Washington Post, March 18, 2001

Many fine books have focused on valued “places” – the parks, the squares and blocks, the buildings and graveyards and public markets that give special character to our neighborhoods, towns and cities.

Such works as Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Tony Hiss’ “The Experience of Place” and William H. Whyte’s “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” spring to mind.

But as inspiring as the theory of place may be, it’s a bit like the menu in a fine restaurant. You can admire, taste, enjoy – but you’re still a visitor. Eventually you have to go home and eat what you cook yourself.

Now comes a places recipe book, self-help for everyone who wants friendlier or more livable home turf. It’s called “How to Turn a Place Around” and it’s published by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS).

I first covered PPS and its founder-president, Fred Kent, in this column 23 years ago; the piece was titled “Planning for Public Spaces As If People Mattered.” A lot has happened since. Based in New York but operating nationally and occasionally abroad, PPS has since gone on to counsel more than 1,000 communities on how to create more people-friendly, successful spaces.

Kent had worked with William (Holly) Whyte’s Street Life Project, learning the art and science of watching how people actually use a place – how they move about, go to work, wait for buses, window shop, sun themselves. The next step was then to apply those insights to suggest how public places – from plazas to train stations to neighborhood markets – can be retrofitted and adapted to work for people and bring communities together.

Kent believes it wasn’t just suburbanization that wounded cities so grievously in the last half of the 20th century, but also urban renewal and a near-tyranny of professionals with a narrow diagnostic approach – single-minded planners, architects in search of prizes, traffic engineers preoccupied with throughputs, for example.

Too often lost in the mix: any idea of cherished public places, of fostering whole neighborhoods, of ownership, equity and belonging.

“We counsel on projects but we’re primarily advocates,” says Kent. “We want to change how things are done. It’s more than being a consultant – it’s a passion.”

PPS’ new places recipe book includes diagrams and tools to evaluate and suggest potential changes for any public space, from a neighborhood playground to a major tourist attraction.

Along with that comes a handy set of principles for reaching success. For example: “the community is the expert.” So don’t listen first to planning departments, designers or architects. Instead, ask ordinary citizens about their own public spaces. And remember the words people, when surveyed, use about their special and favored places: “safe,” “fun,” “charming.”

In Montpelier, Vt., for example, the Post Office Building, heavily visited, was a cold marble and reflective-glass structure set 20 feet back from the street. Local citizens called it “off-putting.” A PPS-organized community workshop envisioned instead a “front porch” environment out in front, including rocking chairs, a community bulletin board, a coffee cart, a dog hitch, new crosswalks and relocating an existing farmer’s market closer to the post office. End product: a place, not a design.

The point is that any town, without calling in outside consultants, can use PPS’ new book to develop similarly inventive strategies.

Just imagine what that can mean as anti-sprawl sentiment puts more and more pressure on existing cities and neighborhoods. The wrong way to go, says Fred Kent, is to start urging more residential density – that just raises fears.

Instead, he suggests, focus on transforming communities into more livable, usable places for people of all ages, based on assets the community already has, from a central square to a grove of great trees to a riverbed. Maybe taking a schoolyard and turning it into a community place. Tapping residents’ ideas, wishes, at each step.

“The byproduct of that will in fact be density – not offensive density, but community-driven density. When a neighborhood becomes a real place, people densify it naturally, because it’s so interesting,” says Kent.

Look around the United States and many places fit Kent’s model. Just the more famed examples include San Diego’s revived, now 24-hour-a-day Gaslamp Quarter; Chicago’s Lincoln Park, on transit lines, with restaurants, shops and hot rents; Denver’s Lower Downtown, now throbbing with activity; Charleston, S.C., where conventioneers slip out of meetings to ogle some of America’s most-desirable housing – at 23 units to the acre.

Kent’s point, though, is that successful places can be created, and we can have a grand time occupying them, anywhere on the continent.

And at any age. Just check out the 60-somethings kissing on a park bench, beside a fountain, on the cover of “How to Turn a Place Around.” The book costs $30, but you can see the picture free at www.pps.org

This article originally appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer on April 20, 2004.

A revitalized Fountain Square and Washington Park in Over-the-Rhine have the potential to pump new life into Cincinnati’s downtown core.

But local political and civic leaders must first determine what people want in order to create diverse, vibrant places with events and attractions year round, according to Fred Kent, president of New York-based Project for Public Spaces.

Kent spoke at an Over-the-Rhine Foundation luncheon attended by about 200 people. He Shared his observations on Cincinnati and dozens of other cities where his nonprofit group has helped develop plans for parks, squares, and other public spaces. Since forming in 1975, Kent’s group has offered advice on redevelopment of 1000 public and private spaces in a dozen nations.

Cincinnati’s public and private development interests are exploring design changes to Fountain Square and Washington Park. While no details have been made public, the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. expects to unveil preliminary renderings next month for its Fountain Square overhaul.

Kent said a key in turning around such locations as Bryant Park in New York or the Omaha waterfront is enlisting the help of city agencies and corporate leaders. Too often, municipal transportation and parks departments are narrowly focused on their jobs and fail to identify a mix of uses and attractions that help create and maintain a vibrant public space. Roads, shops, benches, and seating all must be inviting, he said.

Kent acknowledged that he hasn’t spent much time in Cincinnati, so his observations about the Queen City aren’t as detailed as other cities he’s studied. Nonetheless, he challenged the city’s civic and corporate leadership to make design improvements to Fountain Square and Washington Park.

Kent said it isn’t the sole responsibility of local government to make a place welcome and inviting. Private interests, too, must design office towers and campuses in a friendly setting.

He cited New York’s Rockefeller Center — one of his firm’s first projects — as an example of a corporate space that works well. His group recommended improvements such as a circular bench, paintings, and better signage to help revive the center’s retail offerings.

What doesn’t work in Cincinnati? “That Procter & Gamble fiasco” is a bad use of corporate space, Kent said, because it doesn’t have benches, seats, or other attractions for visitors.

“It’s the one (Cincinnati) public space that I put in our hall of shame,” Kent said of P&G’s Fifth Street offices.

The Planning Report, January 2004

For the past thirty years, Fred Kent and the Project for Public Spaces have been working with cities and public agencies to improve the form and function of town squares, markets, plazas and the like. The Planning Report is pleased to present this interview with Fred Kent, in which he discusses the work of PPS and the importance of place-making in city planning.

Why don’t we begin by you offering our readers a synopsis of the work which, over the last thirty years, you and the Project for Public Spaces have been engaged?

I started working with William Whyte over thirty years ago, and then studied with Margaret Mead at Columbia. Whyte and I set up the Project for Public Spaces to apply his work to areas outside of New York. Since then, we’ve worked on about 1200 different projects in communities all over the world. We develop and run programs in four different areas: markets and local economies; transportation, traffic and transit and how it builds livable communities; architecture, public buildings and how they can become a significant place within their communities; and finally, parks, plazas and the return of the central civic square. Today, we’re active abroad in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia.

We’ve recently started something we call “Great Public Spaces,” a listing of great public spaces from around the world, which were identified by us or nominated by the public. These places are much more about activities, uses, comfort and image, and sociability than they are about some design statement. In fact, you come to realize that these places have grown up over time and that the new designs are holding back the natural evolution of public spaces into something that can be more functional or usable. So, we’re making a big effort to go at the jugular vein of the design professions in thinking about how the idea of creating place has become almost incapable of happening because of the overemphasis on design.

This narrow emphasis on design has become part of the reason these spaces don’t develop naturally. The professions have gotten away from the natural community process, and have kept the communities from really actively evolving on their own into the kinds of places that reflect their values, their sense of community, and their cultures.

Can you elaborate on a few of the projects that exemplify the impact of Project for Public Spaces involvement?

In Southern California, we were working on Santa Monica and the Third Street Promenade. It was quite an important design in the beginning and, over time, it has been well visited. But now, Third Street is not reflective of the kind of people who are there and the kind of activity that the space was intended to host. The design of the central area has been taken over by a lot of druggies and kids, and it’s become a haven for undesirable activity. There’s a sort of heavy design where the entranceway is on both ends, and then the central place has become inflexible. Instead of being an entranceway feature and a central place, it has become controlled or limited by the way it’s designed. Santa Monica Place has clearly seen its day, and probably should be torn down and replaced with a central square-type of development with retail uses around it, which could lead you down toward the waterfront and the pier.

The other issue about Third Street and Santa Monica Place is that it is only one street. The challenge there is to integrate Second and Fourth Streets and the connecting alleyways so that the whole area becomes a larger downtown and a much more dynamic place. Restaurants that would be on the side streets could be much more part of the experience instead of being somewhat isolated. Adding connections to the Ocean would add a whole dimension if the park along Ocean Avenue along with the Avenue itself were improved.

That whole downtown grew up around that mall, but the area never expanded beyond that mall to become a much more important and dynamic destination. It has lost a lot of its original allure and it needs to come back in a much different form – a much larger, more diverse, dynamic experience than it currently offers.

Let’s turn your attention to the work you’ve been doing with single-purpose buildings. What’s the objective of this work?

