“It’s hard to create a space that will not attract people, what is remarkable, is how often this has been accomplished.”  -William H. (Holly) Whyte

Cities defined by great public destinations are becoming ever more important in a competitive globalized economy.  Examples can be seen everywhere, from the transformation of Bryant Park and Central Park in New York, to the emergence of Lower Downtown in Denver and the revival of once-overlooked cities such as Barcelona, Copenhagen and Melbourne.

Based on more than 30 years of work at Project for Public Spaces, the non-profit organization I founded after working with Holly Whyte, I am convinced that place-based initiatives are the best way to promote vitality and prosperity in cities everywhere.  Our experience helping people in more than 2500 towns around the world improve their communities shows that mobilizing people to make great places strengthens neighborhoods, cities and entire metropolitan areas.

Nearly every city today can brag about at least one success story where determined citizens, guided by the idea we call Placemaking, made a difference in the place they call home. Even downtown Detroit now enjoys a popular town square—Campus Martius— whicnh has brought thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment to the hard-hit city center.  These remarkable turn-around stories did not happen through the grand visions of designers, but rather by the creativity of a diverse group of people who thought imaginatively and applied broad skills to transform their communities into great places.

But the recent trend toward “iconic” architecture—which has gained a big following in the media and among high-profile clients, winning numerous architectural prizes—minimizes the importance of citizen input and dismisses the goals of creating great public places. Instead it promotes a design-centric philosophy where all that matters is the artistic statement conceived by an internationally recognized celebrity. Frank Gehry, an architect of considerable talent and imagination, drew world attention to the iconic design movement with his famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In the process, he inaugurated an era in which designers call all the shots in creating our cityscapes, leaving us with showy buildings meant to be admired from a distance rather than contributing to the vitality of everyday life in a local community.

Gehry's iconic Bilbao Museum makes a singular statement

Gehry’s Bilbao Museum made a definitive design statement when it opened in 1997, putting this Spanish city on the map of contemporary cultural destinations.  But this sort of media buzz enjoys a short life. To make an enduring impact, a place must continually reinvent itself to stay relevant to the times and its setting. The next step for this groundbreaking museum should be for it to evolve it into a great place that keeps people coming back for more than just architecture and art. It needs to become a spot where people naturally want to hang out in order to enjoy the entire experience and energy of an amazing city. Our assessment is that the Bilbao museum does not do that. We have praise for the building as a work of art, but not as a destination.

The two people coming out of the stairs at the sunken entryway were mugged by the two people in the above photo and their camera was stolen. Muggings are common in the empty plazas.

I am a big fan of some of Gehry’s buildings. I think the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park is outstanding – a true iconic architectural achievement. The concert stage, the “Trellis” that spreads an excellent sound system across a large expanse of grass and the seating area are all awesome. I think it is his finest work.

The Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millenium Park, Frank Gehry’s finest building, fosters vibrant public life and contextually creates a real center for Millennium Park.

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The public spaces around Queens Courthouse have been improved but are not yet a gathering space.

Sweeping changes in the judicial system and society call for courts to become civic gathering spots [T]he story that a building tells through its design may be as important to the community it serves as is its function. By shaping our thoughts about ourselves and our institutions, it will directly affect our efforts to work productively together. — Justice Stephen G. Breyer (United States Supreme Court, 1994–present)

The courthouse used to be a cornerstone of the community, a source of local pride and the nexus of social life and ritual. But today, courthouses and the public spaces that surround them are often physically and programmatically disconnected from public life, even though they usually occupy central property in a community. Citizens don’t visit their courthouses unless compelled to do so, and very few serve as public destinations.

The good news is that court properties have much potential for resurgence when there is positive leadership, open-minded management, and the desire for change. Courts have the opportunity and responsibility to serve as integral places, key parts of the communities in which they reside. Courts are, after all, the people’s houses of justice, and only by becoming engaging places can they live up to their potential.

While early American courthouses often shared space with other public institutions (like the post office or the county clerk) and were heavily used, more recent court design has encouraged segregation and specialization of uses, so that citizens have little reason to enter the doors of court buildings. The design of court facilities has shifted from welcoming to foreboding, and from public to monumental. The resulting diminution of the courthouse’s community role is indicative of a larger trend: a widening disconnect between the judicial system and public life. While courts are busier than ever, trials are vanishing, and more cases are resolved by private settlement or in non-public forums. Through such privatization, court spaces are no longer truly civic, and don’t support community vitality.

PPS's work with Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square has included efforts to connect the courthouse to the Square.

What is needed – and a real opportunity – is a fundamental reconsideration of how we think about and design court spaces. If courts find ways to recapture their relevance and resonance within communities, they could once again become civic destinations that engage with and respond to their users.

