By: Elizabeth A. Evitts

When Fred Kent founded the Project for Public Spaces in 1975 in New York City, he had no idea that his small start-up would evolve into an organizing tool for cities and citizens in twenty-six countries around the world. Today, PPS is a sought-after agency with a full-time staff of twenty-five supporting the creation and maintenance of multifaceted, engaging places. Fred Kent spoke with Urbanite from his office in New York about what it means to create a great place and why the concept of placemaking has gone international.

Q. You have said on behalf of the Project for Public Spaces, “When you focus on place, you do everything differently.” What does that mean?

A. Successful placemaking shifts the responsibility from the professional to the citizen—to the user of that place—and he or she becomes the defining force within it. That’s a fundamental change. It’s about people saying, “I can make my park a better place.” You realize that the government isn’t structured to deliver the kind of places people want to be in. They are not cross-disciplinary; they are more focused on one particular discipline.

Q. So there’s no cross-pollination of ideas. Everyone works in individual silos and can’t see the forest for the trees.

A. Right. Whereas the community is looking at it holistically, as a place they want to be. They want to be able to cross the street, they want to be able to shop, they want to be able to gather. They have values. It’s just that they are never asked. They’re never given that responsibility.

Q. Baltimore, like many American cities, is seeing a lot of new development. I think some citizens look around and see the cranes and the condos going up, and they’re not sure what to do about it. They feel impotent to impact change.

A. When you say you’re going to live in an urban area, you’re not coming to live in isolation. You’re coming to live in part of a community. A lot of the development that’s going on is not about creating a sense of place, it’s about building these buildings. So we have a lot of misguided development that is not delivering what people want.

Q. Essentially you’re talking about the difference between space and place.

A. Yes. The typical qualities of a design do not necessarily mean that you’re creating a place. A place is something that has far more dimension to it. It’s a much more subtle and complex set of issues that need to be looked at to create a real sense of place.

Q. In your organization’s publication Making Places you once named Fells Point one of the twenty best North American neighborhoods. What makes for a great neighborhood?

A. What we’re hearing more and more is the need for authenticity. The real thing. People want places where they’re comfortable, where they feel like they can connect with other people. Those are precious communities and we don’t have enough, even though everyone wants them.

Q. It’s a real irony. We all want that connection, yet we don’t seem to be able to foster it in our built environments.

A. We have obstacles. We have design professionals who think they have to create their own image of a place instead of realizing the community is more important than they are; we have traffic engineers who have a one-dimensional, narrow approach. If you ask anyone in a community, “What’s one of the main issues?” They’re going to say traffic. Speed of traffic, noise of traffic, inability to walk, the isolation that occurs from it, the tendency to support large-scale malls rather than local commercial businesses. We see it all over the place.

Q. So when you start to look at the real functions and needs of a community, then the best kind of a plan can be very different from what is being realized by developers?

A. Absolutely. We have this phrase: “You cannot know what you end up with.” It means that you’re open for change, you’re open for flexibility, you’re open for spontaneity. It opens up all kinds of doors that are generally shut when you’re dealing with a professional that needs to simply finish that project and then move on to something else.

Q. When you open the doors to community dialogue it can get messy.

A. So that’s why you partner and share with the living community. And then they’ll take responsibility. I’ve never seen a city government alone doing it. If a city government is a partner with a community that plays a role in placemaking, you can get fabulous results. But if the city government is defined by discipline, and imposes that discipline on that community, you will get very, very meager results. It will never become place to people then.

Q. You have a publication that talks about how communities can learn to make better places.

A. We did a book called How to Turn a Place Around. It’s been translated into Japanese and Czech, and we just learned today that it’s going to be translated into Danish. This idea of placemaking is really becoming universal. We get about three thousand people who come to our website everyday and about one-third of those are from outside of the United States.

Q. So this isn’t a uniquely American issue?

A. Today and yesterday, I spent most of my day working on Dubai, Hong Kong, and a city in Israel on the waterfront.

Q.What’s with this escalating international interest in placemaking?

A. There’s a convergence going on. A lot of people are beginning to come around and realize, “Boy, if we have a good place, we have fewer health issues. We have fewer obesity issues; we have fewer crowd issues.” The benefits are amazing. In truth, this is about democracy. This is about citizen engagement. It’s about community health in terms of physical mobility, but it’s also about disease, it’s about isolation, it’s about making connections, it’s about community, it’s about environment. It is about place and where you live and work. These are not little issues.

Q. In your thirty-plus years of doing this, is there a city or a place that has really turned around?

A. We’ve looked back at New York City and we had a major impact on Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, to name a few. To me, what’s happened to New York is that it has been defined by places and destinations. Redefined, I believe. There are twenty destinations within Central Park that are unique, active places. It’s a systemic change. And then you realize who did this: These places were developed by people—really passionate people. It wasn’t about city government. It was about having people with passionate forces in those areas.

Q. Your organization partners with residents through programs like your Great Cities Initiative. What lessons do you bring to communities to help them galvanize their own passionate citizenry?

A. We’ve created this extremely festive approach, which we call the Place Performance Game. We ask people to go out to the places that are important to them in their community. It might be just one park, it might be ten places all around the city, and they evaluate them and come back and talk about what improvements could be made. It creates this brainstorming activity among people who normally don’t know each other. You see this fundamental shift in people when they realize that they have to be the masters of their own destiny. PPS, which knows as much as anyone does about public spaces, has found that without equivocation, the people in a community are far better than we are at figuring out what to do with their space. We can never, ever do better than a community.

Q. Did you have any idea that your nonprofit would take off like this?

A. I had no idea what I was going to end up doing, but somehow I was confident it was something important. And now, I’m totally humbled by the amazing idea that this is, and how transformative it can be to communities all over the world.

Q. As a journalist who writes about design and development, architecture and culture, and sustainability, I’m seeing all of these different groups start to have the same conversations and begin to recognize that they are all really talking about the same thing: Creating a healthy, happy place.

A. You’re right. What if we built our cities around happiness? What an amazing idea!

Q. Wouldn’t that be something?

A. There won’t be a lot of people that resist that. Imagine saying, “No, we don’t want anyone to be happy about community.” That wouldn’t go over too well. We need excellence. We need places that allow people to develop to their fullest potential. That’s what’s behind all of this. Being comfortable, happy, and feeling good about yourself.
EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT