Who We Are

Ethan B. Kent

Vice President

Ethan Kent is an authority in the practice of Placemaking, with experience on over 200 PPS projects. His experiences evaluating and photographing public spaces in hundreds of cities in over 50 countries forms the foundation of his work.

During over 10 years at PPS, Ethan has led a broad spectrum of Placemaking efforts, providing technical assistance to revamp and re-envision places in diverse settings from Portland Oregon’s Pioneer Courthouse Square to Santiago, Chile, to many of New York City’s most underperforming public spaces. He has also helped to shape many new development plans including proposals for multi-billion dollar projects in Hong Kong, Dubai and Los Angeles.

Utilizing lessons learned through his work with community members, Ethan has created and conducted Placemaking training courses for professionals of various disciplines from city planning staff in Vancouver, BC, to community development corporations in Detroit; from public housing developers in Sweden to traffic engineers in New Jersey.

In order to apply Placemaking citywide, Ethan defined and launched the Great Cities Initiative to build local capacity to implement targeted projects that engage high level influence and broad community partnerships. This strategy has been successfully employed in a wide range of cities including Flint, MI, Bellingham, WA, Mississauga, Ontario and Indianapolis, IN and is currently being launched in Chicago, IL, and Boulder, CO.

Ethan also leads PPS efforts in NYC, co-founding and managing PPS’ role in the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign, an effort to challenge auto-centric transportation policy and inspire a new public vision of streets as dynamic destinations. To launch the campaign, he directed an educational exhibit called Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York, that has appeared at the Municipal Arts Society, the Conde Nast Building and the Brooklyn Public Library. In coordination with the campaign, Ethan has initiated and helped manage Placemaking processes with local stakeholders in some of NYC’s most important yet auto-dominated areas including Times Square, the Meat Packing District, Hells Kitchen, Columbus Avenue, and Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. The campaign has been credited for helping to bring about a broad transformation at the NYC Department of Transportation and many on-the-ground street improvements.

Writing and Photography

Ethan’s writing in the PPS newsletter, website, and on Streetsblog has been featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Downtown Idea Exchange, Planetizen, and on Prime Time Radio on NPR. Each year Ethan contributes around 10,000 images from more than 50 cities to the PPS image collection, with many appearing in a wide range of media.

Presentations

An inspiring and persuasive speaker, Ethan has brought PPS' Placemaking message to many groups around the world. Ethan has recently given keynote presentations at conferences of:

International Cities, Town Centers and Communities Society, Auckland, NZ;

Moving the Economy, Toronto, ON;

International Parks Forum, Bogotá, Colombia;

The Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory, Providence, RI;

Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation, Brooklyn, NY;

NY State Chambers Alliance, Albany, NY

Strategic Thinking Forum, Melbourne, Australia

He also has given presentations at conferences of the Urban Land Institute, Local Initiative Support Corp., Placematters, Neighborworks, CAPACD, Planners Network, Eco Metropolis, Car Free Cities and the World Social Forum and to many university audiences including Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Reed, NYU, Bowdoin, New School, University of Washington and Harvard.

Education

Ethan studied sociology, environmental studies and economics at Bowdoin College. He explored local development issues in the context of globalization during a year of travel around the world as a participant in the International Honors Program. Ethan completed all course work for a Masters Degree in Environment and Community at Antioch University Seattle. He attributes much of his Placemaking education, as well as any “miseducation,” to his father who founded PPS.