Project for Public Spaces » joshkent

Supporting Placemaking Leadership in Michigan

joshkent — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:44:52 +0000

Energy, creativity, and collaboration transform Savannah’s public spaces

joshkent — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:00:27 +0000

It was only a few months ago that Destination: Savannah Forward, a coalition of Savannah-based public and private institutions, brought PPS President Fred Kent to Savannah. Last February, Kent and over 300 Savannah citizens met to discuss how to transform the city’s car-oriented streets into pedestrian-friendly destinations, and how to create true gathering places in Savannah’s beautiful natural environment and historic squares.

Since then, Savannah’s citizens have taken bold action to begin making these plans reality. As Theodora Gongaware writes in Savannah Now , Savannians are working energetically to “make each neighborhood a destination by taking advantage of resources that were already in place. Our community accepted this challenge with style and vigor.”

Among the inspired changes taking place in Savannah are the premiere of the Blue Ocean Film Festival, the creation of a citywide Traffic Calming Task Force, and the first “meet and greet” for a group of citizens and local businesses in downtown Columbia Ward. That group plans to continue meeting in order to foster dialogue about using their community square creatively and starting a neighborhood watch program.

Public-private partnerships have been a key part of Savannah’s most creative projects. For example, the county government, the Historic Beach Neighborhood Association, and the Savannah Tree Foundation have teamed up to revitalize and replant a local park. Plans are also underway to move the historic Mother Matilda Beasley House to the park, upgrade existing ball fields, and build a pavilion to serve as a community gathering place.

What can you do now to make your neighborhood a better place?

joshkent — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:13:16 +0000

There are plenty of simple things everyday citizens can do to reenliven their local communities – techniques to engage with your neighbors, revitalize your street, and improve everyone’s quality of life.

Organize an art fair for the kids on your block

It’s easier than you’d think. The Neighbors Project has compiled a set of checklists of simple actions you can take to be more neighborly – from tasks as easy as saying hello to your neighbor, to more involved weekend or seasonal projects, like organizing a block party or community garden. PPS’s own Great Neighborhood Book is packed full of creative ideas for creating fun, safe, vibrant communities – inspired projects carried out by real people – that run the gamut from printing up neighborhood T-shirts, to (literally) tearing down backyard fences, to creating enjoyable public places in local cemeteries. Many of the projects in the Great Neighborhood Book are very low-cost, sustainable, and use only local resources and the brainpower of community members.

One example: the Meridian Hill community in Washington, DC, made efforts to improve the usability of its local park, which had a dangerous reputation. The community organized a simple, inexpensive park cleanup, filling over 400 bags with trash. Motivated by this success, the group went on to organize a series of arts events in the park. Within a few years, park crime had dropped by 95 percent, and park use quadrupled!

The Internet also holds lots of promise to help communities create real connections and share local knowledge. Check out Placeblogger’s network of local blogs, or EveryBlock’s news feed of information about your city. You can also share your best community placemaking ideas, stories, and questions by joining the Great Neighborhoods group at The Placemaking Movement, PPS’s own social network for placemakers.

It's not hard to get to know your neighbors

Do-it-yourself placemaking in your community makes good economic and environmental sense – but even more importantly, it helps you create a truly great place you’ll be proud to call home.

Improving Transit “By Any Means Necessary”

joshkent — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:41:10 +0000

Malcolm X once said that “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” And so we found ourselves in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn at the first annual Bedford-Stuyvesant Malcolm X celebration, as guests of the Malcolm X Merchants Association (MXMA). We were there to educate ourselves about the community’s experience using mass transit in their neighborhood, with the intention of improving the transit service in the community by equipping local stakeholders with tools to influence the transit planning process.

When people think of the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Bed-Stuy as it’s better known, transit may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But as with many other urban centers, transit was a key factor in its development, growth, and sustenance.

In 1888, the Fulton Street Elevated line, operated by the Kings County Elevated Railway (KCERy), began operation. It connected the Fulton Ferry with Bed-Stuy. The next large transit infrastructure project was the development of the A subway line, which connected Harlem with Bed-Stuy. The new subway line led to an exodus of African-Americans from overcrowded Harlem to Bed-Stuy. From that point on, the neighborhood has grown into one of the most vibrant in the Brooklyn metropolis.

Bed-Stuy is now served by the A and C subway lines at the Utica Avenue, Kingston-Throop Avenue, and Nostrand Avenue subway stations, the B46 and B25 bus lines, and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). An extensive list of services compared to many other American communities. But is that translating into quality service for the travelers to and from Bed-Stuy?

The statistics tell us that the Utica Ave. subway station, which is at the intersection of Fulton Ave. and Utica Ave., on the A and C lines, carried 4.46 million passengers in 2008, making it the 101st busiest station out of 422 in the City. And although we don’t have a count for how many bus passengers board the B46 at that intersection, we know that the B46 carried 17.3 million riders in 2008, giving it the second highest ridership out of all NYC’s bus lines. While these numbers are impressive, they don’t tell us the full story of transit service in Bed-Stuy. They don’t explain how and why people use transit, and what improvements could be made to accommodate even more users, and perhaps more importantly, to make the community a better place.

Before we get into the survey process and the results of the survey, I should describe the basis of this project. It is part of a Federal Transit Administration research grant intended to develop tools for public participation in transit-dependent communities. PPS has been working in two pilot study sites, one in LA’s Byzantine Latino Quarter and the other in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Local stakeholders, community activists and merchants have been meeting over the past few months to try out some of these tools. In Bed-Stuy, PPS has worked with the Malcolm X Merchant’s Association and Bridge Street Development Corporation (BSDC) to hold workshops and focus groups that will pilot our public participation tools and, simultaneously, create a community vision for Malcolm X Boulevard and Utica Avenue Plaza.

We went to the Malcolm X festival to gather the type of qualitative information that traffic reports often lack. We set up a table on Malcolm X Avenue, in between a vendor selling homemade earrings, and another vendor selling very random trinkets, with the hope that a few interested people would stop by. We had with us two tools to understand the community’s interpretation of their transit service — one was a short survey regarding the quality of pedestrian journeys, and the other was a large neighborhood aerial for a Destination and Route Mapping exercise. The survey had basic questions that we used to determine people’s destinations, preferred paths, and thoughts on how transit stops could be improved. The map was used to determine positive and negative areas in the community, as well as the paths people chose to get to or avoid those places and why.

Before we knew it, our table was swarmed with community members. The wealth of nuance that they gave us was tremendous. Many of the participants in our research had been living in the community their whole lives and their family histories go back several generations. That’s no small measure in a city as transient as New York City! They described their streets down to the most minor detail, as if they knew them like the back of their hands. “Don’t go down Stuyvesant between Bainbridge and Chauncy after dark because it’s not lit well enough,” one woman said. Another woman spoke of the well-kept landscaping on Decatur between Malcolm X and Patchen. “What about that wine bar opening up on Lewis?” “I don’t like those drug dealers on Fulton,” “There’s Solomon’s Porch on Stuyvesant!” People were blurting out things left and right. Within a few hours our map was filled with green and red dots, and we had 25 completed surveys in our back pocket.

Many community members are not involved in the transit planning process, and as a result, transit service is not catered to their needs. Instead, it is designed to meet the parochial benchmarks of transportation engineers – “level of service” and so on and so forth. But “level of service” isn’t always the best measure for level of service; it doesn’t consider the café down the block that people might want to walk by in the morning to get coffee, or the fact that a vacant block across the bus stop might attract seedy characters. Our pilot project is intended to understand the reality of a community’s transit needs, and equip them with tools to influence transit service to it adapts to that reality – a bottom-up approach, not a top-down approach that we’ve seen far too often.

During our research the community’s main concern regarding their transit experience was safety. Participants mentioned fear of crime in places where certain infrastructure such as lighting was missing. Nevertheless, there was a clear sense of neighborhood pride that people shared. The community spoke with confidence that the streets were theirs, and there was always a glimmer of confidence in their words that they were restoring their community from an era where it suffered greatly from crime, poverty, and political neglect. With the tools that we are helping to develop for Bed-Stuy, and eventually, other transit-dependent communities, we can play a role in empowering them to improve their journey from point A to point B. We want everyone dancing while they wait for the bus, like this gentleman waiting for the B25 in Utica Plaza.

Playborhoods: Bringing Communities Together through Play

joshkent — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:23:50 +0000

Children are Placemakers, too!

Mike Lanza has long been an advocate for safe and livable streets that allow children a safe place to play freely outdoors and meet other local children. He has coined the term “Playborhood” to describe the ideal neighborhood social situation for kids: “A place where children, ideally from more than one family, play outside on their own on a regular basis – i.e. at least a couple days a week.”

Lanza is in the process of turning his front yard into a type of “public outdoor family room” where neighborhood residents can gather to talk, get to know one another and play together.

With many local school-age children headed off to summer camp this summer, Lanza was concerned about both the lack of opportunity for younger children to play freely and safely outdoors, and their missing crucial opportunities to learn and observe play and social interaction among older kids. To remedy the problem, he’s starting an initiative called Camp Yale. However, it won’t be a structured camp with strident activities and regulations. The goal of Camp Yale is to guide children in free play amongst themselves until they are ready to play independently of adults — and then, teach the next generation of neighborhood children by example.

For more information, visit the Playborhood blog!

Playborhoods can also be a part of big cities. The Come Out and Play Festival, a weekend-long event that turns public spaces into giant play areas for children, will take place in NYC from June 12th-14th. The event combines new technology, like GPS, smartphones, texting and bluetooth, into classic childhood activities such as kickball, chalk drawing and treasure hunts. Referencing sense of place, the festival provides an opportunity for children and adults alike to come together around play while exploring thir city in new ways.

Cultivating a Tradition of Placemaking with the Garden Club of America

joshkent — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:22:14 +0000

On May 2nd Fred Kent gave the opening keynote to 700 leaders of Garden Clubs from every corner of the United States. The message resonated as a natural evolution for their powerful role in communities, leveraging their skills as practical implementers, social networkers and resourceful fundraisers. The local garden club is often the first partner mentioned at our workshops to help implement short term improvements. We will now look to Garden Clubs to play a leading role as conveners and facilitators of Placemaking in their communities.

To offer them a tool to support this potential role, PPS lead 200 of the conference attendees in an afternoon “Place Game” workshop to train them to use the tool to evaluate public spaces and kick start placemaking projects. We were aided in facilitating the large crowd by 20 local partners involved in our Kennedy Plaza effort that saw the workshop as a good opportunity to get fresh ideas from the Garden Club members.

Greater Kennedy Plaza Placemaking May 2, 2009 from Russell Preston on Vimeo.

The video was also posted on CNU New England’s Sustainable Urbanism Summit blog, where blogger Russell Preston says:

A critical piece of creating a sustainable urbanism is pleasing and vibrant Public Space. As we move towards a more resilient way of planning for our villages, towns and cities, as Fred Kent says, we can no longer afford to only create “open space”. Our land is too valuable to not be used, be programmed and be enjoyed.

Community Placemakers: Newell Nussbaumer and Buffalo Rising

joshkent — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:13:17 +0000

Portions of Buffalo's waterfront are being revived

Back in the summer of 2008, Rochester native Alan Oberst contributed an article to Buffalo Rising – a local news format blog — that analyzed both Hertel and Elmwood Avenues using PPS’ Ten Qualities of a Great Street.

The city, which has been struggling with population loss and economic downturn since the mid-1950s, is now home to a dedicated segment of the local population working to revitalize city streets and connect important downtown destinations. As it turned out, I was headed upstate the following week for a family wedding and the folks at Buffalo Rising quickly made time in their busy schedules to invite me to their offices and give me a tour of Buffalo’s waterfront.

The organization’s offices, located in the newly-designated cobblestone district (volunteers removed the bricks one by one to log and then replaced them!), were once used as an ice house to store winter ice from adjacent Lake Erie each winter. Down the street, a former truck terminal has been repurposed as a coffee shop, restaurant and bar. Across the cobblestone street, a massive (empty) parking lot fills a city block’s worth of space. Changes here have not been sweeping, but are happening in small, meaningful ways.

Buffalo Rising’s founder, Newell Nussbaumer, grew up downtown. In 1993, he returned from college and opened a shop on then-struggling Elmwood Avenue. The street is now one of the city’s prime location for local businesses, artisans and street festivals.

Nussbaumer started Buffalo Rising as a print publication in an effort to highlight all of the positive activity happening downtown. It was initially a reaction to the prominent Buffalo News coverage of downtown crime and suburban news. Buffalo Rising produces only stories about downtown Buffalo. If the topic being covered is negative, writers try to offer a positive solution for moving forward. Today, a volunteer staff works on covering local politics, urban planning and positive community action.

Nussbaumer had been a key player in ensuring sidewalk and curb redesign, starting a local children’s parade, community composting, and a local garden walk where residents open their gardens to the public. Recently, he’s been busy advocating for better bike parking to encourage cycling between downtown destinations. He has also been at the forefront of “Buffalo Homecoming,” an event designed to bring Buffalo expats back home once a year to remind them about their hometown’s sense of place.

To the west from the roof of the Buffalo Rising building, Nussbaumer points to a rail track filled with light rail trains not in use. Buffalo’s “subway” currently runs in a straight line down Main Street. While the rail is heavily used during home hockey games at the HSBC Arena, located at one end of the rail route, there are no transfers to other lines or accessibility to some of Buffalo’s neighborhoods that have recently seen revitalization. Main Street, closed to cars when the light rail started service, has become a virtual dead zone and the city is readying to retrofit the street and bring the cars back. Nussbaumer heavily advocates a rail extension, which would allow much improved access to Buffalo’s intriguing waterfront. This extension might be an easy place to start, as the tracks extend towards the waterfront currently for rail car storage.

Nearby, one is able to catch a glimpse of Buffalo’s inner harbor between the massive buildings that make up the local General Mills plant. Newell took me to a dead end street where a bridge had been taken out by a large ship some 25 years earlier.

Nussbaumer looks out over the disconnected river

General Mills, however, stood in the way of rebuilding it in the hopes of protecting their privacy and keeping pedestrians away. The area is now completely cut off from the outer harbor and it only accessible by traveling all the way around the area and across a busy highway. As our group was looking out over the missing bridge, a cyclist rode up to ask us how to reach the outer harbor. I assumed it was a friend of Newell’s making a joke, but the cyclist was a stranger, truly looking for a point of access.

A cyclists comes by, unable to access the outer harbor

Nearby, Newell showed me some signs of citizen action, mostly small but significant. Next to the General Mills plant, locals have built their own mini dock with access to the street, a wooden sign pointing towards Swannie House across the street. Local blue collar bar Swannie House has become a popular hangout for both factory folk and activists. Outside, if the wind is right, one gets a whiff of toasted cereal from the nearby plant. I can’t help but imagine how interesting it would be if the factory opened its doors to tourists, playing on the great cultural role many of their cereals play in the American narrative.

The outer harbor is the site of much current contention. The Skyway, an elevated highway that looms large and grey between the city and the waterfront, is still a working roadway despite frequent closures during cold, icy weather. Nussbaumer and Oberst enthusiastically offer creative ideas for the structure (“Paint it red!” “Install windmills!” “Hanging condos!” “Turn it into a high-line-style park!”), but the city has a long way to go before its ready to consider such unconventional solutions. The highway was recently named in a list of elevated roadways primed for transformation by the Congress for the New Urbanism, indicating its potential for significant evolution.

Along the lake, Route 5 is about to revert back to elevated highway status. Local advocacy group Buffalo-Niagara Riverkeeper has conducted several traffic studies and created an alternate plan that calls for the transformation of the road into a boulevard that connects the city at large to the waterfront. Buffalo Rising has been instrumental in circulating information on the project, as well as alternate designs.

More information:

PPS’s approach to waterfronts [pps.org]
Buffalo Rising
PPS’ Placemaker Profiles [pps.org]

Shovel Ready!

joshkent — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:15:45 +0000

Today, First Lady Michelle Obama will put a shovel in the ground of the White House lawn. Mrs. Obama, like many home gardeners, is celebrating this first day of Spring by getting her home garden ready for the season, and she promises that the garden will be maintained by the entire First Family, President Obama included. The 1,100-square-foot plot will soon supply the White House with fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s healthy, family meals, and the total cost to plant the garden will be just $200.

This isn’t the first First Family to use the nation’s lawn for a garden; President Adams and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt both tended to their own White House vegetable gardens, and President Wilson even used a flock of sheep to mow and fertilize the grass!

Perhaps Mrs. Obama always planned on planting a garden if she moved to the White House, but a great deal of thanks still goes out to those people and organizations that worked tirelessly to make this happen. Both The White House Organic Farm Project and Eat the View spent the past year advocating for a White House garden and gathering signatures from thousands of citizens who wanted to see “the people’s lawn” used for something healthy, active and social. This garden will not only supply the First Family with fennel, spinach and blueberries, it will be a symbol that our front lawns can be used for more than just landscaping. Now, let’s hope that President Obama reconsiders his position on beets!

Conference: Fred Kent to speak at De Lange Conference VII at Rice University

joshkent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:03:01 +0000

Fred Kent will be a featured speaker at the De Lange Conference VII – Transforming the Metropolis: Creating Sustainable and Human Cities. Topics to be addressed include:

Globalization and the Transforming Metropolis
Governing Cities of the Future
Engineering Solutions
Education and the Economy
Sustainable, Humane Architecture
Transportation and Movement
Smart Planning
Technology and the Transforming Metropolis
Climate Change Impacts on Cities
The Role of Faith Communities in Building Better Cities

Speaking Engagement: Fred Kent will lead a public forum in Savannah, GA entitled “Destination: Savannah Forward”

joshkent — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:42:08 +0000

The Metropolitan Planning Commission administered a short online survey for Chatham County residents in order to collect public feedback in preparation for the forum on creating and sustaining public places to build communities. The forum will take place at the Coastal Georgia Center.

Great Places Symposium Advances Placemaking Movement

joshkent — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:54:20 +0000

A few weeks ago, a group of dedicated placemakers gathered at a landmark event in Seattle, the Great Places Symposium, laying the groundwork for an even larger regional movement around the idea of place. PPS has been collaborating with the leaders of this new network, called the Great Places Forum, since its inception, and we are thrilled to highlight the Seattle region’s vibrant Placemaking network, which is working to unite like-minded people around the region around the importance of place.

The three-day conference brought together leaders from a variety of professions and fields to “celebrate and advocate for the necessity of placemaking in the vitality of our downtowns and suburbs, rural landscapes and villages.” Among the many positive results of the symposium was the drafting and signing of an unprecedented document called the Great Places Declaration. The forward-thinking spirit that this declaration embodies should be celebrated as a huge step forward for Placemaking networks everywhere, and we at PPS are delighted that the Seattle region is fully embracing the movement and the challenges that come with it.

A Landmark Symposium Sets the Stage for Greater Change

Billed as a working “think tank,” the Great Places Forum brought together the Seattle region’s Placemaking leaders July 19-21. Participants included a wide-ranging group of leaders from the fields of urban planning, municipal government, environmental studies, architecture, real estate development, international sustainability, and community organizing. Organizers billed the symposium as a way to “celebrate and advocate for the necessity of placemaking in the vitality of our downtowns and suburbs, rural landscapes and villages.”

PPS’s Fred Kent, Kathy Madden, and Ethan Kent attended the symposium, along with other leaders from organizations like the Trust for Public Land, the Cascade Land Conservancy, and the Urban Land Institute. Public sector leaders were also present, from Mayor Greg Nickels to Seattle City Planning Director John Rahaim, to City Councilor Richard Conlin to representatives of the Seattle Department of Transportation and many other municipalities. Earth Day founder Dennis Hayes, Great City’s Michael McGinn, also participated.

Two PPS board members, Ron Sher and Don Miles, have developed the Great Places Forum along with Karen True, its current director. Their work has created new opportunities for great public spaces to emerge and flourish in the greater Seattle region. PPS has been a part of this planning process, and we laud the Great Places Forum as huge step toward a more open, productive dialogue about place. If people and organizations with experience in Placemaking discuss and share their understanding of what makes great public spaces, their ideas gain the momentum necessary to reach more individuals, communities, and places worldwide.

The “Great Spaces Declaration”

The leaders who attended the Great Places Symposium closed the conference by signing a document called the Great Places Declaration, their shared statement of intent to foster a network of people and resources to support the creation of great places. The document voiced the basic principles and ideals that these leaders shared:

“We assert that Great Places act as a magnet, drawing people together to live, work and play in complete and sustainable communities, allowing us to preserve natural spaces and enhance the health of the planet.”

They also outlined a clear statement of intent for the future of the movement:

“We affirm these ideas and together pledge to create new policies, systems, and initiatives to shape Great Places for the enrichment of future generations.”

This is language that evokes responses, shared thinking that fosters innovation, and action that gains attention. The next step is to turn these bold declarations of intent and collaborative networks into real, tangible action. PPS is proud to see this kind of raw potential taking a tangible, constructive path among professionals in the Seattle region.

Moving forward

These far-reaching plans offer enormous potential and a significant hope for those of us committed to seeing the cause of Placemaking spread to as many active, engaged minds as possible. The Great Places Declaration and the Forum’s plans to continue spreading the word for the Placemaking movement exemplify one of PPS’s 11 Principles of Placemaking: You are never finished. We look forward to further this supporting this movement to take shape in the greater Seattle region and the around the world.

U.S. Cities Building More Parks and Public Spaces

joshkent — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:36:02 +0000

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.

People and Activity Bring Vitality to Communities

joshkent — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:20:47 +0000

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.

Nine Ways to Transform New York into a City of Great Places

joshkent — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 18:09:16 +0000

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.