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. He works on, evaluates and photographs public spaces in around 50 cities and 10 countries every year. Ethan has been integral to the development of Placemaking as a transformative approach to community development, planning and urban design.

During over 11 years at PPS, Ethan has led a broad spectrum of Placemaking efforts, providing technical assistance to revamp and re-envision many important public spaces. Recent highlights have included Portland Oregon’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, Times Square in New York, Kennedy Plaza in Providence, RI and Sub Centro Las Condes in Santiago, Chile. He has also helped to shape many new public space-driven development plans, including plans for multi-billion dollar projects in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Dubai.

Utilizing lessons learned through his project work, 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. He has also trained hundreds of professionals through leading more than 20 workshops across Australia and New Zealand.

In order to begin to institutionalize Placemaking in cities, Ethan has initiated and led partnerships with agency and advocacy leaders in cities to build capacity on all levels, implement demonstration projects and facilitate systemic change. This strategy has been successfully employed in a wide range of cities including Chicago, IL, Indianapolis, IN, San Francisco, CA, Flint, MI, and Mississauga, Ontario.

This approach has had the most tangible effect in NYC where, Ethan leads PPS efforts. He co-founded the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign, as 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. As an outcome, 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, 9th Avenue in Hells Kitchen, the Meatpacking District, Columbus Avenue and Grand Army Plaza. The campaign and its demonstration projects have lead to the creation of bold shift in NYC transportation policy including a Public Plaza Program that is reclaiming street space for dynamic new public spaces in all 59 Community Board Districts of NYC.

Writing and Photography

Ethan’s writing has appeared broadly being featured in Streetsblog, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Downtown Idea Exchange, Planetizen, and on Prime Time Radio on NPR. His photography from around the world makes up the bulk of the images in PPS publications and appears in a broad 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 City Council, Melbourne, Australia

Neighborhood Summit, "Great People, Great Places, Great City", Garland, TX

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

Education

Ethan studied sociology, environmental studies and economics as an undergraduate 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 did his graduate work at Antioch University Seattle's Center for Creative Change in Environment and Community. He attributes much of his Placemaking education to the communities he has worked with, and to his father who founded PPS.