After 700 years, a Sicilian market’s heart still beats. It’s a place where old men selling olives suddenly start singing their favorite arias.

Image (c) Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

Speeding is down at an intersection in Ramsey, NJ, where temporary traffic calming devices were installed at the end of last month.

Modifications to the corner were just one of the changes suggested by Project for Public Spaces during a study of the streets around a train station that opened in 2004.

Fred Kent believes that you can have the most attractively built community in the world, but if people don’t come together to mix in public spaces, it’s just dead space.

His theory is that attractive, non-automobile dominated public spaces layered with multi-use functions will pump vitality back into communities that have become too isolated.

“The Brattle Walk isn’t an important place or, even, a remarkably beautiful one. It’s not going to appear in any books about great architecture. That’s not the point. It’s not about fame or fortune or what’s called “signature architecture.” It’s about how you make good cities by getting the small things right.”

On Tuesday, May 22nd, Cynthia Nikitin, Vice President with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in New York City, will speak in Cleveland Heights, OH on the topic “Main Street at Work: Shaping Neighborhood Commercial Centers around Places.” The event will be held at Forest Hill Church, 3031 Monticello Blvd. (corner of Lee Blvd.) at 7:00 p.m. Free parking is available behind the church.
In her talk, Ms. Nikitin will discuss how the key to revitalizing neighborhood commercial corridors and retail districts is to re-imagine them as a series of dynamic linked destinations, managed as a whole. Examples will be presented of downtown neighborhood main streets that have turned themselves around by reorienting around the notion of “Place.”
As a seasoned project director of PPS, Cynthia Nikitin has more than 20 years of experience in public art administration, public space management and programming, creating transit centers as public spaces, civic buildings as community assets and facilitating workshops for community and transportation professionals to add greater value to communities with public space projects. PPS is an international non-profit organization that creates the public spaces that build and sustain communities.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is jointly sponsored by FutureHeights and the Cleveland Chapter of the Ohio Planning Conference. For more information, call (216) 320-1423 or email info@futureheights.org.

For more information, download the event flyer here.

An op-ed from the New York Times on possible changes to the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program in the 2007 Farm Bill, and how this could impact farmers’ markets.

Brian Ray attended PPS’s training course “How to Turn a Place Around,” and writes a review of his experience learning a new approach to designing great public spaces.

“Flames soared through the high roof of the 134-year-old Eastern Market as firefighters struggled to control the conflagration. By dawn on April 30, about $30 million in damage was incurred.

Immediately, public grief welled up. Throngs flocked to the site seven blocks east of the U.S. Capitol, comforting themselves and the distraught vendors of meats, produce, cheeses and bakery goods.  Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty was immediately on the scene; the embers were still cooling as he pledged to restore the building “to 100 percent of its architectural and historic splendor.” Within hours, the Capitol Hill Community Foundation launched a fund to benefit the market and its vendors.

Why did Washingtonians react so viscerally, so rapidly? What makes one building matter so much?”

Read more in Neal Peirce’s column.

American museums, still flush with expansion fever, have become more convinced than ever that real estate is destiny. Every museum in the country seems to be opening a new wing or a satellite building or scouting locations for one. And the recent news that the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth has hired Renzo Piano brings the number of American museum jobs the Italian architect has won to 63. OK, to nine. But still.

Few museums, however, can hope to match the double expansion pulled off in just 3 1/2 months by the Seattle Art Museum. Coolly restrained, the SAM expansion keeps its ego in check and the focus on what’s inside.

Fred Kent has spent three decades developing a common-sense approach to streets, buildings and Shuman sociability.  Read a profile of Fred and PPS’ work by Governing Magazine here.