NEW YORK, SEPT. 8, 2005 – Project for Public Spaces announced today that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded them a $1,655,000 grant to support a three-year initiative to expand the impact that farmers markets have on their communities. This program is being undertaken in partnership with the Farmers’ Market Coalition component of the North American Farmers Direct Marketing Association. Kellogg support will allow Project for Public Spaces to re-grant $1 Million directly to local farmers markets over the next two years. This grant builds on our existing $1 Million program for public markets already supported by The Ford Foundation.

Farmers markets are becoming increasingly popular in the United States with an estimated 3,700 selling products ranging from produce and meat to crafts and furniture in all 50 states. These farmers markets have almost all started at the community level, organized by grassroots organizations, agricultural organizations, faith-based organizations, downtown associations, chambers of commerce, and community food activists. These markets have few resources to grow and have great untapped potential – for farmers, customers, and communities.

“Project for Public Spaces has built our understanding of the complex relationships between a market and the community it serves,” said Steve Davies, Project for Public Spaces, Senior Vice President and Director of the Public Markets Program. “This Kellogg Foundation grant gives us a unique opportunity to provide financial support for farmers markets to bolster their role as central places in communities and to significantly contribute to their communities’ overall well-being.”

With this grant, Project for Public Spaces and its partners will provide farmers markets with the resources to innovate to address broader community impacts, while building their capacity to succeed as effectively run, financially sustainable organizations. The re-granting program, which will be formally announced this fall, will provide both financial and technical support for markets to:

• Build partnerships to address broader goals and needs of communities, especially in the areas of health and community development;
• Create better places and become even more important community focal points; and
• Expand opportunities for farmers and low-income entrepreneurs, especially women, immigrant, refugee and minority producers.

In 2002, Project for Public Spaces conducted two studies of farmers markets funded by the Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation. These studies found that both markets and the communities they serve can benefit from a collaborative approach which brings together the assets and opportunities of markets with the assets and opportunities of communities. These studies had a special focus on the impact of markets in low-income communities.

“The Farmer’s Market Coalition is pleased to be a partner in this initiative to support markets and their communities,” said Ed Maltby, Farmers’ Market Coalition coordinator. “We are eager to share the experiences and lessons learned from our many members throughout the country with the grantees. We are all working together to sustain farmers’ markets and their communities, while educating policymakers who have a critical role in defining the environment in which public and farmers’ markets can thrive.”

While spurring innovation at the local level, this initiative will also help develop more supportive state and federal policies for markets and work to create ongoing sources of funding for farmers markets.

“Paris in many ways sets the standard for just how pleasurable urban life can be,” says Fred Kent, president of PPS and a long-time explorer of Paris. “These are the places we’ve found over many visits where you can join in the wonderful life of this amazing city–relaxing in sidewalk cafés, strolling beautiful boulevards, soaking up the cultural richness.”

Project for Public Spaces has honed a unique technique for identifying the best public places in the course of its 30 years of work in 14 countries and over 1000 communities. The New York-based research organization builds upon the insights of pioneering urbanist William H. Whyte, in evaluating the ways places are actually used by people–not just how they look. In addition to highlighting great spots to visit, PPS helps communities around the world improve their public spaces.

After pounding the Parisian pavement for more than 100 days over a number of visits in different seasons, Fred Kent and PPS Vice President Kathy Madden identified dozens of public spaces where people truly enjoy spending time’the most important measure of any great place. That list was refined even further until only the very best remained, the kind that stirs your soul and induces a swirl of euphoria as only the very best public spaces can. Here is la crème de la crème, the 10 Must-See Places of Paris:

10. Place des Vosges
Place des Vosges is the classic “urban oasis,” tucked away among the narrow streets of the Marais. Walk there on a hot June day, and behold the lawn full of people spread out in blissful relaxation as the square opens up before you. Exactly what is it about Place des Vosges that makes you want to take off your shoes and feel the grass between your toes? In a word: simplicity. The square’s uncomplicated layout–four quadrants anchored by fountains, with plenty of benches, grass, and shady trees–lets you feel at ease from the moment you enter. When you’ve had your fill of leisurely repose, the arcades surrounding the square beckon, brimming with shops and cafés.

9. Hotel de Ville
If you’re accustomed to the staid, strictly-business aura of American municipal buildings, you’d never guess that the Hotel de Ville is Paris’s city hall. That’s because the square in front of this building is packed all year round with Parisians who’ve come to enjoy the latest attraction. In the winter, it’s an ice-rink. In the summer, a sandy “beach” where kids play soccer and volleyball. In between, all manner of festivals and expositions appear: cultural exhibits, organic food fairs–you name it. Go to the Hotel de Ville on a peak day, and you’ll never look at your city hall the same way again.

