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SHARED
WISDOM
Preaching
the Gospel of Place:
Fred
Kent of the Project for Public Spaces urges landscape
architects to create "people places."
At
58, Fred Kent has been in the business of placemaking
for more than 27 years. He and his nonprofit firm,
the 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 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.
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 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 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 im- portant-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, ignor-
ing 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.
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 "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 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 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 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.
"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 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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