“It takes a community to create a great place,” advised PPS’s Andy Wiley-Schwartz in his keynote presentation at the annual meeting of Elmira Downtown Development in Elmira, NY.

Andy, with Cynthia Nikitin and Nick Grossman, kicked-off the planning process for the Elmira Promenade. Revitalizing the Promenade is part of downtown development plan to create a city center in Elmira.

Jane Jacobs, the writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet of her own Greenwich Village street and came up with a book that challenged and changed the way people view cities, died today in Toronto, where she lived. She was 89.

“Tall buildings affect cities in two different ways that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is as sculptural objects framed in the sky, where their impact is artistic or symbolic. The other is where the buildings meet the ground and create either pleasant or oppressive spaces where people walk and congregate. Architects regularly misfire with big buildings that are bad by both measures, but the tendency is to fail more often and more egregiously at street level.

One reason is that it’s fairly difficult to make a 500-foot-high building seem humane and welcoming to a 5-foot-something biped approaching it. The other is that a building’s owners are naturally more concerned with the way the building reads in the skyline, because that’s where its marketable image gets fixed in the public eye. “

Blair Kamin looks into the importance of public spaces in light of all the immigration rallies occuring across the country.

PPS to work on city-wide initiative that includes Riverbank Park and Flint Farmers’ Market.

Recent demonstrations and immigration rallies have proved that public spaces are very much alive.

“These are the nation’s civic squares. This is a way of expressing things on a massive leve,” said Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces.

“Transportation affects almost every element on the town warrant, from the cost of our town roads, trails and sidewalks to the human services that help our seniors and shut-ins get to religious services and medical appointments.”

NH DOT has created a transportation plan that the Community Advisory Committee is presenting in town meetings across the state to get feedback from the public. Lew Feldstein, co-chair of the committee, says “Transportation is too important to be left to the transportation planners.”

The art of the flaneur - wandering aimlessly around the city, observing its daily rhythms - has been revived by photobloggers.

New solar-powered pay kiosks are increasing city revenue at formerly metered or free spaces, and new plans are afoot to rollback after hours free parking, meaning nights and weekends could cost drivers.

With comparisons to Piazza Campo del Fiori in Rome, a new public square in Rockville, MD, “will demonstrate why public open spaces conceived in the abstract, with design focused only on formal attributes, often yield dead spaces. To succeed, such spaces also must be enriched and enlivened by activity.