8. Rue de Buci
A compact thoroughfare filled chockablock with wonderful uses, Rue de Buci is as lively a street as you can imagine. Produce stands and flower stalls, cafés and street markets, all combine to make an agglomeration of activity more intense than any outside of the bazaars and souks of the Middle East and Asia. There’s always a lot of passion on display as the street merchants, performers, and even pedestrians compete aggressively for attention.

7. Rue St. Louis en l’Ile
Start out at the western end of Rue St. Louis en l’Ile and take in one of the city’s most breathtaking vistas: the spires and buttresses of Notre Dame, rising from the Seine like an ancient formation of sculpted rock. Turn around and you can see all the way to the end of the street, which is actually the “main drag” on the smaller of the two islands at the center of Paris, Ile Saint-Louis. Though the island is inhabited by a privileged few, Rue St. Louis en l’Ile is filled with all types, drawn to its romantic 17th and 18th century architecture and the scores of tiny attraction that line its sidewalks. There are so many enticements vying for you interest, chief among them the legendary Berthillon ice cream shop, that you cannot absorb them all in one visit.

6. Notre Dame
Most tourists gawk at the flying buttresses, tour the nave, and move on, but the real pleasure of Notre Dame reveals itself slowly, as you discover the little flourishes that surround it. Take your time exploring the small parks, gardens, and playgrounds that the cathedral supports. These are the places that Parisians enjoy on a daily basis, playing and strolling with one of the world’s most recognizable landmarks as their backdrop. The interplay between Notre Dame and its immediate surroundings forms a lesson that most recent iconic designs have yet to absorb: It takes more than architecture alone to bring people together.

5. Rue des Rosiers
Rue des Rosiers has been the main artery of Paris’s Jewish quarter since the Middle Ages. The sense of tradition is palpable: Shops housed in 17th century buildings promote themselves in Yiddish and Hebrew, and excellent kosher foods and specialty items tempt you from behind their windows. Though the area’s cultural heritage is threatened by the encroachment of trendy commercial ventures, there is every reason to believe it will remain a vital ethnic enclave. The area’s longtime Ashkenazi residents, refugees from 19th century pogroms in Eastern Europe, now share the street with Sephardic Jews, more recent immigrants from North Africa. This population shift is an encouraging reminder of how places like Rue des Rosiers help new arrivals adjust to the city, and vice versa.

4. Tuileries Garden
The Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe have more name recognition, but the Tuileries Garden, which lies between the two, is where you’ll find the real action. A boulevard without buildings, the Tuileries is the quintessential promenade. Join the stream of flâneurs and immerse yourself in the pleasures of strolling at its finest. As with all great places, the Tuileries must be savored to experience it fully. Take some time away from the main path, because the periphery is filled with fountains, sculptures, lovely outdoor cafés, and hundreds of movable chairs filled with Parisians enjoying the procession of boulevardiers.

3. Rue Mouffetard
Rue Mouffetard is the gold standard for commercial streets. The merchants who crowd its crooked contours have elevated street displays to an art form. But the true thrill is watching people as they engage in the ritual of shopping for their daily needs. Observe closely over time, and you’ll see how many of the customers stay loyal to their familiar vendors, yet also engage in frequent chance encounters. It is a world unto itself, street theater at its best.

2. Paris Plage
To see Paris Plage is to be in awe of its ingenuity: It transforms two miles of the city’s busiest roadway (The Georges Pompidou Expressway) into a lush riverfront beach, complete with sand, palm trees, deck chairs, hammocks, and big, shady umbrellas. On top of the remarkable way the space has been reclaimed for pedestrians, Paris Plage is intricately laced with activities ranging from writers’ workshops to children’s sports. Though temporary (it is only set up for parts of July and August), it offers a richness of experience equal to that of the most well-established and highly evolved public spaces.

1. Luxembourg Gardens
When you think of the world’s great parks, this gem leaps to the top of the list. The layers of human activity pulsing within its 60 acres are seemingly infinite. Here you will find lifelong friends chatting over espresso, solitary readers absorbed in their books, lovers in full embrace, families out for a picnic. There are no interior boundaries, just overlapping spheres of use anchored by popular attractions: a carousel, a puppet theater, a sailboat pond–even a beekeeping school. No matter how many times you visit, each encounter is invigorating, an everyday celebration of urban life made all the more glorious by the knowledge that you are surrounded by people who feel a similar sense of wonder.