We have developed a theory called “triangulation,” which holds that certain uses that seem like unlikely partners can, if put together, create a synergy that exceeds anyone’s imagination. The idea is, if you take a children’s reading room in a library, and put it next to a children’s playground in a park, and then you put a coffee shop, a Laundromat, and a bus stop, that would be a very vital place. It has never been done.

We were working in Danville, up near San Francisco, looking at a school. It was about 600 acres and there was a park of about 15 acres. We began to realize that if you thought of the school as a public space for the community, with the school was using it some of the time, and the community was using it the rest of the time, the students in the school would become stewards of the facility for the larger public use. The whole town was sort of shaken by this idea.

Our whole culture is about one-dimensional uses, one-dimensional ideas that don’t interrelate or don’t connect. As a result, we’ve become so isolated into the narrow, funnel-shaped types of settings rather than these integrated, exciting, dynamic, diverse, eclectic, chaotic, unbelievably interesting places to which people would be drawn.

In Los Angeles, school districts must build more than 200 new schools and 200,000 new seats in an already built-out metropolis. With voter support for facility bonds and through the work of New Schools-Better Neighborhoods, among others, collaborative efforts to leverage public resources to build community centered, mixed use schools are now being undertaken. But collaboration has been difficult. Are there lessons PPS has drawn from it’s efforts to triangulate that you could share?

It gets back to the disciplines and the professions. Most disciplines have become isolated, and in a sad way each has become its “own audience”. We’ve lost the kind of multi-dimensional purpose of each of the disciplines. In Danville some of the city council members and others began to realize that a new Library and Community Center, both beautiful buildings they had recently built were dysfunctional for the kinds of broader uses that the community would like to have. That was a real watershed for them, because they were nicely designed, and purely functional for the purpose that they had been designed for – but not functional for the larger community uses that normal people would want to take advantage of.

Can you describe community engagement processes that are compatible and supportive of this triangulation effort?

We have something we’ve developed called the “Place Performance Evaluation Game.” We’ll have about 200 people come to a meeting, and the area that we’re examining may be able to be broken down in to four or five sub-areas – it could be a neighborhood, it could be a park, it could be some public buildings around an intersection. We ask people to rate these sub-areas in terms of comfort and image, activities and uses, access and linkage, and sociability. Then they are asked what do they like best about it, what do they like least about it, what would they do in the short-term, and what would they do in the long-term. Then they discuss their conclusions with groups working on the other sub-areas. People begin to talk to each other about what could happen, and then all of a sudden there is a point at which they break out of their narrow thinking, and start thinking more holistically. People start to break out of this mold that we’d been subjected to for so many years and you can begin to see some amazing creativity come out. It’s harder for the professionals that run these various organizations – schools, libraries, etc.

We now offer what we call a “Great Cities Initiatives,” which consists, in part, of an exercise we call, “How to Turn a Place Around”, a City Commentary, demonstration projects, professional training/retraining, and as the community becomes engaged, we get them to actually do an audit and begin to see where the obstacles are. They are always the design professions, traffic professions, and narrowly focused people who run the schools, libraries and other public facilities. A person who is thinking naturally about where they live and what they do can also think very naturally about what they would like to do in these more narrowly defined places.

Fred, you and Project for Public Spaces have been writing a series of commentaries on great cities around the world. Elaborate.

We’ve done commentaries on Barcelona and London, and Paris. New York is not far behind. We look at both the new and the old places, as well as districts and larger transportation systems. We look at a place in terms of comfort and image, activities and uses, access and linkages, and sociability. We’ve found that there are some really scary things going on.

In Paris, the boulevard development that they did back in the 1800s, which was really for creating larger open-spaces and spaces for walking has now become just loaded with traffic. In the center medians they’ve actually put parking. Much of the boulevards in Paris are now just giant parking lots with very heavy traffic. The major intersections are all just giant traffic areas with no sense of place at all. So, what’s happened is that the smaller streets are the places where the tourists are going, and they’re beginning to drive out some of the locals who patronize the smaller spaces and streets. As a result, you’re beginning to see the replacement of some of the important neighborhood facilities with larger market-area driven stores. In addition, the new parks are ones that are designed more as objects or icons then they are about public use. Park development is much less usable and much more playing to the design professions. And then the waterfront along the Seine – you don’t think about walking along the Seine, you think about crossing it and getting to some destination somewhere off of the Seine. The whole city has become much more about getting on the metro and going to a destination rather than walking.

London and Barcelona are enamored with branded designers who have their own interests to protect. The new parks are unfit for human activity, and new building are stand alone icons drawing undesirable activity to their untended, unusable and isolated setting. If you just went and looked at contemporary design in any of these cities you would come away pretty discouraged about the future of cities. Put them all together and we think there is a crisis.

So, what then are the public space successes that deserve closer scrutiny?

The successes that are really interesting are the ones that have been allowed to grow up over time and take their own personality. For example, Luxembourg Gardens, which is without question one of the great parks of the world. When you look at it, you begin to realize that it’s not a very complex design. It’s basically a lot of open space with activities and uses, many of which are actually just small entrepreneurs doing a pony ride or a merry-go-round. There’s a playground that was developed by a small company, and it’s extremely popular because it’s so good. So there are all these little management entities that collectively add up to create an extraordinary place. It’s more about activities and use, and not as much about design.

We’re discovering management is the key to making these public spaces work. Design needs to take a back seat to management so that the natural human activity that evolves can really guide the management and the design of these facilities. Then, you’ll get successful parks.

Let’s close with this: If you were the mayor of a city in Southern California, what would your priorities be to make place making one of the hallmarks of your administration?

I would do a “Neighborhoods First” program. Ultimately, a city is going to be great because of its neighborhoods. I would propose to work with each neighborhood to discover what their assets are and how we can showcase and help each of those neighborhoods shape themselves around the public spaces and community facilities that are currently available. I would look at all public institutions – libraries, schools, city hall -in terms of what their broader possibilities are for integrating the different aspirations and assets. No facility can be one-dimensional any more. Each of them needs to be thought of much more broadly as community facilities and community institutions. The narrowness of each organization, each agency, each discipline, needs to be broadened to serve the larger community.

I would propose the city redefine how we design, place, locate, and manage our schools. I would seek to change the larger public institutions and see how they can be much more broadly defined as part of the community, rather than narrowly defined as many of them are.

A different city would emerge much more connected to the creativity of the citizens. Most cities are trying to copy other development trends instead of finding their own identity through their local assets – their citizens.

View source article.

This article originally appeared in the Kansas City Star on August 17, 2004.

In the rush to rebuild a dozen-block swath of downtown Kansas City with mega-projects, Fred Kent has some humble suggestions to make it a destination people would enjoy.

“We go to places where we can do things,” Kent told an audience at the new downtown library last week. “So we ought to start designing places where we can do things.”

The president of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces then took the group through a slide show of cities around the world. It didn’t focus on dramatic skylines or great buildings, but on the streets, plazas and parks where people gather to shop, play and observe one another.

What architects and planners need to remember when designing their grand projects, he said, are the ordinary people who will — or otherwise won’t — use them each day. That means giving them benches to sit, opportunities to explore new activities and an eclectic environment where serendipity can flourish.

“We’re kind of repressed,” Kent said. “We’re afraid to allow unpredictable spaces. We have designed out human activities from a lot of our buildings and public spaces.”

Kent was in town as the guest of the Kansas City Design Center, a civic organization established with the help of Jonathan Kemper, the president and chief executive of Commerce Bank. The center’s mission is to “raise expectations for the quality, character and vitality of Kansas City’s public realm.”

The gathering was in the fifth-floor auditorium of the library at 10th Street and Baltimore Avenue, a project that Kemper helped champion. The meeting room was a few steps from a rooftop terrace that provided views of downtown’s office towers, and the newly renovated apartment and condominium buildings across from the library.

That urban scene was appropriate for Kent’s message: “Building a Great Kansas City Through Place Making.”

So what makes a place great?

Kent’s checklist highlighted uses and activities, access, comfort and image, and sociability. One of his favorite examples of a place that worked well for people was the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, a gracious park where visitors can sail toy boats, go for pony rides, or just relax and watch one another.

A failure as a public gathering place, Kent said, is the new Guggenheim Museum, a masterpiece of architecture designed by Frank Gehry for Bilbao, Spain. Although the art museum has become an icon for Bilbao, the plaza around the structure is sterile and unwelcoming, Kent said.

“If you would start thinking about architecture as place, you would get a lot of work,” he said.

Kent both praised and lamented the Country Club Plaza, arguably Kansas City’s most recognized place. In terms of ambitious urban design, he put it in the same category as Rockefeller Center in New York. Both projects represented the high points of an era that vanished when automobiles and suburbanization began dominating American cities.

The Plaza’s charm, however, has eroded in recent years, Kent said.

“It’s lost its allure, because everything is a chain store,” he said. “How does it get back to the uniqueness of Kansas City?”

Kent has a mantra called the “Power of 10″ that he said was a surefire formula for success. First, a metropolitan region needs 10 or more major places or destinations. Then, the city itself needs 10 or more destinations. Finally, each place needs 10 or more things for people to do to create synergy.

