The first meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council will take place in downtown Detroit, Michigan, home of the wonderful Campus Martius Park / Photo: PPS

For those of us who are passionate about the public spaces in our communities, this is an extraordinary time. The general awareness of the importance of a strong sense of place—to the economy, to our social fabric, to human health—is growing stronger every day. Placemaking is, at this moment, being transformed from a useful tool to a vital cause by people throughout the world. As one of those rare processes that can bring people with different objectives together under the same banner, Placemaking is uniquely suited to help us grapple with the complex challenges that we face in a globalized society. After almost four decades of working in this field, we are reaching out to peers new and old to form a Placemaking Leadership Council to consolidate and strengthen Placemaking as an international movement.

The goal of the Leadership Council is to build a culture of mutual support amongst the do-ers and deep thinkers at the forefront of the Placemaking movement, creating a community of practice around this important work. Through our work, we know many people who are actively engaged in creating great places today; many of these people—the ones we refer to admiringly as “Zealous Nuts”—have already agreed to join this Council. But there are also people we don’t yet know who should be involved. If you are one of these people, you already know who you are; you’ve achieved something beyond most peoples’ imagination, created one or more successful places, and are looking for an opportunity to share your stories and learn from others about how you might be able to raise the bar even more. If this is you, please read on.

At the inaugural meeting of the Council this April 11-12th, we will gather in Detroit, Michigan, the North American capital of resilience (Background on how Detroit and Michigan are leading the way on Placemaking), to debate, discuss, celebrate and develop a strategy for creating a global agenda around Placemaking in cities. Another gathering will take place in Stockholm this June, through our partnership with UN-Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. The Detroit gathering will be centered on case studies and demonstration projects, publications, films, and social media as ways of demonstrating the true power in place. Discussion will be structured around four agendas that we feel have the potential to transform cities if the focus is on the idea of place and Placemaking.

• Creating healthier communities and improving streets by redefining transportation planning;
• Improving our built environment by advocating for people- and place-centric design through an architecture of place;
• Supporting sustainable local economies by highlighting the central role of public markets;
• And strengthening communities by creating new urban development models that re-orient our cities and towns around great multi-use destinations.

The Council will be organized around four sub-committees, each of which will focus on one of these critical aspects of place-centered development. (Click here to read about the Transformative Agendas in greater detail). Their agenda-defining discussions will be guided by the three strategic themes of Place Governance, Place Capital, and Healthy Communities. Outcomes for each sub-committee will include research topics, benchmarks, potential partners, and implementation strategies that will drive progress and innovation amongst Council members and the wider global community of Placemaking practitioners and community change agents over the coming year.

If your interest is piqued, please review the five criteria below to see if you might be a good fit for the Placemaking Leadership Council. If you meet several of these criteria, we encourage you to reach out and tell us more about what you do, and why you’re passionate about the idea of place.

1.) You know about and understand Placemaking. You’re well-versed in the movement’s history, and can appreciate the uniqueness of the current moment. You understand that Placemaking is a process, not an outcome. Ideally, you’re also familiar with the Project for Public Spaces and the way that we work.

2.) You understand and agree with what we are trying to achieve. You get that the Council isn’t about making money or networking, but working with like-minded individuals to drive large-scale culture change to put place at the heart of public discourse.

3.) You have substantial experience with on-the-ground projects and initiatives. You’re driven and you’ve got a few success stories under your belt–and probably even some failures that you’ve learned a great deal from. We’re looking for people who don’t just think about how to create great places–they roll up their sleeves, head on out, and do it themselves.

4.) You think holistically about place. You’ve worked on a variety of different projects, and you understand how various (sometimes unexpected) pieces fit together to create a great public destination. The term “silo-busting” gets your feet tapping.

5.) You have your own networks and organizations. You’re not a rock, or an island. You have a track record of working with people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and communities, and you understand how important unlikely partnerships are to successful Placemaking.

If you are interested in joining the Placemaking Leadership Council and attending our first meeting in Detroit this April, please click here to fill out a questionnaire that will help us to learn more about who you are and what you do.

We welcome inquiries for this first round up until March 1st, 2013, and will work internally to shape a Council that will represent a diversity not only in professional experiences, but also in age, gender, cultural heritage, and international backgrounds. Please also indicate whether travel costs will be an issue, as we will be able to provide assistance to a limited number of Council members, based on need, through the generous sponsorship Southwest Airlines and contributions by other members.

We’re very excited to announce this new initiative, and look forward to working with more of the passionate Placemakers who make this movement so dynamic.

Says commenter Suzan Hampton of Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, which is in the Architecture of Place Hall of Shame: "It feels like being in an airport terminal in there." / Photo: heyskinny via Flickr

Over the past couple of months, we have written several times about the need to move toward an Architecture of Place, creating design that makes people feel empowered, important, and excited to be in the places they inhabit in their daily lives. Two blog posts generated some lively discussion around the subject, which has led to new insight about how those of us concerned with the current direction that architecture is headed in can steer things onto a more productive track.

