Project for Public Spaces

Success Story

Partnership with GSA's Good Neighbor Program


(1999-present)

PPS has helped turn public buildings across the country into catalysts for downtown revitalization and development.

G

SA is the largest urban landholder in the nation. And with a federal mandate to give first consideration to locating in central business areas and historic buildings, GSA is charged with concentrating most of its new development in downtowns, and encouraging tenant agencies to embrace center city locations. The Good Neighbor Program approached PPS in 1999 to help create safe, attractive, and people-friendly public spaces around government properties, making better places to work and live in the downtowns where GSA does business, that benefit tenants, clients and visitors and the public at large.

PPS and the Good Neighbor Program are working to instill a Placemaking ethic within GSA.

During the last five years, PPS has worked with public buildings in over 30 cities, ranging from Montpelier, Vermont, where a citizens' workshop re-envisioned the local post office as a community center, to Omaha, Nebraska--where the development of a National Park Service facility on the banks of the Missouri River presented an opportunity to create a world-class waterfront. In each instance, PPS helped GSA use its prominent real estate holdings to support community development and civic revitalization efforts.


Using PPS's Place Performance Evaluation Game, stakeholders evaluate the area around a GSA property in San Francisco.

PPS and the Good Neighbor Program are also working to instill a Placemaking ethic within GSA, and by now has trained more than 400 federal property managers how to transform dead zones into thriving hubs of activity. A handbook called The Property Managers Guide to Improving Public Spaces that any building manager can use to evaluate and improve the spaces around their buildings, is slated for release in 2005.