“It’s amazing how it grabs hold of people,” he said. “Kansas City could transform itself very quickly if it grabs hold of its 10 things.”

Is there a Great Public Space in your town? If so, what lessons might it teach landscape architects?

Identifying Great Public Spaces is an idea put forth by the New York City-based Project for Public Spaces (PPS), which features a gallery of such places on its web site, www.pps.org. Anyone can nominate a place for the gallery. Currently, the gallery includes everything from high-profile places like New York City’s Bryant Park to humble neighborhood parks and farmers markets.

Also on the PPS web site is a Hall of Shame: failed parks and plazas where few people go – or if they do, they don’t stay long. Included in the Hall of Shame are built landscapes by some well-known designers.

Through the years I’ve been to places from both lists. While at the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture meeting last fall, I visited a nominee for the “great” category: Marion Square in Charleston, South Carolina. Formerly a nineteenth-century military parade ground, Marion Square is a 10-acre town green framed by streets and buildings near the heart of downtown Charleston. Its concept is extremely simple: a lawn crisscrossed by two soft-surfaced paths and framed by shade trees with plenty of seating. A statue of the revolutionary war hero Francis Marion overlooks it.

I happened to live in Charleston in the late 1970s, when Marion Square had started to look seedy. Recently, a renovation led by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates has tidied up the park, but aside from a new fountain at one corner of the square, it’s hard for me to tell exactly what the landscape architects did – and in this case, that’s good. Why reinvent a plan that has basically worked for a very long time?

Marion Square appears to be very well used by a diverse population. Most visibly, coeds from the nearby College of Charleston regularly use the green for sunbathing. How many parks in the middle of cities attract girls in bikinis? Yet according to PPS, making women feel safe and comfortable is an important criterion of a successful public place. Marion Square also hosts outdoor attractions such as the annual Piccolo Spoleto Festival, the city’s Christmas tree, and the popular weekly farmers market. Marion Square is flexible enough to host large events without feeling crowded, and it can accommodate casual use without feeling deserted.

What makes for a Great Public Space? The PPS web site lists complex factors such as access from surrounding neighborhoods, user comfort, and programmed activities. Notably missing from the list, however, are any references to “cutting-edge design,” “high style,” “minimalism,” or “the avant-garde.” And yet I often sense that these visual criteria are the elements that landscape architects focus on most – or, at least, they are the elements that cause design juries, time after time, to give out awards for built work.

Does this profession, then, value iconic designs over people places? It would be nice, I know, if the two always went hand in hand; in reality, too often they are at cross-purposes. Martha Schwartz’s Federal Courthouse plaza in Minneapolis is a case in point. It won an award from a jury of Schwartz’s peers (see Landscape Architecture, November 1999), but I doubt if anyone would call it even modestly successful as a place for people, much less a Great Public Space. An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (reprinted as this month’s Critic at Large) refers to the plaza as “Dumb and Dumber” — a sentiment that, I suspect, is shared by many residents of the Twin Cities. Was Schwartz’s focus on creating a piece of art antithetical to creating a welcoming public plaza?

And is it a problem for this profession, reader, that low-key but successful places are often passed over for kudos while high-image, people-unfriendly projects garner all the professional laurels?

J. William Thompson
Editor

This article originally appeared in The Grand Rapids Press on June 04, 2004

Extreme rock climbing. Outdoor theater. A water park. A farmers market.

All were ideas suggested by a group that gathered at John Ball Zoo on Thursday to brainstorm about attractions that could replace the zoo if voters this summer approve building a new one in Grand Rapids Township.

The group — consisting of residents, business owners and Grand Rapids and Kent County leaders — met with a New York-based consultant brought in to help develop a plan for the 17-acre county-owned zoo.

“I don’t think you can know right now what the end result is,” said Fred Kent, president of Project for Public Spaces. “But if you wait until the zoo moves out, you’re making a big mistake.”

The anything-goes three-hour session involved 30 people who toured the West Side zoo to come up with ideas.

“We want to take off all our blinders, there are no bad ideas,” Kent told participants.

The group brainstormed on how to build an attraction around the aquarium, which county leaders have said would stay if the zoo were moved. Ideas suggested Thursday included bringing in restaurants, a micro-brewery, a fish market, skate park, and cross country skiing and hiking.

The aquarium plan would confine any new development to the zoo site, and not into the surrounding park — the main concern of neighborhood residents who fought plans to do so.

The proposed $200 million new zoo would sit on what now is a golf course off East Beltline Avenue NE between Leonard and Bradford streets in Grand Rapids Township. The property was purchased by retail magnate Fred Meijer, who has offered to donate the 165-acre site and a $25 million matching grant. The project would feature 85 acres of exhibits.

In August, Kent County residents will be asked to approve a tax increase to pay for the new zoo.

That tax would not exceed 0.55-mill over 25 years, meaning homeowners would pay $27.50 a year per $100,000 of their property’s market value.

Kent said his company will use the suggestions to develop a conceptual plan and make recommendations on what county and city leaders could do in the short- and long-term if the zoo moves.

Some who participated wondered if any of the ideas would be enough to replace the loss of John Ball Zoo.

“I think the zoo leaving is going to be trouble for this part of town,” said Jim Francis, co-owner of Dillenbeck’s Coffeehouse on West Fulton Street, near the zoo.

Kent said he believes that whatever replaces the zoo can be designed to be a regional attraction.

Project for Public Spaces is a New York-based nonprofit organization that assists communities in revitalizing public areas including parks, plazas, civic squares, buildings, transportation and public markets.

The company has worked with the city of Detroit to turn a concrete island into a park, and it has helped the city of Holland with its farmers’ market.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on Friday, March 5, 2004
In the Washington development game, there is no hotter idea these days than transit-oriented development — so hot, in fact, that when the Greater Washington Board of Trade held a conference on the subject last week, 300 architects, planners, environmentalists and politicians showed up to show their support.

And why not? With traffic congestion a major problem and $9 billion already invested in a world-class Metro system, surely everyone can agree that the next wave of growth should be concentrated in high-density projects around Metro stops.

As is often the case, however, there is good transit-oriented development and there is bad.

To understand bad, take the Red Line out to the Rockville station. Cross the rather unfriendly pedestrian bridge from the station and you find offices, apartments and a cluster of county government buildings, with retail storefronts at ground level. And yet this ’80s version of the mega mixed-use project has been a disaster — cold, impersonal, soulless, characterless, often deserted in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. An enclosed mall that was part of the original project was so unsuccessful it’s been torn down, with hopes now pinned on a new “town center” going up in its place.

What was missing in Rockville, as with many transit-oriented projects until now, was any sense of place or community. Imagine an attractive plaza where people might sit on benches to read the paper or admire the plantings. There might be a bandstand for summertime concerts, or a regular farmers market on weekends. Maybe there’d be a bocce court where old men could while away the afternoon. Opening onto the plaza might be a news stand, a day-care center, a coffee shop or an Italian restaurant with outdoor seating.

These aren’t my ideas. They come from Fred Kent, a New York-based land-use planner and consultant who really stole the show at the Board of Trade conference. Kent’s point was that the reason so many transit-oriented developments fail is that place-making is invariably let out of the process.

One reason, he notes, is that most successful urban “places” evolve over time, in the kind of messy, organic way that isn’t allowed for when you have a single developer coming in with a 100-acre proposal and the expectation of finishing it off in five years.

Another is that place-making isn’t really a top priority for anyone in the process — not the developer, who would rather use every square foot for rentable space; not the developer’s leasing agent, who prefers to rent all the stores out to national chains; not Metro officials, who tend to be more worried about preserving parking spaces than creating neighborhoods; and not local officials, whose primary aim is to maximize tax revenue and minimize political fallout from angry neighbors who want no development at all.

Planning officials around the region now acknowledge that their early efforts at transit-oriented development have fallen short, and what they wound up with is all the density of an urban environment without any of the urban character. In the next round, at stops like White Flint, College Park and Vienna, they vow to do it better.

Out in Vienna, for example, pressure from Fairfax County planners, neighbors and smart-growth advocates has persuaded Pulte Homes and Clark Realty to dramatically revise their billion-dollar proposal for high-rise offices and houses. Rather than an inward-looking project that ignores both the Metro station and the surrounding neighborhoods, the new plan is oriented around a two-block-long promenade leading to the Metro stop, with shops, an outdoor ice rink and other town-center amenities. “Pocket parks” have been sprinkled through the development, and pedestrian walkways will provide easy connections for residents of surrounding developments.

If there is a lesson here, it is that development can’t be left just to the developers. Markets on their own do not create vibrant urban places in suburban locations. That requires the active involvement of public officials willing to be patient and tough.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

From:Governing‘s April 2005 Issue

Fred Kent has spent three decades developing a common-sense approach to streets, buildings and human sociability.

By ROB GURWITT

In a city accustomed to money, glitz and bold statements, the new Time Warner Center strives to impress. Fronting on Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan, the immense development houses not only the headquarters and broadcast facilities of the conglomerate for which it is named, but dozens of stores, almost 200 condominiums, seven restaurants catering to people who spend hundreds of dollars on a meal, and a high-end supermarket. It has 73 elevators and six separate postal addresses.

