and others interested in community development, in simple low-cost techniques to revitalize neighbourhoods.

As buildings inch upward and outward in Tempe, AZ, Project for Public Spaces, is devising a way for the city to preserve the areas in between - making sure there are pockets of shade and places to linger for residents, tourists and employees.

 

PPS held a community workshop to kick-off a process to revitalize Pittsburgh's Downtown Market Square.

"After months of public consultation, the City of Mississauga is unveiling its vision for the revitalization of public spaces in and around downtown Mississauga, with particular focus on new parks and public spaces in the City Centre.

The City has been working with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) -- a non-profit organization which specializes in working with cities to create and sustain lively public places -- to draft a concept plan that will see the City Centre develop into a vital community destination with programs, people-friendly settings, and social and economic rejuvenation. The plan is built on the principles of "Placemaking" - creating successful public spaces through access, activities, comfort and sociability."

 

In an era when cities and towns are changing rapidly, public spaces are the key to reviving civic engagement.  Fred Kent and Benjamin Fried look at how one city is making it happen, in the September 2006 issue of Municipal World.

 

An interview with Fred Kent, President and founder of PPS, on what it means to create a great place and why the concept of Placemaking has gone international.

PPS staff members Steve Davies, Ethan Kent, and Elena Madison traveled to Flint MI for two days of meetings with city officials, community leaders and stakeholders, and tours of potential sites that could be transformed into vibrant destinations.

PPS will return to Flint for public workshops that will focus on Riverbank Park, and the Flint Farmers' Market, which will take place on July 25 and 26.
 

Fred Kent, Ethan Kent, and Juliette Michaelson of PPS visited Bellingham, WA last week, and trained 75 city staff, council members, and community leaders in the principles and techniques of Placemaking. 

The Mayor of Bellingham, Mark Asmundson, who has also attended PPS's "How to Turn a Place Around" training, wrote this article on the experience and poses the question, What if we designed Bellingham around places?

Watch Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces, give his presentation "Creating a Sense of Place", given in San Diego on March 14, 2006

This presentation and other streaming video programs are available online on UCSD-TV's web site at www.ucsd.tv.

The NYC Streets Renaissance exhibit, Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York, has moved from the Municipal Arts Society to the lobby of 4 Times Square, the Conde Nast Building.

The exhibit will focus on a vision for Broadway as a grand boulevard containing more than 20 unique destinations, with Times Square as the most iconic. The exhibit will also examine some of the "Best Practice" models already being employed by the Times Square Alliance to transform Times Square into one of the finest public spaces in the world.

Please join the Streets Renaissance team - PPS, Transportation Alternatives, and the Open Planning Project - and the Durst Organization for an opening reception on Thursday, May 25th, 6-8 pm. Enter the lobby of 4 Times Square on the north side of 42nd Street, near Broadway.

Please RSVP to streets@transalt.org.

Fred Kent and Ethan Kent met with community leaders in Midland, MI, to discuss how to create a city of well-connected, well-planned destinations that are engaging to people of all ages.

A follow-up article in the Toronto Star finds broad support from residents and experts alike for the Placemaking approach to revitalization taken in Mississauga, Canada's 6th largest city. For related story, see "Making a square dance in Mississauga."

PPS is nearing completion on an effort to help the city of Mississauga, Canada, activate its empty city plazas and streets. PPS staff Cynthia Nikitin and Phil Myrick worked with Fred Kent to develop a program for revitalizing the public spaces in and around downtown, including concepts for a new park and as well as existing plazas. The program was envisioned as an integrated campaign that involved training for city staff, placemaking workshops, concept development for downtown spaces, and actions the city could take in the short term. Only six months after the project started, the city has created a new department that will oversee Placemaking citywide and initiate an ambitious program of events all year, beginning this summer.