PPS’s Andy Wiley-Schwartz and the Trust for Public Land’s Peter Harnik and Larry Kaplan will share expertise on how communities can take advantage of urban parks as tools for community revitalization and engagement in this webcast sponsored by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.
The webcast will be held Tuesday, August 16, from 2:00 – 3:00 pm EST. Follow the link below for details about how to participate.
The Villager takes a look at PPS’s recent effort in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
PPS sponsored a briefing on Capitol Hill on the importance of farmers markets to communities, how markets can address social needs and enhance regional food security, and how they can help revitalize downtowns.
In our travels throughout the world, PPS staff and supporters are always on the lookout for wonderful spots that deserve recognition as Great Public Spaces. This is our online collection of the world’s best parks, markets, streets, buildings, and districts, which honors over 300 places large and small in more than 30 states and 45 countries. It includes world-famous landmarks like Notre Dame Cathedral and New Orleans’ French Quarter along with a modest but wonderful park in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and a well-designed shopping street in Taichung County, Taiwan (see the full list below).
PPS staff and visitors to our website are constantly adding new places, using the criteria for what makes a place great that PPS has developed from our 30 years of experience. Intuition also plays a big role: Many times you simply know a great place when you see one–it’s where everyone wants to be. The same holds true for PPS’s Hall of Shame, our continually expanding roster of the most disappointing public spaces–the places where few people stay any longer than they must.
Largo Glênio Peres in Porto Alegre, Brazil is one of ten farflung new additions to Great Public Spaces.
This year’s inductees to Great Public Spaces include a street market in a working class neighborhood of Amsterdam, an immigrant shopping street in Chicago and public squares in provincial cities of Brazil and Mexico, as well as the highly expensive and much hyped renovation to New York’s Museum of Modern Art–proving once again that the best public places come in all shapes, sizes, and styles.
Cataloguing the world’s very greatest public spaces is an enormous and daunting undertaking, so we count on your help. A number of these new entries were nominated by users of the Great Public Places website. We hope this list inspires you to nominate your own favorites (it’s easy to do–see the adjacent sidebar for more about how you can nominate a place). And we hope even more that learning about fascinating places around the world will encourage you to create or improve public spaces in your own community.
Stanley Park is a great lesson in public space real estate: Its best assets are location, location, location. Within walking distance from downtown in a high-rise residential neighborhood with a population density similar to Manhattan, the park is easily accessible by foot, bike and car. Once there, you can take in some of the most spectacular natural settings of any public park in North America. Not only is Stanley Park famed for its magnificent trees–including giant fir and cedar, which are unusual for an urban park–it is also known for the variety of activities to take part in. From summer events like Theatre Under the Stars and the annual Chihuahua Walkathon, to a popular public beach with amenities like food kiosks, playgrounds, and an outdoor swimming pool, there’s so much to do it’s easy to see why Stanley Park is called “Vancouver’s playground.”
Submitted by: Andrea Winkler. Originally from the Canadian West Coast, Andrea is currently finishing her master’s in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. She has recently formed a cultural planning group based in Toronto.
Contact: Steve Davies, Senior Vice President, PPS, 212-620-5660, sdavies@pps.org
Richard McCarthy, Executive Director, CCFM, 504-861-5898, mccarthy@loyno.edu
New Orleans, LA – Project for Public Spaces (PPS) , an international organization based in New York, will contribute $100,000 towards rebuilding markets as a means of invigorating economic activity in the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana and Mississippi. The funding, committed as part of a $900,000 re-granting program for public markets recently awarded to PPS from the Ford Foundation, will go to the Crescent City Farmers Market (CCFM) and its governing group, marketumbrella.org. The Ford Foundation has also committed an additional $150,000 in funding from its Katrina relief efforts, for a total commitment of $250,000.
