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The
following article is reprinted from
the most recent edition of Landscape
Architecture Magazine (http://www.asla.org/nonmembers/lam.cfm)
SHARED
WISDOM
Preaching
the Gospel of Place:
Fred Kent of Project for Public
Spaces urges landscape architects
to create "people places."
By Susan Hines
At
58, Fred Kent has been in the business
of placemaking for more than 27
years. He and his nonprofit firm,
Project for Public Spaces (PPS),
created the conceptual plan for
the revitalized Bryant Park in New
York City and made the popular Court
Street Community Square from a parking
lot at the heart of San Bernardino,
California. On a smaller scale,
PPS transformed a New Haven, Connecticut,
street corner at the behest of a
local business owner. By widening
sidewalks in front to accommodate
cafe seating and making the rear
parking lot more attractive and
welcoming, PPS not only transformed
a corner but also helped turn a
neighborhood around.
| Through
publications and training sessions,
PPS freely shares placemaking
strategies acquired over the
decades. Ten thousand people
attend its workshops annually,
usually on the students' home
ground. In addition |
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| 'Eighty
percent of the profession would
like to create meaningful places,
and 20 percent are defining
where the profession goes-and
they are the wrong people.' |
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to conducting visioning programs for
cities and towns all over the globe,
PPS serves as a resource to the General
Services Administration (GSA). As
well as reviewing new construction,
PPS offers technical assistance to
GSA to help the agency integrate the
public spaces around existing federal
buildings into the surrounding communities.
The group trained 300 GSA employees
this past summer and developed a now-required
course in context-sensitive design
for the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
The Neighborhood Reinvestment Training
Institute also relies on PPS training
services.
Yet
Kent is neither a landscape architect
nor an architect. Far from seeing
this as a disadvantage, Kent credits
his ignorance of design disciplines
as a major factor in the success
of PPS.
Kent
also acknowledges the work of his
mentor, William H. Whyte. PPS was
founded in 1975 to apply the urban-space
theories that Whyte developed in
the late 1950s and throughout the
1960s. An editor at Fortune Magazine,
Whyte first became well-known in
1956 as the author of the best-selling
social critique The Organization
Man. Although there his focus was
the decline of individualism and
the rise of a corporate social ethic,
he called the "new suburbia,
the packaged villages that have
become the dormitory of the new
generation" a "preview"
of the dystopia ultimately to be
wrought by Organization Man.
Shortly
thereafter, Whyte shifted his focus
to the urban environment, spending
the second half of his career observing
and documenting how people act and
interact in public spaces. He was
among the first to point out, for
example, that how active a place
is-not the kinds of people who congregate
there-determines the safety and
security of an environment. The
now classic The Social Life of Small
Urban Spaces, published in 1980,
laid out conclusions based on decades
of meticulous observation and documentation
of human behavior in the urban environment
through the Street Life Project
that Whyte founded.
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A
research assistant on the Street
Life Project in the early 1970s,
PPS founder and president Kent
was thoroughly grounded in Whyte's
philosophy and his methods of
observation and film analysis.
PPS staff often quote the |
| PPS
staff are true believers in
common sense and the ability
of ordinary people to create
meaningful spaces for themselves. |
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master's statement that the city street
is "the river of life... where
we come together, the pathway to the
center. It is the primary place."
They are true believers in common
sense and the ability of ordinary
people to create meaningful spaces
for themselves. To this day, Whyte's
research and philosophy form the core
of the PPS approach. Kent and his
partner, Kathy Madden, guide the project
and its 25 employees-some of whom
are designers, architects, landscape
architects, and planners-in an all-out
effort to build the kinds of vibrant
places Whyte documented and praised.
Trained
in geography, economics, anthropology,
and planning, Kent studied at Columbia
for years without taking an advanced
degree. He calls himself "the
dumbest person" at PPS. "I
don't have any of the skills that
the other people have. I'm more
influenced by normal human beings."
In addition to Whyte, one of the
people who most influenced Kent
was Margaret Mead. He characterizes
the famous anthropologist as "a
very normal wise person who did
not have a respect for academia.
She had respect for common sense."