Not surprisingly, le tout New York swooned when it opened last year. “It’s a real asset to the city,” declared the well-known architect and building maven Robert A.M. Stern. “Aesthetic reservations pale into insignificance,” gushed the New York Sun’s architecture critic, “before the immense urban success of the structure as a whole.”

Oh please, grumbles Fred Kent. “This is a dead building. This is a bunch of advertising panels behind glass … There’s no life here, no public gathering spaces, no cafes, no street activity.” The “street life” engendered by the Time Warner building, Kent points out, is actually inside and down an escalator — at the Whole Foods Market, where there’s a crowd of people shopping and gabbing. “The building’s designers hate it when you say this, but all this is, is a shopping mall.”

Kent is not an architect, but he does pay close attention to buildings — and above all, to the way they affect the street. As the president of the Project for Public Spaces, which is based in Manhattan’s West Village, he has for the past 30 years been a buoyant and unremitting advocate for creating outdoor spaces in which people like to linger. “It’s just basic human common sense,” he says. “We need places that people feel comfortable in and connect to, that they can be affectionate in, smile, laugh, engage, tell stories. It’s about bliss, really.” The Time Warner Center may be about a lot of things, but bliss is not among them.

It is unlikely that Fred Kent’s poor estimation of their work is causing any of those responsible for the Time Warner building to toss and turn at night. Elsewhere, on the other hand, Kent’s opinions carry great sway these days with a surprising number of people who shape the places where we spend our time. The transit agency in San Mateo County, California — SamTrans — has engaged Kent to help it figure out how to remake El Camino Real, the soulless paved spine running through the communities of the Bay Area’s Peninsula. In New Jersey, the state department of transportation has so embraced Kent’s beliefs about public space that it offers the unheard-of spectacle of a cadre of traffic engineers bent on transforming the way the state thinks about its roads. In Seattle, Corpus Christi and Philadelphia, a plethora of organizations ranging from the federal General Services Administration to municipal agencies to neighborhood groups to civic institutions are working with Kent to create or retrofit the spaces for which they are responsible so that people will want to spend time there.

They have come to Kent in part because he and his compatriots at PPS — especially his partner, Kathy Madden, and his longtime colleague, Steve Davies — have a track record of making some of the most appealing urban spots in the nation. They did the redesign of Manhattan’s hugely popular Bryant Park, which sits next to the New York Public Library and which, before they got hold of it, had become a no-man’s-land of drug dealers and muggers. They helped make the area around Rockefeller Center’s skating rink the people-watching Mecca it has become.

More recently, they helped create the template for Campus Martius, the astoundingly successful new park that opened last November in the heart of downtown Detroit. “A lot of suburbanites will take pride in telling you exactly how long it’s been since they crossed into Detroit,” says Neal Rubin, a columnist for the Detroit News. “Campus Martius, even in the dead of winter, has become a magnet. It’s a gathering place and a rallying point in a city that’s been low on both.”

Over the years, Kent and Madden have amassed a large, diverse collection of the little details that add up to public spaces people are drawn to or repelled by. They have spent years in minute study of how people use space — time-lapse films of parking spaces and traffic patterns; sketches of how people gather and move around a park; measurements of benches and stairs and why people choose to use some and pass others by; close observation of waste receptacles and public rest rooms and storefronts.

When civic groups and public officials hire PPS, they are in part hiring this storehouse of experience. But they are also drawn to it because of Kent himself, and in particular his ardor in insisting that the seemingly abstruse arts of architecture, engineering, design and planning pay close attention to the untutored citizen and the ways people actually use the spaces around them. “I think Fred is the Mozart of place,” says David Burwell, the founder of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and the Surface Transportation Policy Project, and now a senior staff member at PPS. “When he goes into a space, he hears it — it speaks to him in a way it does for very few other people.”

CONVERGING IDEAS

This is an interesting moment for someone with that sensibility. Over the past few years, a set of tendencies in American urban policy have been converging around the ideas that Kent, Madden and their colleagues have been pushing since the 1970s. The rebellion against sprawl and over-reliance on the automobile; the New Urbanist critique of suburbs and the suburbanization of cities; the debate sparked by Carnegie Mellon economist Richard Florida over the qualities that make cities attractive; the growing tendency within the environmental movement to see urban density as a key to preserving undeveloped spaces; the blunt calculation by public officials that if they can’t make their downtowns and neighborhoods appealing, they can’t compete for residents or businesses — all of these hinge on the deceptively simple challenge of creating places, especially within cities, that people intuitively like.

So this is a time flush with promise for Kent and PPS. Yet it is also filled with reminders, such as the Time Warner Center, that decades of design habits are so ingrained in American communities that making a place “human,” as Kent puts it, is often not even on the agenda. “Everyone recognizes it when something really good happens, like Bryant Park or Campus Martius,” says Kathy Madden, “so why aren’t we getting more places like that? Why can’t we build places we like to go?” The answer, says Kent, is that American communities — and in particular the professionals they turn to for design — have not only forgotten how to do it, they’ve forgotten they even care about it. His job, as he sees it, is to remind them that they do.

Kent, 62, is tall and disarmingly bear-like. Walking through the streets of Manhattan, he manages somehow to shamble and stride briskly at the same time. One moment he is unhurriedly drawing attention to street minutiae — how a mix of shops and restaurants energizes one block, how a hotel’s black-gray facade deadens another — and then all of a sudden he’s moving along so fast it’s hard to keep up.

He’s a bit like that in a public meeting, too, lingering over a slide of people relaxing in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens, then shifting so forcefully to unfamiliar ground that his listeners have to scurry to stay in his wake. “He understands how traditional thinking has created more problems than it has solved,” says Mark Simon, special assistant to the CEO of SamTrans in northern California. “So his first task is to attack the traditional thinking. He’ll tell you that this ballpark you’ve got is designed all wrong; then he’ll tell you shouldn’t have built it in the first place, you should have built a playground. Or he’ll tell you that the places where a road is six lanes, it’s got to be four lanes. And your first thought is, ’I don’t want to be the one to tell the driving public we’re reducing it by a lane in each direction.’ But if you hang around after your first ’No, no, no!’ you get to that place. He’s very good at getting you to think anew about fundamental things.”

This is in no small part because Kent himself is steeped in those things. After knocking around in graduate school at Columbia in the 1960s, starting a street academy for high-school dropouts and organizing New York City’s first Earth Day in 1970, he went to work for William H. Whyte, the urban sociologist who pioneered the close study of city spaces. Whyte put his findings about why some spaces draw people while others remain lifeless into a classic book, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” which was part manifesto, part social science treatise and part self-help manual for cities.

Kent jumped feet-first into Whyte’s world. “He didn’t teach so much as set things up for you to discover,” Kent recalls. “So he gave me a camera and said, ’Go look at Lexington Avenue between 57th and 59th streets.’ ” Kent spent days there, hanging around with a detective to watch how pickpockets worked; counting pedestrians; passing an entire day watching a wastebasket, figuring out how its shape made it easy for passers-by to miss as they tried to toss litter in, and noting how people used it as street furniture. Some 35,000 people a day would pass one particular storefront located next to a bank, so Kent went in to talk to the shopkeeper. “I said, ’You must like your location,’ ” he remembers. “And he said, ’No. People walk faster by a bank, and it takes them two or three storefronts to get back to a window-shopping pace.’ ”

POSITIVE CLUTTER

If there was a single lesson Kent took away from the experience, other than that he loved being on a busy street, it was that people intuitively understand the spaces they use, and that how they feel informs what they do. At a level that just nudges perception, they don’t like the blank institutional face of a bank, so they speed up as they walk by. And in doing so, they may fail to notice the displays in the shop next door.

Kent, Madden and their colleagues have spent the years since they formed the Project for Public Spaces in 1975 elaborating on this basic notion. They have plenty of suggestions for creating the sort of clutter on a street that people like, for the way buildings ought to behave — don’t create blank walls, don’t confront pedestrians with the heating and air conditioning infrastructure, don’t lard a block with curb cuts — and for layering attractions that gather people in. “If you have a children’s reading room inside and a playground outside,” says Kent, “then you put a coffee shop, a Laundromat and a bus stop right there, you will create the busiest spot in your community.”

Kent rarely ventures outside without a camera hanging around his neck, and he figures he now has about 750,000 photographs of people using public spaces. Some of them adorn the walls of the PPS office, large framed color photographs of a child holding hands with a bronze statue; a couple kissing on a street; a knot of older men jovially hanging out in front of a barbershop; people on park benches watching passersby.

What they have in common is that the people in them seem relaxed and happy — “You don’t see affection in bad places,” Kent says; “it’s an amazing indicator of the quality of a place.” All this is in marked contrast, say, to the picture he likes to show of a group of frustrated elderly women standing on the yellow line in the middle of an intimidatingly huge street in Sydney, Australia, peering at oncoming traffic as they wait to get across. “That’s an 800-foot block,” Kent remarks, “and of course the traffic engineers weren’t thinking that people might like to cross in the middle of it.” If you know how to pay attention, in other words, people will tell you by their behavior what they like, what they don’t like and what they want.

