Hundreds gathered in Detroit for the first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council / Photo: Ara Howrani for PPS

In 1970, I had the opportunity to coordinate New York City’s first Earth Day demonstration. It was an experience that changed my life, and one that continues to impact the work that I do, and the way I see the world, today. The environmental movement has become a very top-down affair in the ensuing years, but the first Earth Day actually was billed as a “national teach-in.” Every community across the country was encouraged to create its own event tackling local issues and concerns under the larger umbrella of environmentalism.

It was that openness that was the day’s greatest strength; the event’s leaders came to New York once to check in, but they let us–the people on the ground, working for change in the city–lead our own initiative. Earth Day came at a unique moment in time, when various forces were converging around the idea of environmentalism. Its distributed, empowering approach was critical to its success in bringing many different interest groups and constituencies together, and still serves as a model for mass organizing.

Today, after decades of wrongheaded development, people are coming to realize that their communities are not set up to support health, happiness, peace, and prosperity. They are seeing, once again, the need for a convergence, a coming-together of myriad interests and constituencies. The Placemaking Leadership Council was created as a direct response to that growing sense of opportunity for transformative change, and after our inaugural meeting on April 11-13 in Detroit [full program here], I can tell you that things are headed in the right direction. I believe that we are at a moment when the Placemaking movement is ready for its Earth Day.

The 300+ Placemakers who gathered in Detroit came from all walks of life, and from all across the world: more than a dozen different countries, and 25 states. The group was made up of government employees, teachers, artists, journalists, developers, community organizers, architects, authors, and activists. Some came from communities of privilege, while others came from neighborhoods where struggle is a daily fact of life. What they all shared was an understanding of the power of place to serve as a connector of people (both to each other and to their environment), and a facilitator for revitalization and renewal.

We are living at a time when people are more disconnected from participating in the shaping of their world than ever before. What the members of the Placemaking Leadership Council have realized–each in their own way–is that this time is also brimming with possibility. It used to be that, when I would go somewhere and talk about ‘turning everything upside down to get it right side up,’ people would respond with trepidation. Today, that same phrase often puts people at ease. They nod in agreement, because they understand that we can only go up from here. The world is ready to change, and it will do so not in one great shift, but in a billion little actions. The pot is boiling over.

Break-out groups focused on “transformative agendas” ranging from Place Capital to Building Multi-Use Destinations / Photo: Ara Howrani for PPS

While we have only just begun sifting through the wealth of ideas generated at the Council’s meeting, there are clear themes that are already emerging. There is no doubt in my mind that a group as dynamic and diverse as the one that gathered in Detroit will continue to evolve, but I wanted to share some of the core beliefs that the Council identified together, as well as several functions that this new group will likely serve:

1.) Everyone has the right to live in a great place. Discussions about the importance of Placemaking came back, time and again, to the need to empower individuals to take charge of their public spaces. Council members are keen to utilize Placemaking to inspire people from many different backgrounds to become “Place Champions” and maximize the potential of public space to connect people and build community.

2.) There is a pressing need for better resources. Multiple break-out groups identified the Council as a potential body for developing and disseminating better data and flexible tools that help make the Placemaking process more accessible, and its benefits more readily understandable, for a broad audience. Visual communication was identified as a priority.

3.) Re-orient policymaking through a place-based approach. Or, as one break-out put it during a report back to the larger group on the meeting’s second day, “we need to decode place so policymakers understand it, and decode policy so Placemakers understand it.” Places are idiosyncratic, and people often get caught up in the particular details of a particular location when discussing Placemaking. We need to re-focus attention on the benefits of the process overall in order to create a common shared language and present a united front when dealing with the bureaucratic systems that currently exist at many levels.

The Placemaking Leadership Council will serve to create a stronger framework for the important efforts already underway in cities all over the world. There is a clear and present need for the movement to find ways to bring more people on-board, and communicate more effectively about why this work is so critical. We need to be able to illustrate, clearly and quickly, how place connects many different disciplines, helping communities to develop more holistic solutions. Personally, I cannot wait to work with this fantastic, energetic group of people to take this on.

More than four decades after the first Earth Day, our planet still faces grave challenges. We are social creatures, and we all need to work together to find solutions to those challenges, working from the neighborhood up. Placemaking, the collaborative re-shaping of public spaces, is a tangible, accessible way for people to participate in that process, and we must all do what we can to push this critical agenda forward. Everyone has the right to live in a great place. More importantly, everyone has the right to contribute to making the place where they already live great.

Photo created at Cheezburger.com

After months of hard work behind the scenes, we’re excited to unveil our new website today! As frequent visitors will have probably already noticed, we’ve freshened up the look of the site. Here on the Placemaking Blog, we’ve got a lot more breathing room for big, colorful images, as well as a Related Posts section at the end of each post to make it easier for you to learn more about the issues that matter most to you. Beyond the blog, we’ve improved navigation to make PPS.org a more user-friendly resource, whether you’re looking for help with planning a new public space, or conducting research on an old favorite.

The primary navigation bar for the site is now located up top, where you can determine whether you’ve come looking to hire us for our various Services, learn about Placemaking through our Training program, learn more about the thousands of Projects we’ve completed in cities all over the world, or delve into our trove of Resources to read about the history and practice of Placemaking.

We’ve re-organized the Services and Resources pages extensively based on feedback over the two years since the last version of the PPS website was launched. If you’re wondering what we can do to help with your public space project, we’ve made our menu of services much clearer. If you’re just searching for information, our Resources page is now streamlined to help you find the most relevant articles on many different types of public spaces, from parks to waterfronts to downtowns.