Kent's
formative encounters with Whyte
and Mead combined with early recognition
of the importance of place to happiness
and human flourishing. Memories
of growing up enjoying the "enormous
freedom and naive liberalism"
of small-town Andover, Massachusetts,
clashed with equally strong and
very negative feelings about West
Hartford, Connecticut, where he
moved as a teenager. West Hartford
was a far more segregated and restrictive
environment. Kent never really felt
comfortable again until he arrived
in New York City to start undergraduate
work at Columbia University.
| Last
year, Kent logged his customary
150,000 travel miles as PPS
trained federal and state government
employees and ordinary citizens
in placemaking. Seventy-five
communities received assistance
from PPS |
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| 'You
are so important-you could be
the transformer of cities' |
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in building stronger social bonds
through creating public spaces that
work.
Few
of the trainees were landscape architects,
however, a factor Kent finds incredibly
frustrating. "You are so important-you
could be the transformer of cities,"
he tells landscape architects. "It's
hard to be critical in a constructive
way, but if landscape architects
became synthesizers, and facilitators,
and community resources they would
become so much more important."
According
to Kent, the design professions
promote form over function, ignoring
what great places are all about,
namely "creating interaction
and building community. Architects
and landscape architects take pictures
of projects without people in them
when the primary thing ought to
be connecting people in the public
places and then designing to support
that. That is not done in the profession."
Places
without people are the antithesis
of Kent's working environment in
the heart of New York City's Greenwich
Village. Both the office and the
surrounding neighborhood are bustling
with people, places, and things.
Most important, they mix, overflow
onto one another, in that small-town
way that compels lipstick application
prior to leaving home. You just
don't know whom you might run into.
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Follow
Fred into a local restaurant.
He nods familiarly to the wait-staff
and stops by a table of people
he knows. Later, a PPS employee
lunching with his cousin approaches
to chat. It is the number of
these consistent, but casual,
encounters that makes or breaks
a place, as far as Kent is concerned.
Yet, |
| Few
contemporary environments, urban
or suburban, nurture the experience
that connects people to each
other and to place. |
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few contemporary environments, urban
or suburban, nurture the "meet
and greet" experience that connects
people to each other and to place.
As far as Kent is concerned, many
newly designed spaces work against
such interaction.
"According
to designers, the success of a place
all ties into the whole idea that
things must be visual," Kent
says. "What people really want
is to reengage in the communities
in which they live. Unfortunately,
we have designed that out, and the
landscape architecture profession
is as guilty of that as the traffic
engineers."
Kent
has strong words for a profession
he sees as overly occupied with
aesthetics. "Landscape architects
need to start from a completely
different point of view. They need
to start from the idea that their
job is to build communities, support
community activity, and create places
in the community that are special
to those people-all that work is
geared toward serving the community
and not the profession. They should
start out saying, 'My job is to
build community, connect people
in this community, and create special
places that people will care for.'"
Kent
has become skeptical that landscape
architects wish to design for community
interaction. A recent experience
working with landscape architects
on a Cleveland city park underscored
the problem PPS has in communicating
its philosophy to the profession.
After a series of community meetings,
the public generated ideas for connecting
small destinations within the space.
Instead of taking its cue from the
public wish list and
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designing
pathways to connect these places,
the firm planned a huge oval
path that reinforced the park's
name but, according to Kent,
"completely ignored the
natural ways people would move
from place to place in the park.
Landscape architects need to
be released from having to do
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| Landscape
architects need to be released
from having to do shapes, forms,
and metaphors |
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shapes, forms, and metaphors and instead
focus on understanding human interactivity
and managing uses-from flowers to
playgrounds and markets. This means
taking on more skills and responsibility,
but if landscape architects continue
to focus strictly on design skills,
they may end up without a profession."
"So
many cities don't want parks now,"
he goes on to say, "because
parks are just these visual flat
things. They don't attract people,"
he notes. "So then [landscape
architects] do their schtick of
the form, the shape, and the metaphor."
It
is hard to define, but we all know
a good place when we see it-a sidewalk
cafe near a subway stop, a spot
of downtown greenspace that beckons
office and construction workers
at lunchtime, the street that becomes
a farmers' market every Sunday.