”Jumble and chaos on the street are great,” he insists, “and we’re not allowed to have it. We’ve narrowed the experiences people can have. It’s an atrocity, and the design professions don’t even know they do it.” Even worse, he argues, the people who hire the design professionals often seem powerless to stop them. “I think there are a lot of mayors who are real humanists,” Kent says, “but they come up against the disciplines that control a city.”

Not surprisingly, sentiments like this have gotten a cool reception among architects and landscape architects, but there is one surprising group of people that is starting to change, thanks in part to PPS’s work. For years, Kent reserved his greatest scorn for traffic engineers. “Whatever a traffic engineer tells you to do,” he liked to say, “do the opposite and you’ll improve your community.”

That was until he and PPS began to work with the New Jersey Department of Transportation, and in particular with its director of project development, Gary Toth. As was true in a number of states, NJDOT began in the 1980s and ’90s to encounter furious community opposition to its road-building plans. Toth, along with a few of his colleagues, began to realize, as he himself puts it, “that maybe what we were trained to do — that is, jam cars down people’s throats — wasn’t going to fly.” He began casting about for new ways of thinking about road-building, and in the late 1990s his search led him to PPS and Kent.

PLACE GAMES

By the time Toth hooked up with them, PPS had developed what it calls “the place game,” in which it sends a group of people interested in a particular spot — from shopkeepers to residents to city officials — out to study it. That’s what Kent and his colleagues did with Toth’s highway engineers. They trooped them out to a major street in New Brunswick, a street that had been widened over the years to the point where it moved traffic well, but was a nightmare for anyone who wasn’t in a car. Then they asked the engineers to put themselves in other people’s shoes: Imagine being the parent of a child who has to cross the road to get to school; or a shopkeeper trying to make a living from passersby; or a resident for whom the street was essentially a front yard. “I had some trepidation about how the engineers would react,” Toth says, drily.

What happened stunned him. The engineers bubbled over with changes they wanted to see: The road needed narrowing, some new crosswalks, slower traffic. “They started looking at it as a place,” he says, “and understanding that a street has more than one use: It’s not just to get cars through, but people live there.” It was the beginning of a cultural change. “What struck me,” Toth says, “was how there were a lot of people in this organization who were behaving a certain way not because it was how they should behave, but because they believed that was expected. When we showed the engineers a different way of looking at it — ’Hey, we should be thinking about pedestrians and the life of these neighborhoods’ — most of them instantly got it. Yet they’d never tried to push for that in 30 years, because the organization didn’t expect it.”

PPS is about to start working with regional planning agencies and highway engineers in New Hampshire, where the state’s commissioner of transportation, Carol Murray, has come to the same conclusions as Toth about how roads can enhance livability and community development. It is heavily involved with San Mateo County because Mike Scanlon, SamTrans’ general manager, got tired of what the El Camino Real highway strip has become. “We’re sitting in the center of what I believe is one of the most beautiful places on earth,” explains Scanlon, “and we’ve got this butt-ugly road that goes right through it, with hodgepodge development and sleazy types of things — it’s a major disconnect, an elephant in the room.”

Even when the design profession can be made to see a need for places that build community life, citizens can be slow to catch on. In Bergen County, New Jersey, for instance, the state DOT has enlisted PPS’s help in convincing communities that sit along a gridlocked stretch of road called Route 17 that improving land use in the corridor lining the road is a better approach than widening it. So far, the towns are not buying the idea. “The state is making me laugh,” says Bergen County Planning Director Farouk Ahmad. “Because you know and I know and they know that you are not going to put aBand-Aid on it by dealing only with land use. Widening Route 17 has to be their number one alternative.” To which Kent responds, “We’ve become a nation of traffic engineers.”

Yet one of the strengths of PPS’s approach is that once it can enlist a broad range of people in picturing what they’d like to see, there is a chance to build a constituency that — sometimes with great effort — can withstand pressure to go the more traditional route. In Detroit, for instance, Kent and his colleagues took a core group of citizens through months of conversations about what the two-acre parcel of land that would become Campus Martius park ought to look like.

”We looked at thousands of slides,” says Bob Gregory, who runs the organization that was charged with developing the park, “and talked about here’s what’s pretty, here’s what functions well, we do want this, we don’t like that. And ultimately we created a vision.” They decided the park needed to be beautiful, green, actively used, hold water that people could touch, provide something for people to do every day throughout the year, contain spaces flexible enough to allow entertainment or just quiet sitting — a long list of qualities.

So when everyone from the mayor at the time, Dennis Archer, to major corporate funders of the project started weighing in, Gregory and his group held firm. They resisted the elegant, upscale restaurant that Archer wanted — “fine for Central Park,” says Gregory, “but it would have taken up too much square footage” — and the huge pillars, laser lights, and other spectacular ideas that Detroit’s corporate community thought would put an iconic stamp on the park. Instead, they wound up with a casual cafe, a skating rink that has proven an irresistible draw even on the coldest winter days, a fountain that Gregory is certain will be equally popular in the spring, summer and fall, a large lawn, and stages that can become walkways when not in use.

After three decades of trying to improve the built environment bit by bit, Fred Kent is ready to barge off in a more political direction. “At 62, I figure I have five years to change the world,” he says. “After that, I’ll go into a different mode, maybe comment on buildings or aggressively attack some designer. But I won’t give up an inch.”

To enhance your success in creating a vibrant, economically healthy downtown this year, make downtown stakeholders an integral part of your promotion and event planning process, suggests Kathleen Madden, vice president of Project for Public Spaces (PPS).

PPS, based in New York City, has pioneered a radically different approach to revitalizing downtowns, called “placemaking.” In contrast to the traditional design or planning process, PPS’s mission is to create a successful, well-used place. And the users of a place should decide the type of activities they want; not the professionals.

“The role of the professionals is as a resource for the communities. They should work to implement the community’s vision,” she says.

“Tapping into the ideas and talents of the community is crucial in deciding what will be done to improve an existing place, or in developing a vision for a new place.”

“When ideas come from the ground up, not from the top down, the events, programs, recreation, and play areas in a public space are truly connected to the communities that use them. In addition, partnerships among local organizations, merchants associations, and government agencies act as new sources of ideas for activities and help a public space become a true ‘community place,’” she says.

“The ‘community’ is anyone who has an interest or stake in a particular place. It is made up of the people who live near a particular place — whether they use it or not — own businesses or work in the area, or attend institutions such as schools and churches there. It also includes elected officials who represent the area nad groups that organize activities, such as a bocce club or a merchants’ association,” Madden explains.

Hold a downtown evaluation workshop

PPS’s most effective toll to involve communities is what it calls a “public space evaluation workshop.” With the Project’s assistance, communities invite downtown merchants, residents, government representatives, and other stakeholders to a half-day workshop during which participants discuss the types of activities and improvements they woudl like to see for their downtown.

During the workshop, a “place game” is held in which three to five participants are sent out to rate the public space for activities, access, comfort, and sociability. Each small group should be diverse, Madden says, because people from different walks of life — like a merchant, resident, government official, and property owner — can inspire each other. After about an hour, game players return to the workshop to talk about their ideas and vision of the space.

Sometimes the leasy likely participants are the ones who come up with the best ideas. For example, during a workshop held in Philadelphia, a man who often loitered around downtwon came up with a great idea. He returned from a group visit downtown and suggested the city copy Paris and erect a giant ferris wheel that could be seen from far away to beckon people downtown. “The man couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Paris,’ but he had a brilliant idea,” Madden says. “The idea of the workshops is to empower all kinds of people to come forth with ideas.”

Create a plan

After holding the workshop, the next step is to translate the results of the workshop into a conceptual plan that reflects the community’s ideas, Madden says. Then refine and discuss this plan with the community, and develop an implementation strategy.

Tips for merchants

“Small-scale, inexpensive improvements can be more effective at drawing people into spaces than major, big-buck projects. Inexpensive amenities such as vending carts, outdoor cafes tables and chairs, umbrellas, flowers, benches, or movable seating are relatively inexpensive. Such items are not generally costly when compared with the overall budget for a public space, but are often eliminated as frils, and as a results\, another potential place bites the dust,” she says.

Management is more important than money

“Developing the ability to effectively manage a space is more critical to success than a large financial investment. For example, the ability to put out items such as movable furniture at a moment’s notice, to host a range of events, or to notice in the use of the space and act on them are all ways in which a continuous management presence makes a place successful,” Madden explains.

“When a community’s vision is driving a project, money follows. Projects perceived by the public as being too expensive often do not become a reality. Why? These types of projects have not evolved from a community’s vision.

“The most successful public space projects tend to use an incremental appraoch in which the place grows little by little; accordingly, people become more and more invested as it grows,” Madden says.

“Once a community backs a project with its voices and its hearts, money usually follows.”

This article originally appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on June 16, 2004.

Fred Kent began his talk with a warning.

“I know this could be heretical,” said the consultant hired by the city of Seattle to figure out a way to turn around Pioneer Square’s Occidental Park.