Don’t miss the full report on Paris’s best (and worst) places.

Paris has become the world’s top travel destination for one simple reason: It is home to many of the very best places on the planet–places to walk, places to sightsee, places to experience urban charm. Many cities offer world-class museums and architecture. What sets Paris apart are the lively cafés and neighborhood squares, crooked market streets and beautiful boulevards.

But can Paris keep its stature as the world’s favorite city? Project for Public Spaces (PPS), an organization internationally recognized for its pioneering approach to evaluating and improving public spaces, released a report today identifying disturbing trends that could dislodge Paris from its number one position. For thirty years, the New York-based PPS has promoted the importance of public places around the world.

“Paris is still a delightful place to visit,” notes PPS vice-president Kathy Madden, “but we have serious concerns whether it will always remain that way.”

Paris’s legendary charm is now threatened by an onslaught of traffic. Roads along the Seine River now resemble raceways. Cars choke once-celebrated spots such as Place de la Concorde. A number of historically significant boulevards are now little more than giant parking lots.

Not only do roaring cars and trucks dominate the streets and squares, but the city’s famous sidewalks are under siege. People who want to indulge in that most Parisian of pastimes, a leisurely stroll, find themselves competing for space with parked cars, motorcycles, and scooters. Motorcycles and scooters frequently thunder along the sidewalks, striking fear into the hearts of boulevardiers.

To witness a great city such as Paris surrender itself piece by piece to the tyrannical demands of the automobile is tragic. We’ll always have Paris, but for it to retain its stature as the urban ideal to which other cities aspire, things must change. The city needs to take immediate action now to protect the kind of great public places that allow the comfortable enjoyment of life for which Paris is famous.

Another alarming development is the construction of brave new public spaces designed to win architectural prizes rather than meet the needs of the people who actually use them every day. These new places, including Parc de la Villette, Parc Andre Citroen, and the National Library, do not measure up in any way to Paris’s tradition of world-class public spaces like Luxembourg Gardens and the Hotel de Ville. This is not because we have lost the ability to create great places, but because these new public spaces were created to spotlight the reputation of “superstar” designers rather than paying attention to how these places would meet the needs of Paris’s citizens.

Fortunately, key decision makers are beginning to take steps that enhance Paris’s unique character. The current Mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, has turned the city hall plaza into a lively place for Parisians to gather all year round, hosting a variety of seasonal activities and festivals there. This summer also marks the third year in a row he has banned traffic on roads along the Seine River for Paris Plage (“Paris Beach”), a festive round of summertime activities that take over the George Pompidou Expressway for a full month.

The city’s pedestrian zone is now being expanded, and alternatives to the auto are being promoted by giving public transit vehicles preference over cars on some roadways. These steps suggest that Paris’s leaders are beginning to understand that thriving public spaces are the city’s greatest asset. If local officials take more bold actions like these throughout the city, then Paris’s reputation as the world’s most beloved city will remain secure.

Don’t miss the full report on Paris’s best (and worst) places.

New York, NY October 27, 2005 – Project for Public Spaces, Inc. (PPS) published 14 profiles on innovative farmers markets from around the U.S. on a new part of their website: Farmers Market Profiles. As farmers markets continue their exponential growth – from 1,755 in 1994 to over 4,000 in 2005 – many are looking for new ways to broaden their impacts on the communities they serve. With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and as a complement to its ongoing public markets funding initiative (which is also supported by the Ford Foundation), PPS researched farmers markets that are forging partnerships and developing projects around health and nutrition, urban agriculture, local and immigrant farmers, and smart growth.

From small town farm stands to big city farmers markets, the markets profiles here are extremely diverse. They range from established, thirty-year-old efforts to start-ups that have been open for only one or two seasons; from markets with over 200 vendors and long waiting lists to sell at the market to those with fewer than ten growers. What these markets share, though, are creative approaches and partnerships that are helping them bridge the urban/rural divide, increase access to fresh, affordable local foods, improve health and nutrition, support family farmers, and cultivate a sense of place in town and city centers. PPS looks forward to seeing how these programs develop in the future.

