Project for Public Spaces

Success Story

How to Turn a Place Around


(2000-present)

PPS's signature book and training course have inspired people everywhere to make a difference in their own communities.

I

t's surprising to note that for the first 25 years of PPS's existence, we never produced a publication specifically about Placemaking and its potential to revitalize communities. Our stock-in-trade up to that point had been a 35 millimeter slideshow with twin slide projectors. It made a strong impression, but once the lights came back on and the slides were packed away, there was no permanent record of these important ideas.
The emphasis on transcending disciplines makes the "How to Turn a Place Around" workshops unique.

So in 1999 PPS decided to set down our experiences and approach, developing a book and training course that would allow these ideas and methodology to reach an audience beyond the communities in which we had been working. How to Turn a Place Around was born out of a series of discussions about PPS's core principles, about the best ways of creating really great places, and about which tools we could offer people to help them "turn around" places in their own communities.

The book, first published in 2000 and now in its third printing, is used as a text in university classrooms as well as passed from hand to hand by community activists and design professionals around the globe. It has so far been translated into Czech and, soon, Japanese.


Fred Kent leads a site tour for the "How to Turn a Place Around" Training Course.

The first training course followed in the Spring of 2002, and since then, we have trained nearly 300 professionals--from landscape architects to police officers--in the principles of Placemaking. This emphasis on transcending disciplines, using various New York locations as a laboratory to explore what works and what doesn't, makes the "How to Turn a Place Around" workshops unique. Demand for the course has been so strong we decided to take it overseas, conducting a London version in 2003 in partnership with the Prince's Foundation.

With a sequel book on 101 ways to improve your neighborhood in the works and the training course going as strong as ever, "How to Turn a Place Around" has become our signature effort to show designers, community activists, and public officials how to become practitioners of Placemaking.