Hurricane Katrina has largely devastated all aspects of some 15 markets on the Gulf Coast: commercial fishers, farmers, family enterprises (farmers, fishers, bakers, and more), market staff, and many market sites. “These markets provided a link between farmers and consumers,” said Steve Davies, Senior Vice President and Director of the Public Markets Program at Project for Public
Spaces, “and many were also the site of social services for low-income communities through the United States Department of Agriculture Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program and electronic benefit program.”
The funds will be used to help resume operations of public markets in the region, in ways especially designed to meet post-Katrina needs, according to Richard McCarthy, executive director of marketumbrella.org and a founder of the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans.
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, CCFM had four open-air locations each week, serving over 3,000 shoppers and nearly 100 vendors. Shoppers came from all over the New Orleans metropolitan area, and vendors from three states – Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Annual sales of the Saturday market alone are $1.2 million; projected gross annual economic impact of the four markets was more than $11 million.
“We also provided mentoring to dozens of markets throughout the region, and had piloted the first electronic benefit transfer (food stamps) program for open-air markets in the Deep South,” McCarthy said. In the post-Katrina world, “the ability of people to get the goods and services they need for re-building is imperative,” Davies said. “The low start-up cost of a market provides the place for that transaction to happen, and enables the rapid construction of economic infrastructure lost to the disaster. Families and businesses not only have a place to purchase and sell goods they need to get back on their feet but communities will have a place to host critical services that have been displaced by the storm.”
Among marketumbrella.org’s plans, are:
Both Project for Public Spaces and marketumbrella.org are committed to the principle that our markets are points of rebirth in the face of devastation.
“The silver lining of this disaster can be that, with the right team of market partners, we can demonstrate the intrinsic value of markets to communities,” said Ford Foundation Program Officer Miguel Garcia.
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Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a non-profit organization founded in 1975 dedicated to creating and sustaining places that build community. We provide technical assistance, education, and research through programs in parks, plazas and central squares; buildings and civic architecture; transportation; and public markets. PPS has worked with communities in 48 states and in 20 countries around the world. With support from the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, PPS has initiated a $2.5 million regranting program to enhance public markets as focal points for community development.
The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.
Marketumbrella.org’s mission is to initiate and promote the ecology of local economies: markets, meeting place, mentor and model. A department of Loyola University New Orleans at its Twomey Center for Peace through Justice, it embodies the Jesuit institution’s core social justice values and its role as a center for innovation. Among its other roles, it sponsors the Crescent City Farmers Market, which celebrated its 10th birthday this fall.
There are no guarantees when it comes to public spaces. A treasured park or favorite street can succumb to unexpected assaults–the sudden appearance of a big development project that will forever deface the neighborhood, for instance, or the gradual nibbling by the auto that eventually adds up to a huge bite being taken out of the place.
Creating a great place does not end once the trees are planted or the paths paved.
The places profiled here are in varying stages of transition from greatness to something less. Yet, thankfully, all of these places show the potential to overcome the obstacles now before them and become truly great once again. Each of them also offers a cautionary tale reminding us that creating a great place does not end once the trees are planted or the pedestrian paths paved. It is a process that evolves over time and demands constant attention. As we at PPS are fond of saying, “You are never finished.”
Commonly referred to as Oaxaca’s zócalo, this plaza is the heart of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an exceptionally sociable place. That is to say, it was a sociable place until April of this year, when workers with jackhammers started tearing up sections of the zócalo in preparation for a wholly unnecessary renovation.
Most of the zócalo's old stonework is being replaced, and the local community is outraged.
Not all renovations are bad of course — a 1974 re-design closed the zócalo to traffic and greatly improved it — but the current changes are being implemented without any prior public consultation. The project was not presented to local residents until the day bulldozers arrived, and the process has remained frustratingly opaque ever since. The government has not been forthcoming with specific details of the renovation, though it is known that the park’s popular imported trees were slated to be replaced by native species. Massive protests have swayed officials not to replace the trees until they die or become diseased, but no one is sure what sort of place the zócalo will be after the renovation wraps up.
