Why are some places better than others? Why do we get out of our cars and walk through certain towns, and take the bypass around others? Why are some neighborhood parks assets to their communities, and others liabilities? What if we want our public spaces to be assets in our communities and neighborhoods, but don’t know how to make them thrive? How do we make our public spaces into great community places?
The result of 25 years of experience working in communities around the country and internationally, How to Turn a Place Around is a primer for everyone from mayors to community members on evaluating and transforming public spaces into thriving centers of community activity. Sections include: Why Places are Important to Cities; What Makes a Place Great; Why Many Public Spaces Fail; An Alternative Approach to Planning; The 11 Principles of Creating Great Public Spaces; and a Workbook For Evaluating Public Spaces. Through examples of peoples’ experiences in other cities, PPS demonstrates that, with an understanding of how a place works, any place can be “turned around.” “Today there is a growing understanding of how a focus on place can change how design and engineering professionals function,” writes Fred Kent in the book’s forward. “If we move away from our own agendas and toward the idea of creating places, there will be a major shift in how our communities and cities function and grow. In fact, many communities are turning to alternatives to the traditional, project-oriented approach to neighborhood revitalization. We are making headway. Downtowns are once again becoming places to walk and shop and gather. Our city parks are greener than at any time since the turn of the last century, and we are discovering new ways for them and for our downtown plazas and civic squares to function as centers of community life.”
The year 2000 marked Project for Public Spaces’ 25th anniversary as a nonprofit technical assistance, research and educational organization. PPS’s mission, to create and sustain public places that build communities, is achieved through programs in transportation, parks, plazas and civic squares, public markets, and community institutions and public buildings. Since PPS’s founding in 1975, the organization has worked in over 1,000 communities, within the U.S. and abroad, to help grow their public spaces into vital community places.
PPS' Approach
PPS helps accomplish these changes through a community/place-based approach to planning and decision-making that we have developed and broadened in the 25 years since our organization evolved from William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project. This approach involves looking at, listening to and asking questions of the people in a community about their needs and aspirations. We work with them to create a vision around the places they view as important to community life and to their daily experience; and we help them implement their ideas beginning with small scale, doable improvements that can be phased in quickly and immediately begin to benefit a community.
This process is carried out with such tools as systematic on-site observations, time-lapse filming, customized interviews and user surveys, that allow us to go out to people in the places where they live, work and congregate to gather their input, document and analyze their activities, and reach those who otherwise might not participate in an improvement effort. The process also includes facilitated public forums, workshops, meetings and committees that give people an opportunity from the effort’s outset to identify issues, contribute ideas and make decisions about improvements that can holistically address their manifold concerns and enhance the places where they live and work. Using this approach, we are able to help rebuild communities both in spirit and as places.
PPS Initiatives
PPS’s "place-making" mission is reinforced on a broader level through three major programs: the Urban Parks Institute, an initiative to educate and involve people and promote public/private cooperation in improving urban parks through research, conferences, workshops, a web site, a newsletter and training sessions; the Public Market Collaborative, created by PPS in 1987 to further the preservation and establishment of public markets and to assist communities in market development, design and operations through technical assistance, an international market conference, publications, classes and forums; and Building Livable Communities through Transportation, an effort to advance the community building capacity of transportation, through workshops, an exchange program, educational outreach, research, information dissemination, policy discussion and demonstration projects.
