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, Vancouver, BC
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.