The featured farmers markets are:

• Hopi Reservation Farmers Market, Palacca, AZ
• Downtown Farmers Market, Des Moines, IA
• Cotton Mills Farmers Market, Carrollton, GA
• Minnetrista Farmers Market, Muncie, IN
• The Lexington Farmers Market, Lexington, MA
• The People’s Grocery, West Oakland, CA
• Espanola Farmers Market, Espanola, NM
• The Holyoke Farmers Market, Holyoke, MA
• Montgomery Women’s Market, Bethesda, MD
• Seeds of Hope, South Carolina
• Kaiser Permanente Farmers Markets, CA, CO, OR, GA, HI, DC
• Austin Farmers Market, Austin, TX
• East New York Farms!, Brooklyn, NY
• Lindsay Public Market, Lindsay, CA

These profiles are intended to inform applicants for PPS’s latest Request for Pre-proposals, Diversifying Public Markets & Farmers Markets, which was released on October 17, 2005. PPS will choose from hundreds of applicants to regrant approximately $1 million in collaborative funding from the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support public markets and farmers markets.

The launch of the profiles also coincides with “Great Market, Great Cities,” PPS’s 6th International Public Markets Conference in Washington, DC, October 28-October 31, 2005.

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Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a non-profit organization founded in 1975 dedicated to creating and sustaining places that build community. We provide technical assistance, education, and research through programs in parks, plazas and central squares; buildings and civic architecture; transportation; and public markets. PPS has worked with communities in 48 states and in 20 countries around the world.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930 “to help people help themselves through the practical application of knowledge and resources to improve their quality of life and that of future generations.” Its programming activities center around the common vision of a world in which each person has a sense of worth; accepts responsibility for self, family, community, and societal well-being; and has the capacity to be productive, and to help create nurturing families, responsive institutions, and healthy communities.

To achieve the greatest impact, the Foundation targets its grants toward specific areas. These include: health; food systems and rural development; youth and education; and philanthropy and volunteerism. Within these areas, attention is given to exploring learning opportunities in leadership; information and communication technology; capitalizing on diversity; and social and economic community development. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.

Long used by Project for Public Spaces to describe its work, phrase now widely heard in conversation

You won’t find it in the dictionary yet, but the word “placemaking” is sliding off more tongues every day. PPS has promoted the term for years in describing its work, and now, in a sign of the term’s growing use, Wordspy.com, a popular website that practices “the sleuthing of new words and phrases,” recently added “placemaking” to its lexicon.

“We use ‘placemaking’ to describe our work because we help communities turn their lifeless and unwelcoming spaces into great places where people want to be.”

Wordspy.com defines placemaking as “Designing a building or area to make it more attractive to and compatible with the people who use it.” The website names PPS in its first citation of how the word is used.

“We use ‘placemaking’ to describe our work because we help communities turn their lifeless and unwelcoming spaces into great places where people want to be,” said PPS President Fred Kent. “The term captures our belief that people gravitate to public spaces that convey a sense of place, and that the people who use a place are the ones best-suited to shape its design, uses, and activities.”

In much the same way that “environmentalism” entered the language in the ’60s, referring to new streams of thought about the relationship between people and nature, “placemaking” is poised to signify a fresh way of thinking about how people design and use public places.

Placemaking represents the next logical step, making public input an integral part of the design process from the very beginning.

Other organizations have recently embraced the term as PPS has defined it, including the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation, which launched a “Transportation and Placemaking” awareness campaign this July, and the City Repair Project, a non-profit from Portland, Oregon that uses placemaking techniques to involve local communities in urban design decisions. The New York Times quoted a public official in southern California using the term as recently as July 14.

PPS first used the word in the 1997 publication, The Role of Transit in Creating Livable Metropolitan Communities. Since then PPS has applied the term to describe improvements to every aspect of the public realm, from street corners to playgrounds. No other group has so consistently used the term over such a long period of time.

The term implies a distinct evolution from the prevailing “project-based” approach to planning and development. The project-based approach usually involves a small cadre of developers, designers, engineers, and public officials who determine the parameters of a new building, park, or street, then solicit feedback on their design in a process of public review. The inclusion of public review grew out of the preservationist and environmentalist battles of the 1960s. Placemaking represents the next logical step, making public input an integral part of the design process from the very beginning.

“What comes out of the collaboration between users and designers is consistently quite wonderful and surprising.”

“The problem with the project-based approach is that it inevitably leads to the handful of real decision-makers trying to ram their project down people’s throats, so you end up with confrontation, NIMBYism, and a mediocre result,” said Kent. “But when you have ‘place’ in mind from the beginning, at every step of the way you get ideas from the people who know the area’s needs best–the people who will actually use what’s being built. What comes out of the collaboration between users and designers is consistently quite wonderful and surprising.”