Finally, we’ve made it easier to stay connected by integrating our social media presence into the site more prominently; all of our content is now easier to share, from blog posts to reference articles. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to like PPS on Facebook, follow @PPS_Placemaking on Twitter, and subscribe to our bi-monthly Newsletter, which will keep you up to date on all of the latest news from across the Placemaking movement. We hope that you dig the new look — and if you happen upon any little bugs that we’ve missed, do let us know.

Abandoned public baths along the Dún Laoghaire waterfront / Photo: Gary Toth

Places, like many things, go through cycles—and even the grandest of public spaces can wind up looking a bit worn and forlorn. Last month, PPS’s Fred Kent, Gary Toth, and Kathy Madden traveled to the wonderfully bucolic community of Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, to conduct one of our How to Turn a Place Around training workshops. The area between Dún Laoghaire’s waterfront and high street is picture-perfect at first glance, but the 30 workshop participants quickly identified many underlying flaws. Led by the PPS team, these locals recognized assets that together represented a “gold mine” of Placemaking potential, and developed some wonderfully creative ideas for knitting together the area’s public spaces to create a truly extraordinary destination.

Dún Laoghaire, a suburban seaside town about 7.5 miles south of Dublin along Dublin Bay, has long been nourished by its access to the sea—first as a sea base for Ireland to carry out raids on Britain and Gaul, and later as a commercial shipping center. In 1821, Ireland decided to build a harbor here due to increasing difficulty for ships to navigate, berth and transfer cargo along the River Liffey in Dublin (at one point, shipwrecks rose to literally hundreds per year off the coast). As a result, a new town center developed uphill along a former military road, and came to be called George’s Street. Ireland’s first railway started in Dublin and terminated in Dún Laoghaire (then called Kingstown), establishing Dún Laoghaire as a preferred suburb of the capital. Ever since, the fortunes of the town’s waterfront and its high street have been tied together.

George's Street, briefly pedestrianized, was re-opened to auto traffic in 2008 / Photo: Gary Toth

Dún Laoghaire was one of the Irish centers that began to experience decline when Ireland accelerated its construction of big freeways like the M11 and the M50 in the 1990s (just a few decades after the same strategy destroyed Main Streets across the US). George’s Street now suffers from over 30 vacancies along its length. The street was briefly pedestrianized at the start of the new millennium. Due to shop owners’ complaints and a lack of a sufficient revitalization of the street, one way traffic was restored in 2008. The waterfront has, similarly, lost a lot of its luster. Elements like the public baths, which flourished until 1997, are no longer functioning; some are falling into disrepair.

How to Turn a Place Around (HTTAPA), which is designed to enhance the impact of designers, planners, and other professionals by illustrating how their efforts to revitalize public spaces can strengthen existing communities, got a few tweaks for its first Irish audience. The course included a session on Streets as Places and a Street Audit. The focus was on George’s Street and a parallel strip of the harbor between the East Pier and City Hall, an area that provides a solid foundation for a great waterfront district, but that faces a lot of challenges. HTTAPA focuses on the idea that, because people are holistic thinkers and see their world in an integrated way, engaging the people who live and work in a space is the best way to turn everything upside down, and take places from inadequate to extraordinary.

A panoramic view of the harbor from the Grand Marine Hotel / Photo: Gary Toth

On the first afternoon, the attendees evaluated six distinct sites in the downtown area of the waterfront via a process we call the Place Game, which helps attendees to better understand these sites and the connections between them from their own perspective. The sites included: Carlisle Pier and its entrance area; entry areas in front of the East and Ferry Terminal Piers; the Pavilion, a newer public space created when the airspace over the train line to and from Dublin was covered over and landscaped; and a plaza alongside the new library, currently under construction.

Kent, Madden, and Toth guided participants through the Placemaking process, helping them to identify challenges and brainstorm a range of solutions, from short-term, inexpensive fixes that could start to change the way that other residents of Dún Laoghaire thought about the waterfront and start building local momentum immediately, all the way up to creating a long-term vision for the area.

On the following day, participants conducted a Street Audit at five sites—three along Marine Road and two on George’s Street. Guided by the Streets as Places concept and observation of these sites, the team came to understand the important role that streets could play in knitting together the various destinations within the vibrant downtown district that they’d imagined. The broad corridor of Marine Drive was identified as a critical lynchpin in their vision, as it represents the greatest opportunity for linking George’s Street to the waterfront.

Harsh streetscaping on Marine Drive, between the water and George's Street / Photo: Gary Toth

Below, we’ve mapped the ideas that were generated for central Dún Laoghaire during the HTTAPA training. If you are working on a public space project in your own city, take a look—and if you’re interested in learning more about the Placemaking process and the various strategies and concepts behind creating a great place, you’re in luck! We’ll be offering another HTTAPA training here in New York City in just two weeks (April 19-20). If you’re interested, email Casey Wang: cwang@pps.org.

View How to Turn Dún Laoghaire Around in a larger map

MAP KEY
DARK BLUE AREAS: Sites analyzed on during the waterfront Place Game evaluation
LIGHT BLUE AREAS: Sites analyzed on the second day of HTTAPA through PPS’s Street Audit process
PINK LINES: Existing streets and paths that need to be re-engineered to restore balance & re-thought via the Placmaking process
YELLOW LINES: New paths that could be engineered to improve connectivity throughout the downtown