Creating Great Public Market Places - Training and Visioning Workshops

PPS offers a series of customized workshops to help communities develop improvement agendas that encourage collaboration and provide a head start toward positive change.

PPS’s public market training and visioning workshops are designed for market managers, sponsors, and vendors as well as their diverse community partners -- from mayors and community development officials to health institutions to neighborhood organizers and sponsors. These partners can often support the market and expand its impacts on broader community issues such as improving health, creating jobs, and revitalizing communities.

Workshop Types

Based on PPS’s extensive public market experience and its successful "How to Create Successful Markets" training course, PPS market workshops are tailored to the specific needs of a local community. Two types of workshops are available:

"Getting Started” -- Start-up workshops for new markets, combining training with preliminary visioning for a local public market project. This approach allows participants to learn and apply our unique approach to public market placemaking.
“Strengthening Your Market” – Workshops for existing markets, combining training with an evaluation of the market and how it can be strengthened from a design and management perspective to attract more business and customers.

PPS has conducted special custom-designed community-based workshops for 30 years throughout the United States and abroad and has found them to be highly successful in bringing diverse interests together to share their ideas and concerns, in producing high quality, workable recommendations and in leading to tangible action and results.

Workshop Components

PPS customarily includes the following components as part of a workshop geared to strengthening an existing market:

Review of Existing Plans and Materials
Prior to the visit, PPS reviews all relevant background information, for example, existing planning reports, historic data, previous plans, graphic materials, other local studies and recent newspaper articles. Major points of discussion are outlined in preparation for the workshop and site visit.
On-Site Tour
At the outset of the site visit, PPS visits the existing or potential markets site with business and civic leaders, as well as other key community people, to become familiar with the environs and context of the market project.
Workshop
The actual workshop is conducted as an invited forum for interested members of the larger community (residents, business interests, employees, property owners, merchants, visitors, civic leaders, etc.). The workshop addresses issues such as:
- What makes a successful market
- Good practices, as well as the bad
- Goal setting and business planning
- Site planning and design
- Market and vendor management
- Market sponsorship
The workshop also includes visioning for the local public market project, including:
- Goals of the market or re-visioning an existing market – how the market can address broader community issues
- Creating a product mix that attracts diverse customers
- Making the market a great place
- Leadership and sponsorship to guide the market’s development
- Identification of next steps and need for additional feasibility studies

"Place Performance Evaluation"
As a half to one day “add-on,” PPS has devised a special "place performance evaluation" exercise that sets the stage for a cooperative program of improvement by getting people in the community to think about positive change and how they can work together to achieve it. Following a presentation, participants play “the PPS MarketPlace Game” where teams evaluate the existing or potential market site and develop short and long term ideas of how the sites could be improved and developed. The “Game” gets people thinking about how the market functions, or could function, as a public place – how to enliven it, add more economic activity, and revitalize the surrounding community.
Short Report
Following up the workshop visit, PPS further reviews and analyzes the information collected from on-site tour observations, interviews, and the workshop and prepares a memo summarizing problems, opportunities and recommendations for an overall direction and implementation strategy, based on participant comments and conclusions.