Asked for examples of placemaking in American towns and cities, Kent cited Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, a former parking lot that is now among the most widely-used civic squares in the nation, and Bryant Park in New York, which became one of the city’s most beloved places following its restoration in the early ’80s. “These are the types of places that you can expect much more of in the future, as the economic and social desirability of placemaking becomes widely apparent,” said Kent.

Project for Public Spaces – which has an international reputation for its work on the design and management of public spaces – wants to challenge conventional landscape design awards, believing that they give little or no thought to users of award-winning spaces.

Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces says:

“In conventional design awards the process is too narrowly defined. The question is, do people go there – not whether or not it looks good on a magazine cover.

“We’ve always been wary of awards at Project for Public Spaces, but then we realized it’s the way they are done that’s the problem. So now we’re offering an alternative that will bring attention to good practice – and at the same time, we’re challenging the professionals to rethink the way they evaluate success. Parks have a key role in revitalizing our cities – but they must have the pride and ownership of the people who use them”.

The three new Great Parks, Great Cities Awards will be inaugurated this summer by Project for Public Spaces as part of its seventh annual conference on urban parks.

The conference will bring together 300 parks leaders from cities across the U.S. and will feature presentations by some of the nation’s key figures.

Notes for the editor
1) Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit, founded in 1975 to continue the pioneering work of William H. Whyte (The Organization Man, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces). Using observation, time-lapse filming and interviews, we have helped over 1,000 communities across the US design ‘people places’, alive with vitality and commerce.

2) The winners of the Great Parks, Great Cities 2001 Award will be announced at the conference. The awards are being initiated by Project for Public Spaces to acknowledge that an attractive, active, well-functioning public space can jumpstart the comeback of a community – from a small suburban or rural town to a highly urbanized city.

3) The Great Parks, Great Cities conference will be held in New York City, July 28-31, 2001. It is the seventh annual conference run by Project for Public Spaces. The conference will bring together the most influential leaders from cities across the US to highlight the significance of parks and open spaces in urban revitalization.

New York, NY (May 10, 2002) – Learn how to revitalize your neighborhood, town or city through farmers and public markets.

The 5th International Public Market Conference of Project for Public Spaces will be held this November in New York City. The three day event will include tours, speakers, workshops, neighborhood ethnic food tours, and local food prepared by W Hotel chef, Michel Nischan of Heartbeat Restaurant. Tours will include visits to New York City Greenmarkets, Fulton Fish Market (the final year of this historic market), Chelsea Market, Gansvoort Market District and Grand Central Market.

The conference is sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

“Great Markets, Great Cities”
November 9-11, 2002
The ‘W Hotel’, 541 Lexington Avenue, New York

http://store.pps.org:1040/PMC.htm

Contact: Steve Davies, Senior Vice President, PPS, 212-620-5660, sdavies@pps.org

Richard McCarthy, Executive Director, CCFM, 504-861-5898, mccarthy@loyno.edu

New Orleans, LA – Project for Public Spaces (PPS) , an international organization based in New York, will contribute $100,000 towards rebuilding markets as a means of invigorating economic activity in the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana and Mississippi. The funding, committed as part of a $900,000 re-granting program for public markets recently awarded to PPS from the Ford Foundation, will go to the Crescent City Farmers Market (CCFM) and its governing group, marketumbrella.org. The Ford Foundation has also committed an additional $150,000 in funding from its Katrina relief efforts, for a total commitment of $250,000.

Hurricane Katrina has largely devastated all aspects of some 15 markets on the Gulf Coast: commercial fishers, farmers, family enterprises (farmers, fishers, bakers, and more), market staff, and many market sites. “These markets provided a link between farmers and consumers,” said Steve Davies, Senior Vice President and Director of the Public Markets Program at Project for Public
Spaces, “and many were also the site of social services for low-income communities through the United States Department of Agriculture Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program and electronic benefit program.”

The funds will be used to help resume operations of public markets in the region, in ways especially designed to meet post-Katrina needs, according to Richard McCarthy, executive director of marketumbrella.org and a founder of the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, CCFM had four open-air locations each week, serving over 3,000 shoppers and nearly 100 vendors. Shoppers came from all over the New Orleans metropolitan area, and vendors from three states – Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Annual sales of the Saturday market alone are $1.2 million; projected gross annual economic impact of the four markets was more than $11 million.

