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U.S. Cities Building More Parks and Public Spaces

By joshkent on Jun 29, 2007 | Add Comment

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 [...]

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Winners of Jane Jacobs Medal Announced

By ksalay@pps.org on Jun 28, 2007 | Add Comment

After funding the research that helped Jane Jacobs produce her landmark book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” nearly 50 yeas ago, the Rockefeller Foundation has inaugurated the first Jane Jacobs Medals.

Barry Benepe, the 79-year-old founder of Greenmarket, will receive the first medal for “lifetime leadership.” Omar Freilla, the 33-year-old founder of [...]

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Competing Visions for NYC’s Governors Island

By ksalay@pps.org on Jun 20, 2007 | Add Comment

The five proposals for Governors Island hold clues to what’s right and wrong about how public space is designed.

“All five concepts are thoughtful approaches to a complex design problem. And the emphasis on public space is reassuring; responses to the agency’s earlier requests for proposals typically included more commercial development. But the five [...]

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Career Opportunities Available at Project for Public Spaces

By ksalay@pps.org on Jun 8, 2007 | Add Comment

Project for Public Spaces is seeking to fill three positions: Executive Assistant; Associate, Marketing and Development; and Associate, Website and Database Manager.

Click here for the full job descriptions and information on how to apply.

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What a Bike-Friendly City Looks Like

By ksalay@pps.org on Jun 7, 2007 | Add Comment

If bicyclists are given their own pathways, as pedestrians have with sidewalks, this healthy, efficient mode of transportation can take off as it has in Europe.

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Using Church Parking Lots As Catalyst For Downtown Redevelopment

By ksalay@pps.org on Jun 4, 2007 | Add Comment

A program in Savannah is encouraging downtown churches to redevelop their parking lots to include needed affordable housing and neighborhood services.

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People and Activity Bring Vitality to Communities

By joshkent on May 22, 2007 | Add Comment

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.

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Public Wants Space, Not Style, Architects Told

By ksalay@pps.org on Apr 23, 2007 | Add Comment

Policymakers are ignoring the wishes of local people and exaggerating the importance of “metropolitan” urban design in creating successful public spaces, according to a new report, the Social Value of Public Spaces.

“Most public spaces that people use are local spaces they visit regularly, often quite banal in design, or untidy in their activities [...]

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Can New Architecture Create Successful Places?

By ksalay@pps.org on Apr 19, 2007 | Add Comment

Kathy Madden, Senior Vice President of PPS, is participating in Planetizen’s Interchange blog series.  In her second entry, Kathy answers the question, does a building need to be old or look historic to create a sense of place?

Kathy compares the ground floor design and management of Country Club Plaza in Kansas City and [...]

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Robert Moses Reconsidered: Blight is in the Eye of the Beholder

By ksalay@pps.org on Apr 3, 2007 | Add Comment

PPS Board Member Roberta Brandes Gratz reminds us what was lost when Robert Moses deemed areas ‘slums’ and tore them down in this piece from City Limits.

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Interview with Fred Kent in Urban Land

By ksalay@pps.org on Mar 21, 2007 | Add Comment

This interview with Fred Kent appeared in the February 2007 issue of Urban Land:

“As an internationally known advocate for public spaces, Fred Kent, founder of the New York-based  Project for Public Spaces (PPS), sees cities – and the people who inhabit them – through the measured senses of an urban provocateur.”

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Former Baton Rouge Wal-Mart Will Become 11-acre Mixed-use Village

By ksalay@pps.org on Mar 13, 2007 | Add Comment

Commercial Properties, a for-profit unit of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, will redevelop a former Wal-Mart shopping center as pedestrian-friendly Acadian Village, offering 130,000 square feet of retail space topped by some 30 rental townhouses and including other smart-growth features, such as an open plaza, landscaped parking lot and public transportation pavilion.

”Given the residential [...]

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