This heavily-used Midtown Manhattan park, located directly behind the New York Public Library, is now a favorite lunch spot for nearby office workers and rest stop for weary tourists. It’s hard to believe now that in the 1980s it was transformed from an open air drug market to one of the city’s most beloved gathering spots–a project in which PPS played a prominent role. Bryant Park’s very success, however, has brought with it a new kind of threat: encroachment from private interests. For two months each year–once in February and once in September–the park’s lush green lawn is not available to the public, as tents for the “Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week” swallow it up. At other times, the lawn has been taken over by the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and, as we wrote about last year, VIP political shindigs.
Tents pitched for Fashion Week keep visitors off the grass at Bryant Park.
Appropriation of this public space by private interests has come at considerable expense to everyday users, who find themselves shut off from what has been described as “the crown jewel of Manhattan.” The managers of a place as beloved as Bryant Park should take pains to keep it available to all of its constituents all of the time. Almost all other privately managed civic squares in the U.S. and Europe either do not allow private events or ensure that the impact of such events remains negligible. No excuse can justify the continued practice of fencing off Bryant Park for events where only ticket holders can get inside.
Located in the heart of Stockholm, Kungstradgarden has had many incarnations, from royal garden to army drill-ground to lush public park. In its current form the park serves as a cautionary tale for places like Oaxaca’s zócalo: It is a re-design gone awry. For years Kungstradgarden had an extremely open and flexible layout, and the park’s managers took full advantage of this asset. The park played host to countless events and seasonal activities, from big performances to friendly one-on-one games of chess and ping pong.
A 1998 re-design of Kungstradgarden introduced made some of its spaces more inflexible and rigid.
The garden was redesigned in 1998, and the resulting layout is much more rigid. Many of the small scale activities are no longer possible. Also scrapped in the redesign was an innovative demonstration playground featuring the latest designs for children’s play equipment. Though Kungstradgarden remains popular because of its prime location in the heart of Stockholm, it is a shell of the place it once was.
Times Square is still the center of Manhattan’s theater district, but it is no longer the vibrant, enthralling public place that many Americans picture when thinking about the heart of New York. The area has long had problems, but the nature of the threat has changed in recent years. Once equated with sleazy adult theaters and peep shows, the area experienced a rebirth in the 1990s. With the new crowds came a different kind of threat: a lack of space provided for pedestrians. In today’s Times Square, people are squeezed out into the street at every corner, often brushing dangerously close to traffic. You could say Times Square is a victim of its own success.
The curved outline represents potential pedestrian space that is currently part of the roadbed at Times Square.
With vast numbers of office workers and tourists walking around Times Square amidst rivers of auto traffic, more space needs to be dedicated to pedestrian use. A thoughtful redistribution of space, with an eye toward improved pedestrian conditions and better sidewalk amenities, could turn Times Square into the thrilling, quintessential Manhattan place that now exists mainly in people’s imaginations. Thankfully, the New York City Department of Transportation has allocated 15% more pedestrian space, and is working with the non-profit Times Square Alliance to study ways to add even more space. But until improvements are applied to the entirety of Times Square, it is bound to be a disappointment for tourists and an aggravating headache for New Yorkers.
All across the continent, from small town Main Streets to hip urban neighborhoods, independent businesses are struggling to stay afloat in the face of rampant chain store/big box expansion. While not all local businesses are great places and not all chains soulless purveyors of strip malls, on the whole a business owned by someone living in your community is likely to be a better neighbor. They tend to make use of existing storefronts rather than cookie-cutter buildings and parking lot configurations dreamed up in some faraway corporate headquarters and imposed on the neighborhood. They are also more likely to contribute to life in the place, helping buy uniforms for the local Little League or starting a Business Improvement District. The entrepreneurial impulse in Americans is strong and many folks dream of opening their own shop; it’s up to the rest of us to support them if we truly care about the life of our communities.