“We also provided mentoring to dozens of markets throughout the region, and had piloted the first electronic benefit transfer (food stamps) program for open-air markets in the Deep South,” McCarthy said. In the post-Katrina world, “the ability of people to get the goods and services they need for re-building is imperative,” Davies said. “The low start-up cost of a market provides the place for that transaction to happen, and enables the rapid construction of economic infrastructure lost to the disaster. Families and businesses not only have a place to purchase and sell goods they need to get back on their feet but communities will have a place to host critical services that have been displaced by the storm.”

Among marketumbrella.org’s plans, are:

• Relaunching regional markets. The Tuesday Crescent City Farmers Market opened just before Thanksgiving in uptown New Orleans with an estimated 2,000 shoppers. Festivus, a “Holiday Market for the Rest of Us” drew crowds to the Warehouse/Arts District in early December. “Working with French Market, Ocean Springs, Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, and other regional markets is central to our mission of initiating and promoting the ecology of the local economy,” McCarthy said.
• Expanding on CCFM’s wireless/wooden currency network to keep local money in the local market and help create security in the regional food system.
• Cultivating alternative philanthropy and mutual aid (the “circles of giving” which CCFM has termed “crop circles”) for vendors
  and shoppers at markets to invest into funds with a direct impact on vendors and host communities.
• Providing workshops and other training/model programs to the community of more than 4,000 farmers markets nationwide.
• Seeking out new partners for public markets: schools, for instance, can serve as appropriate host institutions as local infrastructure is redesigned or “useful markets” can include small business owners who provide services essential in individual rebuilding efforts as well as serve as a central point of contact for social service efforts.

Both Project for Public Spaces and marketumbrella.org are committed to the principle that our markets are points of rebirth in the face of devastation.

“The silver lining of this disaster can be that, with the right team of market partners, we can demonstrate the intrinsic value of markets to communities,” said Ford Foundation Program Officer Miguel Garcia.

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Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a non-profit organization founded in 1975 dedicated to creating and sustaining places that build community. We provide technical assistance, education, and research through programs in parks, plazas and central squares; buildings and civic architecture; transportation; and public markets. PPS has worked with communities in 48 states and in 20 countries around the world. With support from the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, PPS has initiated a $2.5 million regranting program to enhance public markets as focal points for community development.

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.

Marketumbrella.org’s mission is to initiate and promote the ecology of local economies: markets, meeting place, mentor and model. A department of Loyola University New Orleans at its Twomey Center for Peace through Justice, it embodies the Jesuit institution’s core social justice values and its role as a center for innovation. Among its other roles, it sponsors the Crescent City Farmers Market, which celebrated its 10th birthday this fall.

‘Rebuilding A Community’ (www.downtownnyc.org) is an initiative of the Civic Alliance, a coalition of more than 75 business, community and environmental groups representing a cross-section of New York and the Region that is providing a broad “umbrella” for civic planning and advocacy efforts in support of the rebuilding of downtown New York.

Information and ideas from the site will be used by the Civic Alliance to inform its recommendations and reports to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the joint State-city Corporation that is overseeing the revitalization of Lower Manhattan.

“We’re talking about specifics” says Julie Caniglia of Project for Public Spaces – Civic Alliance member and one of the driving forces behind “Rebuilding A Community’. “We’re asking people who know and use downtown intimately – residents, workers and others – to contribute their local knowledge to help build a vision for a revitalized downtown. The website will evolve both as a major information resource, and a place where people can publicly discuss the issues while visioning, planning and rebuilding takes place.”

In the larger context of planning efforts, the ‘Rebuilding A Community’ website acts as a “nuts and bolts” counterpart to “ImagineNY,” another project that solicits narratives and pictures from the public, in that it allows the public to provide a high level of detail in commenting on specific places, issues, and proposals. The goal is to get people involved in creating a new downtown – not simply react to plans that are presented to them as a fait accompli.

The tool has been created and will be maintained on a pro-bono basis by Project for Public Spaces, as its contribution to the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.

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REBUILDING COMMUNITY OBJECTIVES

- Allow residents, workers, business owners, planners, and a range of other stakeholders to share information and ideas about rebuilding downtown through ideas, input and responses related to specific lower Manhattan sites, and through online discussions on related topics – Provide a range of information and resources related to rebuilding, on topics such as traffic-calming, streetscape amenities, user-friendly design of plazas, and more – Keep the lines of communication open among Civic Alliance partners, community members and stakeholders, and ultimately, the decision-makers, planners and builders

PROJECT FOR PUBLIC SPACES

PPS is internationally known for its innovative approach to public-space planning. Community visioning is an essential part of our process, involving workshops, surveys of key constituencies, focus groups, collaborative envisioning, and observations of the current use of an area. We work with government agencies, arts organizations, downtown development groups, neighborhood associations, merchants’ associations, and corporations. We invite you to visit our website, www.pps.org, for a more comprehensive understanding of our work.