One of the principal challenges facing architecture today seems to be the lack of understanding of how people relate to the context of a site. Words like “community” and “stakeholders” have been bandied around so much that they have become abstract, and the need for individuals to have agency and a sense of ownership of their surroundings is lost in the mix. Commenter Richard Kooyman, for example, argues that:

It’s a fad today to say that everyone is ‘creative’ or to use terms like  ‘stakeholders’ as if by doing so we are now all empowered to make the changes society needs. The reality is that not everyone is equipped or even cares to be creative and real stakeholders are still those that hold the purse strings of projects.

The idea behind good Placemaking, and using a Place-centered approach when designing a building or public space, is not that each individual within a given community is the expert on what that space should look like, but that the community, as a group, has an important expertise about how that space is used, and how the people most likely to enliven it on a day-to-day basis (themselves) are most likely to do so. Another commenter, Gil, makes this case quite well:

At the end of the day it is people’s perceptions of how great, or not so great, their places are that matters most…I have yet to attend a public hearing on a proposed project where anything resembling “community attachment” has emerged in the dialogue that emanates from the planners, or engineers, or architects, or those that interpret the rules.

There is a misconception of how community knowledge should be integrated into the design process that we have encountered often in our work around the world. The idea is not that the pen and paper should be handed over to community members to create a final design, but that their needs and concerns be treated as contextual factors that are just as important as the shape of the site, the surrounding buildings, or the site’s location within a city. People make a space into a place–or, as Cindy Frewen writes:

When integrated and understanding place and people, design can mean thoughtfully imagined, beautiful, remarkable, moving…Design can help place, if we understand the need to be relevant and connected.

Commenter Cindy Frewen cites Kansas City's River Market as an example of a "place based, grassroots, emergent" design process. / Photo: Scott Unrein via Flickr

A good designer is someone who thinks creatively about how to develop the most efficient and attractive solution possible to a given problem. For architects, this means creating places that are not just visually appealing, but that are also responsive to the needs that the people who will use those places–not the needs that the architect thinks those people want addressed. When design is responsive (not enslaved) to local needs, it’s better for everyone involved: the people who use a place, and the architects, who can point to a well-used and loved place rather than a pristine object. It is our belief that, if more architects were to take a Place-centered approach in their work, it would create a much broader constituency for their work.

It’s also important to acknowledge, though, that non-designers are part of the problem, too. Decades of top-down decision-making have led large chunks of the vocal public to be distrusting of architects and urban planners today. In some cities, this has created a culture where any change is seen as bad change, and community involvement can be, for designers, a headache at best. As The Overhead Wire writes, about San Francisco:

When there is an open piece of land, often times people don’t think it should be anything.  It’s kind of crazy, especially with housing costs so high.

While NIMBYism won’t disappear overnight, architects and designers can begin to counteract this knee-jerk fear of change by treating the communities that surround a project site as part of the context that informs the building or public space they are trying to create. It’s important to remember that, as Ben Brown writes in a recent post on the Better! Cities & Towns blog, most people are “driven by intuition first, reason second.” People are very good at intuiting whether or not a new addition to their neighborhood is saying “come visit” or “keep away!”

So how do we communicate the value of understanding people as a fundamental part of a site’s context–both to architects who would choose to operate as “lone geniuses,” and to members of the public who would rather fight development than try to improve it? As commenter Greg cautions:

I don’t think the argument [for an Architecture of Place] will be broadly persuasive until we find a way to take it out of the purely subjective. Because others can and will respond “but that building doesn’t make me feel that way,” and then there is an impasse.

Thorbjoern Mann, shortly thereafter, suggests that scale is the critical issue to be addressed:

The disconnect between ‘high architecture’ and the life of places can be traced to several factors. One is the habit of making decisions about projects looking at scale models of the proposed buildings. The larger the building, the more the viewer’s attention is drawn to its overall shape, form, geometry, and away from what happens at the ground level where people interact with it.

Says The Alley Project's Erik Howard: "The best design is built around people." / Photo: youngnation.us via The Huffington Post

And Graig Donnelly points to an article on the Huffington Post about The Alley Project (TAP) in Detroit that beautifully illustrates how a participatory design process–especially one that builds off of existing community efforts–can create a more powerful sense of place than any of the buildings listed in our Architecture of Place Hall of Shame. Explains TAP’s Erik Howard: “Good design speaks to activities and people. Then those get translated into design solutions. The best design is built around people.”

We couldn’t agree more.

One of the key principles to remember when trying to create a great public square is that the inner square and outer square must work together. Active edges (sidewalk cafes, museums, shops) feed into the center; in turn, a lively scene at the heart of a square creates a buzz that draws more people to the area, generating more activity for edge uses. It’s symbiotic!

The video above illustrates this principle using imagery from our study of Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, Texas. Home to one of the most iconic buildings in America, the plaza itself is more of a place to stand for a photo op than a place where people linger and enjoy. As you can see, creating a sense of connection and flow between the inner and outer square is key to success.