Indeed, the crowd of about 50 neighborhood residents who gathered Monday night gasped when Kent recommended that the lush ivy be removed from the side of the park’s brick Grand Central Arcade building. Then, flashing a slide showing pastel-colored buildings in Copenhagen, Denmark, he said the brick could be painted.

When the members of the audience caught their breath, one of them, Cecilia Kardum-Smith said, “That might fly in Copenhagen, but that won’t fly in Seattle.”

Heather Rosen, who also lives in the historic neighborhood, agreed. “I think that’s a horrible idea,” she said.

And Sara Jane Bellanca said the ivy and the bare brick are part of the historic neighborhood, noting: “We have a responsibility as a preservation district to preserve.”

There were gasps again when Kent, president of a non-profit New York firm called Project for Public Spaces, recommended replacing the cobblestones in the middle of the park with AstroTurf.

However, neighborhood residents acknowledged that Occidental Park, dominated most of the time by the homeless, drug dealers and public inebriates, needs help. They said they’re willing to consider a more detailed proposal for the park, expected to be released by the city next month.

Kent’s firm has worked with cities from Portland to Paris. Seattle spent $40,000 to hire the firm to make recommendations for Occidental Park.

“I don’t know a place that’s as bad as it is, but could become good so quickly,” Kent said.

The city of Seattle and the Pioneer Square Neighborhood Association have started organizing activities such as bocce ball to draw people into the park. Kent recommended a number of changes beyond that.

The trees and the ivy on the arcade darken the park and deter customers from going to the Grand Central Bakery and other businesses inside the arcade, he said. To create a more open park conducive to movie nights and outdoor performances, he recommended installing an “Astrolawn” and moving three totem poles and trees.

The park’s iron pergola-like shelter, used primarily by the homeless, ought to be replaced by a coffee kiosk with more cafe seating, he said. The money generated by the businesses could pay a management firm to maintain the park.

Ken Bounds, superintendent of Seattle’s Parks and Recreation department, said the city and the neighborhood association will refine the proposals in the next month to present to neighborhood residents, as well as the city’s historic preservation and parks boards. They also will come up with a total estimated cost for the changes as part of the mayor and City Council’s budget process this fall.

As admirable as preserving history and trees might be, Kent said the neighborhood should be willing to accept some changes to “create a very dynamic asset for the whole city.”

Leaving the meeting, Kardum-Smith acknowledged that changes might have to be made.

“It’s just really tragic that we have this gorgeous park and it’s not used,” she said.

By Susan Hines
Landscape Architecture Magazine

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 important-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.

But it’s not just the fresh flowers and falafel that attract the customers, O’Neil maintains. In an age of electronic mail, telephone banking, impersonal superstores, people are hungry for face to face interaction.

“Some guy did a study, the social ecology of markets versus supermarkets, and found that just the number of social interactions in a market are much higher,” says O’Neil, C’77, who lives in Roxborough. “In a supermarket you don’t talk to anybody–if you’re lucky. But here you talk to everybody. People open up in a market because they feel comfortable, they feel they’re part of something they can relate to on a visceral level, and that doesn’t happen in today’s traditional public spaces and retail environments.”

As the market’s former general manager for 10 years, it’s not surprising that O’Neil bumped into quite a few people he knows this afternoon. One of them, an architect who lives and works in the neighborhood, stops by the table to chat. O’Neil, now a consultant to public markets around the world, gives him a pamphlet about an event he was organizing in Seattle in September, the Fourth International Public Market Conference. It was the second conference he has coordinated for its sponsor, the non-profit Project for Public Spaces. “What we hope comes out of it,” he says, “is that markets get stronger, and people start to realize the role that markets play in revitalizing our communities, strengthening our local economies, and reconnecting pieces that still exist in the American landscape.”

The U.S. today has about 5,000 public markets. In contrast there are some 60,000 public markets throughout Europe, where, O’Neil says, “the tradition has never really been lost.” Most U.S. markets, including the Reading Terminal Market, started declining in the 1950′s with the growth of the suburbs, reliance on the automobile, the development of frozen foods, and the nationalization of food production and distribution, O’Neil explains. A back-to-earth movement helped rejuvenate an interest in public markets. “People were responding to things that were truly fresh, things that had flavor.”

Today there are still many fewer indoor public markets of the size and scale of the Reading Terminal Market–only about 100 across the country. At one point there were 28 indoor markets in Philadelphia alone. “But they’re coming back again,” O’Neil promises. “Cities are seeing the value of investing $5 million, $10 million, and $20 million on a market, because they see them as one of the greatest urban amenities.”

Because of the low start-up costs required for individual vendors, for instance, markets open up opportunities for people who otherwise couldn’t go into business.

From a local economic point of view, public markets are big winners, O’Neil adds. “If you go to Kmart, that money gets sucked out of town. There’s this very profound reinvestment that takes place in a public market, because the dollars stay local.” In Pennsylvania markets also play an important role in preserving green belts, and even Amish agricultural traditions, by supporting family farms. “We can even go so far as to say it reduces crime,” O’Neil says. “Because it creates a non-threatening environment to get people to talk to each other, relationships are established, there is accountability, and it’s a reclamation of public space by the people that live there.”

On his way to becoming a markets consultant, O’Neil followed a career path as diverse as the knockwurst and cannolis served up at the Reading Terminal Market. After graduating from Penn with a major in history, he worked on a short-lived weekly newspaper in Rhode Island, doing almost every job there–reporting, advertising, sales and layout. He then went on to New York to work with an inventor, marketing an electric-car project. Afterwards O’Neil went on an archaeological dig in Yugoslavia.

He later returned to Philadelphia, where he taught English to foreign business people, tutored for a literacy project and waited on tables. Seeking dialogue for a murder mystery he was writing, he asked for a scooping job at Bassett’s Ice Cream in the Reading Terminal Market. “The market was a wonderfully seedy place at that time,” O’Neil recalls. On his first day the president of Reading Railroad, whom he already knew from several years before, passed by and asked, “What the hell are you doing here?” The president invited him to his office and “told me it was high time that I joined the world of industry.” He asked O’Neil if he would be interested in working for the market, trying to lure more businesses and clean up the place. He officially became the general manager a couple of years later and it wasn’t long before the operation was profitable again.

It was through word of mouth that O’Neil gradually built up his consulting business. “People were always asking me, ‘How did you do it?’ and ‘Would you help us out?’” He estimates that he’s worked on most of the large urban markets in the United States, as well as many smaller ones. O’Neil may think locally but he travels globally, lending his expertise in Zimbabwe, Kansas City, and Niagara Falls among other places. He’s helped create new markets, including one for Pacific Islander in New Zealand and one in Philadelphia’s Norris Square.

He has also taken away ideas from hundreds of markets around the world. One of his favorite locales is the immense market of Kashgar, an oasis town in the largely desert expanse of western China. “All these groups–a lot of them minorities in China–all come in on market day, so you just see stuff and people and colors like you have never seen before. It’s unbelievable. You can see handmade furniture, ground-up pigments used for making paints, white camels, herds of sheep, everything. People come by horse, by caravan, I’ve never seen so many bicycles in one place in my entire life.”

O’Neil also has collected thousands of historical images of markets around the world to document a cultural phenomenon that he believes has been taken for granted for far too long. “Markets are the original human gathering place,” he says. “They are one of the most central institutions to all people in all parts of the world.”

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on July 16, 2004.

REDWOOD CITY — El Camino Real, which means “the King’s Highway” in Spanish, has become more like a royal eyesore in San Mateo County.

It was, in 1823, a 500-mile walking path connecting mission settlements from San Diego to Sonoma.

Over the years, indiscriminate land use has resulted in an unremarkable roadway lined with car dealerships and take-out restaurants, parking lots and strip malls right down the middle of the county.

Dusty storefronts look out on a congested, six-lane roadway without much in the way of landscaping or charm. Pedestrians rarely stroll along its sun-baked sidewalks.

It’s just, well, unsightly.

But that may change, according to an optimistic group of transportation, city and economic planners that has set its sights on a new future for the county’s tarnished centerpiece.

“Right now El Camino Real is really the third freeway in the county. It’s not really part of the community. It’s more of a thoroughfare,” said Deberah Bringelson, president of the San Mateo County Economic and Development Association. “We want to make it part of the community.”

The concept has come to be known as the “Grand Boulevard.” It envisions transforming El Camino Real from a highway into a street — a slower-paced, pedestrian-oriented boulevard packed with affordable housing, small parks and mixed-use retail frontages, and connecting to vibrant transportation hubs in each city.

It’s a utopian vision, and one that will require both plenty of funding and cooperation among cities. Still, local planners say the possibilities are real.

“I think there is incredible potential to have an impact,” said Ian McAvoy, chief development officer with SamTrans, Caltrain and the Transportation Authority. “It will take a long time. This is not a one-year plan. This is a plan that will be ongoing.”

Daly City and Colma have already applied for roughly $4 million in construction funds from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. San Carlos has begun inviting developers to peruse six-and-a-half acres of vacant land near its Caltrain station to see what sort of housing or commercial property can be built there.

The first part of the plan calls for new housing, plazas and shops around transit stations on El Camino Real in Daly City, Colma, Belmont, San Carlos and Redwood City.