THE CIVIC ALLIANCE

The Regional Plan Association has convened The Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York to develop strategies for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. The Civic Alliance is a coalition of more than 75 business, community and environmental groups representing a cross-section of New York and the Region that is providing a broad “umbrella” for civic planning and advocacy efforts in support of the rebuilding of Downtown New York. The Alliance will work closely with the Empire State Development Corporation, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the City of New York to create a bold vision for a revitalized downtown.

A visitor’s verdict on New Orleans’ Vietnamese market sounds preferable: “At 5am each Saturday, over 20 vendors set up shop in a dilapidated shopping square, spreading out produce on blankets; live ducks, rabbits and chickens wail to a background chanting of Asian pop music.”

Such travel tidbits can be found at an unlikely source – the new website of Project for Public Spaces, America’s leading public spaces’ nonprofit. The site, Great Public Spaces, Great Community Places, (www.greatpublicspaces.org) invites people to praise or damn the
places where they live or visit. Not only can you sound off, but you can find tips about parks, walkable streets, trails and farmers’ markets.

World-renowned spaces such as New York’s Grand Central Station and Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens are assessed with the same “place” characteristicsthat are used on neighborhood parks and main streets. And it is the lesser-known places that provoke the most passion: vibrant community gardens tendered by volunteers, obscure flea markets – and other treasures hidden within local neighborhoods.

“There is a pizza and bread-making oven, theatre, ice rink, playground, wading pool, baseball diamond, basketball court, chess, checkers, gardens, crafts for kids, card playing for older visitors, drop in center activities… and best of all, beautiful and abundant old shady trees.” (Dufferin Grove Park, Toronto, Canada)

“Though the neighborhood seems, at first sight, gloomy and messy, it is a place with a very intense community life. In a very human scale environment, children play in alleys embellished with lots of flowerpots, the elderly chat at entrance-doors, and in the summer, everybody dressing “Yukata” gathers at outdoors to celebrate dancing the Obon festival” (Kyojima, Tokyo, Japan).

The 1980 study of New York’s plazas started a mini-revolution in urban planning and design, laying the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned.

PPS President, Fred Kent says “Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform”.

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THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES (BOOK)
Price: $28 Non-Member Price: $35

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES (VIDEO)
Price: $20 Non-Member Price: $25

Review copies are available on request

New York, NY (January 11, 2002) – We’re surrounded by public spaces – streets, parks, markets, plazas, train stations – some we love and some we hate. Yet no one ever asks people what they think of the places that shape and influence their lives.

Project for Public Spaces, America’s leading public spaces’ nonprofit, has launched a website, Great Public Spaces, Great Community Places, (www.greatpublicspaces.org) that allows you to praise or damn the places you live in and visit, from Rockefeller Center’s skating rink to your local watering hole.

“What makes it so awful? It’s the nothing-ness you feel when you go by. The place is passive, cultureless and commercially bland.” (McArthurGlen Designer Outlet, UK)

“With an aesthetic that might be dubbed ‘dressed-up Home Depot’, this building has no sense as a place in which one can do anything more than drive by blank walls.” (The Central Library, San Antonio, TX)

“The old plaza exhibited the worst of Modernism’s frosty attitude toward accommodating humans – its late ’90s redesign is no better.” (HUD Plaza, Washington, D.C)

World-renowned spaces such as New York’s Grand Central Station and Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens are assessed with the same “place” characteristics that are used on neighborhood parks and main streets.

And it is the lesser-known places that provoke the most passion: vibrant community gardens tendered by volunteers, obscure flea markets – and other treasures hidden within local neighborhoods.

“There is a pizza and bread-making oven, theatre, ice rink, playground, wading pool, baseball diamond, basketball court, chess, checkers, gardens, crafts for kids, card playing for older visitors, drop in center activities… and best of all, beautiful and abundant old shady trees.”
(Dufferin Grove Park, Toronto, Canada)

“At 5am each Saturday, over 20 vendors set up shop in a dilapidated shopping square, spreading out produce on blankets; live ducks, rabbits and chickens wail to a background chanting of Asian pop music.” (Vietnamese Farmers’ Market, New Orleans East, LA, U.S.)