Over the past 30 years Project for Public Spaces has evaluated more than 1,000 public spaces, and informally investigated tens of thousands more. From all this we have discovered that most great places–whether a grand downtown plaza or humble neighborhood park–share four key qualities:
Paying attention to these qualities can help you evaluate the public spaces in your own community, and make the changes that can transform them into great places. Please let us know about the places, in your town or anywhere around the world, you think are great by filling out the nomination form on our Great Public Spaces website.
You can easily judge the accessibility of a place by noting its connections to the surroundings–including the visual links. A great public space is easy to get to, easy to enter, and easy to navigate your way through. It’s arranged in a way so you can see most of what is going on there, both from a distance and up close. The edges of a public space also play an important role in making it accessible; a row of shops along a street, for instance, is more interesting and generally safer to walk along than a blank wall or an empty lot. Accessible spaces are conveniently reached by foot and, ideally, public transit, and have a high parking turnover.
(Photo: Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland, OR)
A space that is comfortable and looks inviting is likely to be successful. A sense of comfort includes perceptions about safety, cleanliness, and the availability of places to sit. A lack of seating is the surprising downfall of many otherwise good places. People are drawn to places that give them a choice of places to sit, so they can at various times of day or year be either in or out of the sun. Women are good judges of comfort and image, because they tend to be more discriminating about the public spaces they use.
(Photo: Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, France)
A range of activities are the fundamental building blocks of a great place. Having something to do gives people a reason to come to a place–and return. When there is nothing interesting to do, a space will sit empty. That’s the best measure that something is wrong. A carefully chosen range of activities will help a place attract a variety of people at different times of the day. A playground will draw young kids during the day, while basketball courts draw older kids after school and band concerts bring in everyone during the evening.
(Photo: Kungstradgarden, Stockholm, Sweden)
This is the most important quality for a place to achieve?and the most difficult. When a place becomes a favorite spot for people to meet friends, greet their neighbors, and feel comfortable interacting with strangers, then you are well on your way to having a great place.
(Photo: Jackson Square, New Orleans, LA)
Great Public Spaces is PPS’ continually expanding roster of the very finest places around the world. Think of it as sort of a Hall of Fame–a source of ideas for places you’ll want to visit and inspiration for improvements you can make in your own community.
Great Public Spaces showcases the world’s best parks, markets, streets, buildings, and districts, including more than 300 places in 30 states and 45 countries. You’ll find wonders of the world like the Eiffel Tower, Grand Central Terminal and the Theatro Municipal Opera House in Rio de Janeiro. But you’ll also discover humble but delightful spots like downtown Lake Street in suburban Oak Park, Illinois, and the Mbare Market in Harare, Zimbabwe, where you can find anything from vegetables to plumbing fixtures.
PPS also singles out some of the world’s most disappointing, overrated or just plain inhospitable places in our Hall of Shame.
We invite everyone to submit their own ideas of favorite (or awful) spaces for our website. Take a look at the information on what makes a place great that PPS has devised from 30 years of exploring and evaluating public spaces. And then complete our easy-to-use online nomination form. Your submission will appear as a nominee on the website, then PPS staff will review the nomination and decide whether to add it as an official Great Public Space.
By Fred Kent
Since this edition of Making Places is dedicated to highlighting great public spaces, I think it’s appropriate to also single out places that are receiving so much undeserved praise. These are famous examples of contemporary architecture that have been proclaimed as masterpieces, yet fail miserably as public spaces. They are icons for architecture buffs to admire, not places for people to actually use. While often breathtaking as objects, they are overrated as places. It’s important that we call attention to the fact that these places aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, because they have received so much favorable attention as the prototypes of 21st Century design. That’s alarming in light of the fact that they represent a huge step backwards in how we should be designing our civic and commercial spaces. We must set our standards for public space as high as possible–and we should always speak up when a place fails to meet those standards.
