The Placemaking Round-Up
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
The Biweekly Bazaar
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
By Ethan Kent, Vice President
What kind of places do we want to create? What kind of communities do we want to live in? What kind of world do we hope to see in the future?
These questions are at the heart of environmentalism today, but are seldom posed. Environmentalism can perhaps best accomplish its goals for humans to impact less by leading the conversation on how we can impact more.
Crisis drives people to action but often does not lead us to address underlying challenges and opportunities. Through the years, environmentalists have effectively drawn attention to many problems, galvanized action to remedy them and limited the overall damage. But today the movement can seize an opportunity to launch a discussion about the world we want and how we can empower people to make it happen.
Project for Public Spaces is rooted in the founding of the environmental movement and our work has been shaped by calls to action on issues like resource overconsumption, ecological breakdown and climate change. We continue to consider environmentalists as key allies and remain as concerned as ever about what’s happening to our natural ecosystems, but we also see that the core of humans’ dysfunctional relationship with the environment lies in our communities.
Since 1975, PPS has been invited into thousands of communities in more than 40 countries around the world, where we continually find that communities’ ability to care about and address these larger crises are undermined by the failures of their immediate environments.
It is in fact these immediate environments that humans most directly interact with and experience, and it is this place level or community scale that Environmentalism has largely ignored. We can perhaps best ramp people onto a broader environmental agenda through engaging them in and challenging them to take responsibility for and shape these public realms beyond their homes. This is a process we call Placemaking, which is dedicated to encouraging and empowering people to take ownership over and contribute to the world beyond their private property and work together to improve them. Placemaking is the common sense process through which the human places we most value are created and sustained.
Only by helping people connect to, care for and shape the world beyond their front doors will we be able to instill people with a capacity to redress the larger environmental crises. Incorporating Placemaking as an essential element of Environmentalism will lead to a reinvention of citizenship and the discovery of new tools and strategies to change the world.
Environmental action today tends to work in silos around seemingly abstract issues with incremental goals, perpetuating a very passive role for citizens. For instance, the narrow goal of consuming less carbon is limiting the outcomes that Environmentalism and carbon can bring about. As the building block of life, carbon’s potential for creativity is perhaps its biggest reason for conserving it. It is when we use carbon for goals that do not create life that we are putting it to waste. Having less impact is noble, but aspiring to have a big impact, to create the world we want starting in the place where we live, work and play, is a transformative agenda that inaugurates the next phase of the environmental movement.
Environmentalism is still largely focused on limiting pollution and changing consumption patterns, which are important goals but ultimately don’t go far enough in offering a compelling vision for fundamental change. Rather than concentrating our energies on narrowly consumerist and technological issues, we can co-create sweeping solutions by instilling public demand for far-reaching change and showing how we can collaboratively envision the world we want. Greener technology and products will advance at a quicker pace if there’s a broad movement to create better communities and a stronger planet.
A new environmental agenda that draws on the strengths of Placemaking will continue to ask the familiar questions about any new project or action:
But we will also be asking new questions:
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