According to PPS, a "place"
is created when sociability, multiple
activities, and use intersect with
comfort, image, and access. While
these are the "key attributes,"
various intangibles-charm, proximity,
diversity, and amusements-also exert
an important influence. It is not
all touchy-feely, though. PPS points
out that measurable factors like
traffic data, crime statistics,
and property values contribute to
place. So, too, do the number of
women, children, and elderly people
gathered in one spot. This mental
calculus we all perform, consciously
or not, every time we enter a space.
| How
to do this? Kent gives one example.
"Triangulation and layering
are key when you are trying
to make a place." Asked
to define those terms, Kent
offers, "There is something
that goes on if you take a playground,
a children's reading room |
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| 'There
is something that goes on if
you take a playground, a children's
reading room in a library, a
coffee shop, and a laundromat,
and put them all together near
a bus stop.' |
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in
a library, a coffee shop, and a laundromat,
and put them all together near a bus
stop. Then people make connections.
The amount of communication between
people who don't know each other,
and chance encounters between people
who do know each other, creates such
an amazing synergy. But nowhere in
America do we do that, and the one
profession that should be thinking
about it is off thinking about forms
and shapes and metaphors."
In
addition to placing the community
at the center of the process, PPS
calls on citizens and designers
not only to embrace the idea of
place but also to expand concepts
of stakeholders to include potential
users, people on the fringes of
the space, government agencies and,
especially, "zealous nuts."
"Where would Central Park be
without the Central Park Conservancy's
passionate Betsy Barlow Rogers?"
Kent asks.
PPS
notes that public areas often have
to be retrofitted to make functional
places from merely beautiful spaces.
The firm's principles encourage
mixed-use development and triangulation
on the tiniest scale- placing a
trash can, a telephone, and a bench
at the entrance to a park, for example.
"It's not an expensive proposition,"
Kent maintains. In fact pps regularly
advocates quick and dirty fixes-like
paint and petunias-encouraging signals
that something is afoot.
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"No
one pulls together these focal
points where human interaction
occurs," he complains,
"and that's what I think
community building is about."
Making reference to the project's
training in context-sensitive
design for the New Jersey Department
of Transportation, Kent |
| 'If
the landscape architecture profession
became place creators and community
builders, you could solve many
of this country's problems' |
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describes converting state traffic
engineers to placemakers. "We
have been training all these traffic
engineers to create places. They love
the idea. There is no resistance.
Heretofore, they have just been moving
cars faster through a given place.
But now, they have this mandate to
create places, and they want to know
what the community's vision for these
places is and how they can serve and
support that vision." He laughs,
"They are enjoying their job
all of a sudden. But to me, the ones
who should have been doing this all
along are the landscape professionals."
Reminded
that some landscape architects have
championed smart and sustainable
growth and a range of other people-
oriented policies for years, Kent
relents a little and comes up with
an interesting version of the 80:20
split. "I think probably 80
percent of the profession would
like to create meaningful places,
and 20 percent are defining where
the profession goes-and they are
the wrong people. Awards aren't
given to the sensitive majority,
and that's where they should go,"
he argues. Nor does he let the most
prestigious designers off the hook.
"The big firms are the worst
firms for building good places-you
can absolutely quote me on that."
Kent
has not given up on landscape architects,
however. "I think if you unleashed
the landscape architecture profession
and they became place creators and
community builders, you could solve
many of this country's problems,
including problems of isolation
of people in communities. You could
solve sprawl problems, because people
would want to stay in and maintain
neighborhoods close to these spaces.
So, I think the profession is on
the wrong road. We know that if
you started rewarding people who
create good places-places that were
judged by people in the community
to be successful-then a strong portion
of the profession would gravitate
in that direction very easily."
Special
places. Maximizing communication.
Creating a stage for a variety of
experiences. Minimizing sprawl.
These buzzwords leap from the pages
of snazzy firm brochures. Certainly,
they are concepts landscape architects
are familiar with and use constantly
in their communications with each
other and the outside world. Kent
seems to be asking if landscape
architects are putting these sentiments
into practice. Can landscape architects
walk the walk as well as they talk
the talk? Fred Kent will be watching.
Susan
Hines is the managing editor of
ASLA's LAND Online.
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