Project for Public Spaces is committed to playing a key role in facilitating these discussions. PPS has worked extensively to revitalize many types of civic centers, including courthouses, post offices, museums, libraries, and seats of government. Since 1999, PPS has partnered with the General Services Administration’s Good Neighbor Program in helping communities envision public spaces that will draw a variety of people, uses, and activities. PPS has worked in this capacity in almost two dozen cities.

PPS’s extensive placemaking experience with civic centers, and our history of collaboration with GSA, give us a strong foundation on which courts of all types can build in fulfilling their potential as true civic destinations.

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By Karen Levy with Fred Kent, President and Cynthia Nikitin, Civic Anchors Program Director for Project for Public Spaces, Inc. Karen Levy is an attorney and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology at Princeton University. Karen has been working with Project for Public Spaces as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Summer Fellow, a program sponsored by Yale Law School and Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.

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Federation Square, in Melbourne, had the primary goal to create a great place.

The Role of Placemaking in Fostering Better and More Creative Design

“Architecture needs to evolve from expressing the individual’s creativity to supporting the community’s creativity.” — Silvia Soonets, Architect, Arqui5

If the primary goal of architects and landscape architects was to create places that people want to be in, would we be designing our communities the way we do today? If contemporary architecture was asked to be responsive to community outcomes, public uses and human comfort would it be done differently? Would it create more demand for the skills of designers?

Looking at design magazines and looking at our cities, it appears that the professional shaping of the built environment has been reduced to creating isolated physical forms with little consideration for their contribution to a larger experience of a place. This reality no doubt closely reflects a demand on design professionals to merely create designs (for buildings, parks, roads, master plans, etc.). Since they have rarely been asked to create places that attract people, it follows that they have not, for the most part, created such places.

At a time when the skills, technology and need for creating successful places has never been greater, there are so few truly successful examples of new public spaces being created or improved.

It Will Take Architects to Create Great Places

Design professions can be much better employed in shaping the public realm. The role of design can and should be much broader and bolder, but will undermine itself if it continues to try to drive a city building or Placemaking process the same way it does today. If the role of design is to create places, design actually become more valuable and creative while developing more productive relationships with clients, partners and communities it is serving.

But if we merely focus on the goals of “good” or “world class” design as an end in itself, we limit the potential of what can be accomplished, and we ignore architecture’s ability to respond creatively to context. When a project prioritizes creating places that meet the needs of its community, the design problems and solutions become more clear, interest in the project rises, and talented people step up to collaborate in the process.

How PPS is Working to Support the Design Professions

Our intention at Project for Public Spaces is to boost the prospects of success for urban designers, architects and landscape architects by creating public demand for quality urban spaces and educating communities to work creatively and constructively with design professionals. Ultimately, we want designers’ work to be more valued than it is today.

PPS works to understand, bring about, celebrate, and inspire public spaces that are valuable to cities with the hope that we can get more of them. When public spaces are not adequately used, do not add value to a community and or become “owned” by the citizens that are meant to use them, it is not only a loss for the community, but a blow to the design professions whose contributions have been limited.

By focusing on the broader goal of creating places, we are consistently able to draw more creativity out of the various professions, as well as the communities they serve. We believe that creating successful places should be easier and more rewarding than it is today, and we dedicate ourselves to making that happen.

The New York Times recently reported a major upswing in library patronage, attributed to the country’s economic downturn.  As discretionary incomes take a hit and families have less money to buy piles of new books and videos, people are rediscovering libraries as important gathering places.

In addition to offering free access to books and videos of all sorts, modern libraries are a central place to access the internet.  Job searchers and researchers alike have been crowding the computer stations.

Libraries offer other opportunities as well.  Often, as is the case in Bryant Park in New York City, a local library will turn itself “inside out,” offering outdoor spaces for people to read quietly and creating a seamless connection to a public park.  Other libraries partner with local organizations to offer free programming - classes, seminars, performances - to further create a public place where people are encouraged to gather, mingle, interact and learn.

Our country’s current economic situation has created a ripe opportunity for the local library.  In a time when people are staying close to home, saving money and looking to connect with one another, libraries have the power to provide the breadth of services and resources the public needs, acting as important cornerstones of the communities they serve.

More information on PPS’ work with libraries:

• Libraries that Matter
• Libraries and Placemaking
• Our Approach to Civic Centers

Today, First Lady Michelle Obama will put a shovel in the ground of the White House lawn. Mrs. Obama, like many home gardeners, is celebrating this first day of Spring by getting her home garden ready for the season, and she promises that the garden will be maintained by the entire First Family, President Obama included. The 1,100-square-foot plot will soon supply the White House with fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s healthy, family meals, and the total cost to plant the garden will be just $200.