Monumental blank walls create a dead zone around the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Let’s start with the Guggenheim Bilbao, an overrated place if ever there was one. Frank Gehry’s signature design has garnered more critical acclaim than any project in recent memory, yet it displays a shocking disregard for the accumulated knowledge and research about how people use public space. Visitors encounter blank walls and sterile plazas all around the periphery–a dead zone that leaves the potential of the riverfront site mostly unfulfilled. While there’s no denying the boost in tourism spurred by the museum’s now-famous form, the Guggenheim could have brought so much more than an influx of cash to Bilbao. It could have boosted public life and created a socially vibrant counterpart to the richly textured downtown core. Instead the museum is an island, removed from the city around it.
If people demand better, then some of the Overrated Places profiled here may one day achieve greatness through good management and thoughtful design refinements.
The “Bilbao Effect”, in which a city garners international attention for a showy architectural project, has become pervasive, with many mid-size cities splurging on high-profile architects in the hopes of attracting more tourists. For the millions they spend, cities get a stunning artistic objects but little in the way of long-term improvement to their public realm. In the U.S., the two prime examples of the Bilbao Effect – the Quadracci Pavilion of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the new Seattle Public Library – definitely qualify as Overrated Places. The plazas of the Quadracci Pavilion are incredibly sterile, surrounded by roads wide enough to be highways. And the Seattle Library, as we wrote in this newsletter last year, fails to engage people at sidewalk level, presenting incredibly dull facades to the downtown streets that surround it.
The front plazas of the Quadracci Pavilion are surrounded by roads designed for automobile capacities that match highway levels.
Already, the buzz for these overrated buildngs is fading, and many arbiters of urban trends predict that the Bilbao Effect will soon peter out… to be succeeded, they say, by the “Millennium Park Effect.” The Architectural Review called Chicago’s new Millennium Park “an ambitious fusion of art, architecture, and landscape,” but this new addition to downtown has simply expanded the current obsession with high design to include parks.
Millennium Park's monuments are isolated among lifeless areas with little to do, like this plaza space facing the Art Institute of Chicago.
While it is exciting to see parks recognized as essential to the well-being of people and cities, so far Millennium Park belongs in the pantheon of Overrated Places. Like a Hollywood blockbuster, the park is okay as quick entertainment but doesn’t provide a rich experience. Its attractions, including the enormous Cloud Gate sculpture and Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion, seem to have been plopped down with little regard to the space in between. There is spectacle to behold, but not the variety of experience necessary for a truly great public space.
We should never allow the narrow agenda of big projects to trump the broad need for places where people feel engaged, safe, and comfortable.
Then you have the places that garner undue praise not for eye-catching design, but for purported economic benefits. Philadelphia’s recently completed Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts was hailed as a cornerstone of urban revitalization. In fact, neighboring Broad Street was proceeding just fine without the boxy, insular Kimmel Center, which interrupts an engaging pedestrian environment with its prominent loading docks and vehicle access. The building was seemingly designed so that patrons can be easily shuttled to and fro without setting foot on neighborhood streets. That kind of thinking is typical of the misguided faith behind most big projects. It produces anti-urban albatrosses like the Kimmel Center, which weigh down potentially viable districts by squashing the small-scale economic exchange that is the lifeblood of city neighborhoods.
The Kimmel Center interrupts an otherwise engaging pedestrian experience.
We should never allow the narrow agenda of big projects to trump the broader need for places where people feel engaged, safe, and comfortable, nor should we settle for the flash of spectacle when we can have the substance of design that supports human use. If people demand better–if we make it clear that we do still care about the quality of public space–then some of the Overrated Places profiled here, such as Millennium Park, may one day achieve greatness through good management and thoughtful design refinements. The unglamorous truth is that it takes ongoing care and adjustments–not a single stroke of genius–to cultivate and maintain great public spaces.