New York, NY (December 19, 2001) – The Urban Parks Institute at Project for Public Spaces, America’s leading public spaces nonprofit, has received a holiday donation from the architectural and landscape architectural firm, Ratio Architects, Inc.

Ratio chose the Urban Parks Institute (UPI) because of the high quality ofUPI’s work.

“We believe the Institute’s focus upon local participation and control, highly active programming and unrelenting maintenance is a very appropriate message to be sending to park stakeholders across the nation, and we wish to thank them for their substantial contribution” says Kenneth Boyee, Principal-in-Charge of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at Ratio.

PPS’s new directors are: Tom Downs, Executive Director of the National Center for Smart Growth; Daniel M. Fox, President of the Milbank Memorial Fund; Emily Lloyd, Executive Vice President for Administration at Columbia University; David McCune, a writer/consultant who has been active in the publishing field for over 20 years as a journalist, editor, publishing executive and electronic publishing expert; and Robert A. Peck, Commissioner of the Public Buildings Service of the U.S. General Services Administration from December 1995 to January 2001.

Last year, PPS developed a new strategic plan, which calls for further development of its four major programs – parks, plazas and civic squares; transportation; public markets; and community institutions and public buildings – through three new crosscutting initiatives including strategic partnerships, a public space (educational) institute and an extended technical assistance program. “Our new directors will bring valuable skills that will enhance the expertise of our current directors in helping us to fulfill the goals of our strategic plan and expand our capacity to serve communities throughout the world,” said Fred Kent, president of PPS.

In the 26 years since its founding, PPS has worked in over 1,000 communities throughout the United States as well as internationally, helping them create and carry out strategies for turning their public spaces into places that highlight local assets, serve common needs and provide the foundation for community rejuvenation.

The other, previously appointed, members of PPS’s board of directors include Jonathan Rose, president of the Affordable Housing Development Corporation in Katonah, New York and chairman of the PPS board; Richard Bradley, executive director and CEO of the D.C. Business Improvement District in Washington and former president of the International Downtown Association; Ricardo Byrd, executive director of the National Association of Neighborhoods; Elizabeth Smith Cashin, director of underwriting and portfolio analysis for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation; Dana H. Crawford, president of Urban Neighborhoods in Denver which develops historic properties; Douglas Durst, president of the Durst Organization, a real estate firm in New York City; Paul Elston, chairman of the New York State League of Conservation Voters; Roberta Brandes Gratz, an author (most recent book: The Living City) and a former award-winning reporter for the New York Post; Donald Jacob, senior partner for the Patient Advocate Group in Poughkeepsie; Don Miles, associate partner with Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca, an architectural-urban design firm in Seattle; Joel Schiavone, owner of the Schiavone Realty and Development Corporation in New Haven; William Sharman, chairman and chief executive officer of Lancaster Hotels and Resorts in Houston; Kent G. Smith, president of Crowley Cheese in Healdville, VT; Jennifer Vickers, president of the Community Investment Corporation in Austin; and Michael Whiteman, president of Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Company, a restaurant merchandising and operations consulting firm.

The PPS/Whyte recommendations, including a more open periphery and other features to encourage and sustain public use, like concessions, events and movable chairs, have resulted in what has been hailed as “the crown jewel of Manhattan” and is one of New York’s most popular public spaces. PPS asserts, however, that the original intention for the entire park to be continuously open to the public has been compromised with occupation by private entities that either charge admission or hold events that are open only to a select group of people.

Starting September 14th and continuing through the rest of this months, as well as in January and February 2001, the majority of the park will be taken over by the Seventh on Sixth’s General Motors Fashion Week. During that time, the public will be forced to the periphery. Public access to the park also will be blocked in November and December when Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus will take over.

PPS maintains that its organization has always supported the concept of public/private partnerships to improve and maintain public spaces. They assert, however, that even though Bryant Park is managed by a private entity, as a public space it is intended for continuous and free public use. They do not rule out commercial activities that serve the public and often contribute to the life of the space. And although they admire the accomplishments of the Restoration Corporation and recognize the charitable intent of the Fashion Show, they do feel that the private appropriation going on needs to be reviewed by New York City and urges investigation of the following:

• What is the City’s policy concerning commercial use of parks?
• Who made the decision to make Bryant Park available for occupation by private interests?
• What is being gained in exchange for limiting the public’s use of the space?
• What are the financial benefits of these events to the different organizations involved? – the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation? – New York City, including the Parks Department? – the organizers of the event? – private charities? How are the revenues allocated from the advertising posters that ring the park?
• How has the public and adjacent entities been notified and included in this decision process?