Eventually, the improvements will expand to other cities as the idea catches hold, according to Cynthia Nikitin, project manager with Project for Public Spaces, a New York nonprofit working on the Grand Boulevard project.

“Hopefully, this will set up a framework to guide the evolution of El Camino Real over the next 25 to 30 years,” Nikitin said.

Planners say the first improvements should be finished by around 2006.

Who pays for the improvements, which are expected to run well into the tens-of-millions of dollars, is still unclear. At this point, it’s simply a concept that has city planners thinking hard about the future.

Officials are looking at “what sorts of things we might put near the San Carlos station to make it a place people want to get to, to make it a destination,” said Brian Moura, San Carlos’ assistant city manager.

It’s also about cooperation. Until now, cities have generally isolated their planning efforts to their own cities, and left changes to El Camino Real to Caltrans, which owns it.

However, the Grand Boulevard concept has cities working hand-in-hand to improve the road that connects them. State Assemblyman Gene Mullin, D-So. San Francisco, has sponsored legislation that would allow cities to pool their redevelopment money to build common projects like the Grand Boulevard.

Currently, cities may only spend redevelopment funds in specific, blighted areas within their own city limits.

“I think we really have the potential to connect communities together,” McAvoy said.

By Orna Coussin

January 8, 2001: PPS President Fred Kent and Vice President Kathy Madden spent New Years Eve and the following week giving 15 presentations in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Jerusalem. Hosted by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), a community-minded environmental nonprofit, the pair met with a wide range of influential citizen groups, professional organizations, government agencies and other nonprofits. Their workshops covered local issues surrounding light rail, public markets, waterfronts, streets, civic plazas and parks. The following article includes highlights of the workshops:

“Forcing people to go underground in order to cross from one street to the next is humiliating,” says Fred Kent, an expert on revitalizing urban spaces. Visiting Tel Aviv last week, he was appalled by the appearance of main thoroughfares such as Allenby and King George streets. Pedestrians who want to cross from, for instance, Sheinken Street to the Carmel market are forced to descend to filthy, neglected subterranean tunnels. Most choose to bypass the indignity of such underground passage, and instead make the trek through a long, roundabout route to reach their destination. Such circuitous pedestrian journeys are caused by needless separations between bustling urban spaces.

“It’s pathetic and doesn’t need to happen here, and you can change it,” Kent declared, speaking to dozens of environmental activists who attended one of the lectures he gave during his visit to Israel. “These spaces have vast potential, but they’re squandered because a road is designed for cars, and not for people.”

Kent, who came to Israel to review symptoms of urban blight at the request of Tel Aviv region environmentalists, is a pioneer in a global effort aimed at reviving urban streets and public spaces for the benefit of city residents. Inspired by work on urban decay and revitalization done by William Whyte and Jane Jacobs (author of “Death and Life of Great American Cities”), Kent founded the organization Project for Public Spaces, Inc. (PPS) a quarter-century ago, and serves as its president today.

Kent’s work tools are common sense, and also slide photographs. Using common sense, he observes urban centers and studies what people do in them, and what they have trouble doing in them; he watches them try to overcome problems moving around and relaxing, taking notes about what works for them, and what doesn’t. His analysis is geared toward identifying just what turns a mere urban space into a genuine “place.”

Inviting city spaces, Kent explains, enhance pedestrians’ link to their surroundings, facilitate access to other urban areas, and teem with activity. Using slides, he shows his audience examples of urban streets, plazas and sites from around the globe which have succeeded or failed according to the criteria he uses in assessments. Two successful examples of urban revival taken from Kent’s own stomping grounds, New York City, are Greenwich Village’s thriving Bleeker Street, which combines commercial and residential sites, and Union Square (between 14th and 18th streets, and Broadway and Park avenues), a site which was brought back to life by virtue of a simple solution (setting-up a farmer’s market). These are places that tourists like to visit, and where local city residents feel at home.

Architecture, Kent claims, is not responsible for the success of urban centers. The opposite, he contends, is too often true. “Architecture and ego are what destroy the city,” he explains. “They create cities that lack pedestrians.”

To prove his point, he shows a picture of a large bank in Houston, Texas, a large, impressive facility designed by the architect Phillip Johnson. The photo shows a deserted sidewalk leading to the bank; and a lone soul standing before the building’s tall facade is barely distinguishable. Kent adds that the bank’s managers bemoan the lack of customers – apart from architecture students. They complain that nobody enters the building, he says. “Similarly, in Tel Aviv, where there are many attractive streets built in accord with human needs, huge buildings are being constructed, buildings whose presence on the sidewalk appears removed, alienated, and distant.”

According to Kent’s model, successful public spaces have four components: accessibility (the site is easily reached, and it’s easy to move from it to other sites by foot, bicycle or public transportation); comfort and positive appearance (people linger at a site because it looks clean, safe, and comfortable, and because the surrounding buildings seem inviting and non-intimidating); a diversity of activities and uses (people gather at a site which offers a range of services and activities – benches to sit on, recreation space, exhibits of various sorts, water fountains, etc.); and last, sociability (a successful urban “place” is one where people meet to talk, walk around, and develop friendships).

Making a brief visit to Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, Kent observed the lack of the first, most important, component: accessibility and connection to other urban spaces. “The market itself is wonderful,” he says. “You can really feel how emotions soar there. But it’s so disappointing to stand on the street where the buses come [Jaffa Road] and not know that there’s a market around you. This is a site which should be the heart of the urban scene, but there’s no connection between it and the city. The market’s separation from the city is painful. You enter the market via a parking lot. That’s really insulting.”

As a corrective to Mahane Yehuda’s seclusion, Kent imagines Jaffa Road providing a simple, accessible entrance to the market. A public transport depot would be located directly across the market; Agrippas Street, he proposes, could provide access for walkers and bicyclists. Speaking with people who work in or utilize the Mahane Yehuda market, Kent learned that many customers are taking their business elsewhere, going to large supermarkets. Should the problem of access to the market remain unsolved, he predicts, Jerusalem could lose one of its most crucial spaces.

Kent also visited urban centers in Tel Aviv. Even as a guest who was just passing through, he had no trouble identifying trouble spots in the city. He was amazed to see cars parked on sidewalks – he stopped to photograph a woman who was forced to push a baby carriage on the street because the sidewalk was clogged. Generally, he encountered a glaring waste of public spaces.

Tel Aviv’s listless Habima Square, Kent says, could be revived. He proposes scrapping the parking lot and creating a public square that would facilitate recreational activities and also street theater and concerts performed as a logical outgrowth of events on the Habima stage. Activities in such a revitalized square would enhance its links to the two main thoroughfares, Rothschild and Chen, which lead to it. As for the parking lot, Kent believes that it could be shoved underground. Revenue accrued by taxes paid by the parking lot’s owners to the Tel Aviv municipality could be invested in the maintenance and administration of the outlying public square. “Experience shows that such arrangements work,” Kent says. He adds a word of caution. “Joint administration [between the public and private sectors] represents 80 percent of a place’s success. You have to make sure that there’s a body set-up to review constantly what works, what needs to be changed, what can be updated. Otherwise, such a site can go downhill.”

Focusing on Tel Aviv’s dead zone, its harbor, Kent suggests that public spaces should be zoned and planned as a first stage. Only after such planning is completed would it be prudent to discuss specific types of buildings and commercial activities. He urges city planners to set high standards, and resist any temptation to be satisfied with mediocrity: “Harbor areas in cities which attract tourists from all over the globe ought to be the model. Your harbor can also be stunning, an attractive symbol of the city as a whole. Take a look at harbors around the world, and think about what makes them work.”

Kent thinks that a splendid facility, akin (for instance) to the Sydney Opera House, can be built at the site. “But opera,” he warns, “doesn’t suffice to bring people to Sydney’s harbor. There’s a promenade which leads to this facility, with activities strewn along it… They are the what give life to the place. Beyond the promenade, Sydney isn’t more impressive than Tel Aviv.”

As it stands today, visitors at Tel Aviv’s harbor lack access to the sea, and the various store outlets attract cars to the area rather than pedestrians. So far, architectural proposals drawn to revitalize the harbor have been flawed by neglect of pedestrian needs, by the failure to perceive the harbor as a venue designed first and foremost for human activity. On the whole, the harbor is thought of as a prime site for accruing profit in real estate deals, for parking, and for erecting shopping mall facilities. “If you don’t change these patterns and perceptions,” Kent warns, “Tel Aviv won’t bustle with life; it won’t be a place worth visiting, and that would be a shame, a real missed opportunity for generations to come.”

A successful model of managing automobiles in an urban area is provided by Portland, Oregon, Kent says. One large city square there was brought back to life because contractors and entrepreneurs had the courage to invest ample sums in a train system, which shuttles people to and from the site; they didn’t allocate money to build a parking lot. Such planning innovation and boldness can revitalize areas Tel Aviv areas such as the harbor. “Your harbor can be one of the finest in the world,” Kent says. “The only thing which you need is a little imagination.”

