PPS Looks to the Future with Hope

Embarking on new projects to promote Placemaking around the world.

E

Launching the Placemaking Movement

A new way of thinking about communities, about the environment, and about public life is sweeping across North America and the world. It's a grassroots phenomenon led by people who want places they can gather with others as neighbors, friends, and citizens. This is the foundation of a new movement gathering steam around the ideas of Placemaking, which taps into millions of people's hunger for a deeper sense of place.

PPS is at the forefront of this emerging movement, and one key step in launching it will be a series of PPS-hosted regional meetings to chart the direction Placemaking activists want to go. We are moving forward with plans for the first such conference in the Pacific Northwest, with future ones planned for the Midwest and East Coast.

Building Strong Communities around the Transformative Idea of Place

With the unveiling of the Great Cities Initiative late last year, PPS is applying what it has learned in many individual projects to the overall work of making great neighborhoods, towns and metropolitan regions. PPS will help cities bring a more unified approach to managing public spaces, moving beyond the old habit of shaping communities through the lens of narrow goals and focusing instead on broader patterns that encourage urban spaces to be used by many people for a wealth of activities.

The driving idea behind this initiative is that you can build great cities around great public spaces. We call this notion "The Power of Ten," because every great public space offers at least ten things to do, and every neighborhood and district within a city should have ten great public spaces. The Great Cities Initiative will apply the "The Power of Ten" philosophy to create more livable cities place by place, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The Politics of Common Concerns

We know that when you get a group of people talking about the places that matter to them, political and cultural differences are quickly set aside in favor of common goals. Placemaking helps bridge the gaps that exist now between Blue America and Red America, urban America and exurban America, poor America and wealthy America. PPS's approach to public places can show communities, and the country as a whole, how to reunite in a common purpose by creating public places where we can all engage as citizens.

Placemaking Goes Global

Based on our substantial experience abroad, we know that Placemaking can be a tool to encourage democratic renewal and economic development everywhere. PPS will expand our work throughout the world, continuing our strong presence in the Balkans and the Czech Republic as well as getting involved with communities in Australia, Italy, the UK, Denmark, Latin America and Japan.

Reinvigorating Professional Disciplines

PPS's training courses have already had a noticeable impact on fields ranging from urban planning to landscape design to transportation engineering, and we are committed to bring ing the useful tools of Placemaking to many more people in place-oriented professions. We also plan on introducing our Placemaking approach to more universities and planning and design programs, where too many students are still taught to mindlessly "push the envelope" instead of learning how to nurture and create great places.

Matching Transportation Planning with Community Needs

Building on our successes in New Jersey and New Hampshire, PPS will help other State Departments of Transporation incorporate Context-Sensitive Solutions into their long-range plans -- shifting their chief aim from the faster movement of traffic to a broader set of goals that sustain community, environmental and aesthetic goals. Highway engineers and transit agencies make excellent partners in these activities alongside community leaders such as business owners, health care professionals, educators, recreation directors and active citizens. Cities and towns were developed as places of exchange--commercial and personal--and Placemaking can assist transportation agencies in focusing on these community goals while taming cars and speed as the presumptive focus of urban transportation services.

A Sense of Place as the Engine of Economic Development

In the coming years PPS will identify and disseminate models of how successful investment in public spaces strengthens local economies, including commercial districts, public markets, parks, and civic squares. Working with experienced business leaders like Ron Sher, founder of the successful Third Place bookstores around Seattle, we will be connecting the ideas of social capital, place capital and Asset Based Community Development with the Placemaking movement as part of a new push to build healthy local economies.