Man is the measure by which the city should be built: this principle is paramount in Kent’s thinking. When he observes pedestrians, he doesn’t view them as objects subordinate to the construction of huge city streets and skyscrapers. Nor does he see them as consumers rendered subservient by the construction of large shopping malls and commercial centers. Instead, he sees them as people, free citizens in a democratic society in whose name a city is built. The city’s spaces, its streets and squares, belong to them.

“Traffic engineers hate streets that teem with people,” Kent explains. “They want traffic to flow. But when you think about people rather than about consumers or drivers or tourists, there’s nothing better than a street bustling with pedestrians. You can slow-down and reduce automobile traffic at the entrance of a city, widen sidewalks and add benches.” Consumer activities and tourism should be the byproducts of how city life is perceived and planned for – the city, in other words, is to be built for people, not commerce or tourism.

Using Kent’s guidelines as the measuring stick, the deficiency of prime Israeli sites such as Jaffa becomes apparent. Jaffa’s old areas were planned as artificial tourist enclaves, and they have remained deserted. Likewise, Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square is an empty urban desert – in this, and other, cases, it isn’t difficult to imagine projects that would revive the site. The annual book fair held at Rabin Square could become a weekly event; shady areas, with benches, could be created; the ground could be re-surfaced to accommodate roller-blade users. With such innovations, Rabin Square could become a popular meeting place for young and older people alike; the entire city area would gain from such a revitalization project.

Some signs of life have been shown recently by Dizengoff Square. The Tel Aviv Municipality has tried to revive the square by sponsoring an artists’ market. Some stores on the stretch running between Frishman Street and the square, which had been closed, have re-opened. But if Dizengoff Square provides a glimpse of the kind of urban revival that Kent champions, many Tel Aviv streets are fraught with signs of foreboding isolation. For example, the off-putting way in which tall buildings on Rothschild Street and Kiryat Atidim have been built – cut-off from the city, secluded from pedestrains – typifies trends that cause damage to public spheres.

These trends are surveyed in the article “The Changing Public Space of Globalizing Cities,” written by Harvard University researchers Greg Smith and Katrin Bindner. Increasingly, state and local authorities in countries around the world are putting responsibility for the management and economic well-being of public spaces in private hands; huge private corporations are increasingly gaining control of major urban buildings and spaces. The companies try to attract a particular social stratum and type of consumer to these facilities and sites; corporate outlooks and activities detract from the diversity of urban sites, and cultivate a dull, homogenous ambiance in public spaces. The article’s authors deride processes leading to the establishment of stores such as the Gap, the Banana Republic and Starbucks in innumerable public venues; such tedious duplication of public spaces curbs the full utilization of a city’s potential, they argue.

Similarly, Kent views diversity as the key to a city’s success. Heaps of money, he says, aren’t needed to preserve urban authenticity and diversity – sometimes it’s enough simply to widen a sidewalk, or install a bench at the right spot near a park.

As an example, he cites the revival of a street corner in New Haven, Connecticut, close to Yale University. Here, and elsewhere, just a few benches or sidewalk improvements were needed to encourage owners of coffee shops to put tables and seats outside, and to bring a book shop back to life.

“A wide range of people sometimes suddenly find reasons to come to a site,” he reflects, optimistically.

March 13, 1978

Washington Post

Tucked away in a nondescript Rockefeller Center office, filled with charts on traffic and people movements, darkroom equipment and movie projectors, works a small band of operatives whose unorthodox techniques could remake the face of hundreds of America’s main streets in the years ahead.

Geographer Fred Kent and his colleagues run a small, nonprofit firm, Project for Public Spaces. They believe it’s possible to plan for streets, plazas and parks, as if people mattered.

The PPS technique is disarmingly simple: A small team, on invitation from a government, a foundation, or merchant’s group, moves into an area and watches how people actually use the place – how they move about, go to work, wait for buses, window shop, dodge vehicles, sun themselves or congregate in groups for talk or recreation. Based on these observations, including innovative use of time-lapse photography, suggestions are then made on how a street or park can be redesigned to be not just an open space, but a lively, livable place where people will want to be.

Kent’s group is both a pedestrian lobby and a thorn in the side of specialists – traffic engineers, designers of cold architectural monuments, imperious city bureaucrats – who so often put their own professional predilections ahead of the interests of the man and woman and child on the street.

“We look at a whole space, a whole eco-system, all of the activities that are going on that people are relating to or not relating to, and then begin to make recommendations on how that place can be better designed and managed for what the public needs,” Kent says.

PPS’s time-lapse photography compresses hours of street activity into a few minutes on the screen. At a speed that outpaces the old Keystone Kops silent movies, pedestrians, buses, cars, and taxis whiz across the screen. Suddenly it becomes clear that parts of that river of movement are exceedingly inefficient, and that with relatively simple changes the street could be made infinitely more pleasant for people.

PPS’s first study, shortly after it was formed in 1975, was of 27 blocks of the most intense activity on New York’s Fifth Avenue – the premier shopping street of New York and perhaps the whole nation.

People think of a street like Fifth Avenue as a great, nonstop sea of people. “But it isn’t,” Kent notes. PPS’s films show graphically that the pedestrians are forced to move up and down the avenue in platoons. Why? “The traffic lights,” Kent says, “are set for private cars and taxis with no consideration of the pedestrian whatsoever.”

PPS found that minor shifts in traffic-light timing would end platooning and permit pedestrians to move along the avenue in a steady flow. Broadening the narrow crosswalks, it was suggested, would eliminate a bottleneck and deter pedestrians from spilling over the lines to mix dangerously with traffic. Shade trees would encourage pedestrians to use both sides of the street instead of crowding onto the shaded side on hot summer afternoons.

Fifth Avenue’s parking lane, PPS found, was being monopolized by all-day parkers with diplomatic tags that made the owners immune from traffic tickets. The proposed solution: eliminate the parking lane; use the freed-up space to broaden each sidewalk seven feet, creating more space for planters and street seating that create cul-de-sacs conducive to window shopping. (Merchants, Kent notes, often don’t recognize the “immense market potential of street space.”)

In addition to time-lapse photography, Kent’s group carefully counts pedestrians and people in vehicles and spends hours on the street to get a feeling for what can’t be quantified – the “sense” of a place.

“On Fifth Avenue you see all kinds of people smiling. There’s an exhilaration to it; it picks you up,” Kent says. “To remove cars from the avenue would be a disaster. They’re part of the vitality. But you need a balance and now it’s too heavily weighted toward vehicles.” Though stalled under Mayor Abraham Beame’s administration, PPS’s proposals appear to have a good chance of being implemented under the new administration of Mayor Ed Koch.

In the meantime, the group – which started out in 1975 with inspiration from William H. Whyte, author of “The Organization Man,” and funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund – has branched out to examine public spaces across the country. There was a study of Harlem’s 125th Street, two plazas in Seattle (where PPS has a branch office), Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue, and the Jacob Riis Park in New York’s Gateway National Recreation Area. At the invitation of the National Park Service, PPS studied visitor facilities at the Grand Teton and Great Smoky Mountain National Park. PPS is now embarking on studies of downtown Fort Wayne, Ind., Main Street in Columbus, Ohio, and the small Pennsylvania town of Waynesburg.

“The techniques,” Kent claims, “are applicable everywhere.” And apparently they are, if one shares PPS’s belief that “people needs” – not the traffic flow, not some architect’s preconceived notion of the “place beautiful” – should come first in public spaces where we all spend a significant portion of our time.

The approach also seems to be an economical one. PPS enters an area with a multi-discipline team; Kent, the geographer, plus an anthropologist, an environmental designer and a filmmaker.

The PPS team recently produced, at a cost of $30,000, a complete evaluation of Cleveland’s major shopping and business street, Euclid Avenue, from Public Square to Playhouse Square. Today that street is choked with traffic, dangerous to pedestrian. The PPS plan – which Kent expansively predicts would turn Euclid Avenue into “a very exciting place” and “remake downtown Cleveland” – would broaden the sidewalks dramatically, ban parking altogether and private autos most hours of the day, and cut traffic down to a lane in each direction with lay-bys for buses and taxis. Newspaper and information stands would be placed beside bus shelters so that waiting passengers could easily check on transit schedules and cultural and commercial activities.

Can conservative Cleveland be sold such a plan, even if the $7 million to $10 million price tag for implementation seems reasonable? Downtown Cleveland Corporation director Tom Albert believes so, with the use of PPS’s film as a selling tool with skeptical merchants and the city government.

The problems and potential of the street, Albert notes, “are hard to appreciate fully until it’s laid out before you graphically and in moving pictures. A merchant may say, ‘My whole business depends on a parking lane in front of my store,’ Then you show him the slow turnover and that that’s not true.”

Albert believes the PPS approach of starting by observation rather than a preconceived concept has great promise. “People forget that cities are different, physically and socially,” he says. “The last thing we need is to have a design from another city picked up and imposed on Euclid Avenue, only to find it doesn’t work for us.”

From another vantage point, Robert LaGasse of the Landscape architecture Foundation believes PPS’s techniques may prove as valuable to landscape architecture as the earliest time-and-motion studies were for modern industry.

That doesn’t mean Fred Kent’s merry little band of street-watchers won’t make their share of mistakes as they go along. But by starting with people, they’ll probably make far fewer.