This isn’t the first First Family to use the nation’s lawn for a garden; President Adams and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt both tended to their own White House vegetable gardens, and President Wilson even used a flock of sheep to mow and fertilize the grass!

Perhaps Mrs. Obama always planned on planting a garden if she moved to the White House, but a great deal of thanks still goes out to those people and organizations that worked tirelessly to make this happen. Both The White House Organic Farm Project and Eat the View spent the past year advocating for a White House garden and gathering signatures from thousands of citizens who wanted to see “the people’s lawn” used for something healthy, active and social. This garden will not only supply the First Family with fennel, spinach and blueberries, it will be a symbol that our front lawns can be used for more than just landscaping. Now, let’s hope that President Obama reconsiders his position on beets!

The forum is a continuation of the 2007 forum (“Developing and Managing Successful Destinations”) in which Project for Public Spaces, Inc. (PPS) brought together 25 developers, government leaders and public space managers to discuss innovative strategies for managing public spaces by both the public and private sectors.

The goal of this year’s forum is to bring together leaders to discuss and envision new models for significant public, mixed-use destinations that will attract a diverse group of both community residents and visitors to a city. The forum will build upon the previous theme of innovative development and management strategies for urban development and redevelopment.

New ideas for the kinds of processes, programming innovations and unlikely partnerships that will create great places will be explored, and we will look at interesting models for developing urban spaces including destinations such as Vancouver’s Granville Island, Sundance Square in Fort Worth, Texas, and Discovery Green in Houston which all combine cultural, educational, commercial, and even industrial uses to attract locals and tourists of all ages throughout the year. Drawing from such benchmarks and the expertise of industry leaders, we seek to foster a dialogue around the creation of public, mixed-use destinations where civic and cultural institutions serve as community anchors and the local identity is celebrated.

The latest issue of C&RL News, a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries, includes an article on how students and professors use public spaces in academic libraries.  Their adaptations of these spaces as places of meaning often differs from the ways librarians and planners conceptualize the library’s physical layout.

A proposed solution?  Management and consistent user analysis.

The article’s author, Amanda Wakaruk, attended a PPS Placemaking workshop with VP Cynthia Nikitin last spring and incorporated some of what she learned into her research.

The General Services Administration (GSA) and Project for Public Spaces are currently partnering on an initiative to improve federal plazas that extend into urban communities in 24 American cities. The partnership has resulted in a free publication titled Achieving Great Federal Public Spaces: A Property Manager’s Guide.

The tools and initiatives developed through this partnership have recently made impacts in cities of Syracuse, NY, and Denver, CO.

In Denver, the Byron G. Rogers Courthouse plaza had become a sterile and inefficient locale during the Timothy McVeigh trial. As part of the plaza’s revitalization, the city added an “ambassador” to assist in directing visitors, as well as new benches and planted flowers. The once hectic waiting area to enter the building’s security checkpoint has been enclosed under a light-filled atrium that now includes a calming water feature.

In Syracuse, The GSA involved the surrounding community for input on upgrades to The Plaza at the James M. Hanley Federal Building, a long-time locale for weekly live music, food and entertainment on summer evenings. The Plaza’s upgrades include an oval green space, as well as benches, picnic tables and improved signage. The new design also incorporates design elements from the nearby, recently upgraded Clinton Square Corridor, creating cohesion between the two spaces.

Incorporating local communities is key to decision-making. “The broader outreach, the better,” says Project for Public Spaces Vice President Cynthia Nitikin. “It’s all sort of also geared toward having these federal buildings or municipal buildings or civic institutions start coalescing into districts and civic centers. This process is really about civic institutions taking a lead once again in helping revitalize communities.”

Related Articles:

Achieving Great Federal Public Spaces: A Property Manager’s Guide [PPS Project Experience]

Improve Your Building’s Public Spaces[Buildings Magazine]

(Washington, DC) — The KaBOOM! National Campaign for Play today announced the 31 founding members of the Playful City USA initiative.  Playful City USA is a national recognition program that honors cities and towns across the nation for a vision, plan and commitment to creating an agenda for play. Cities were recognized based on a pledge to five specific commitments to play:

1. Creating a local play commission or task force;
2. Designing an annual action plan for play;
3. Conducting a play space audit;
4. Outlining a financial investment in play for the current fiscal year; and
5. Proclaiming and celebrating an annual“play day.”

The founding members of Playful City USA have activated powerful citizenship by creating play agendas with deep and lasting impact on public policy issues including childhood obesity, public safety, and quality of life issues. Through the collaborative support of corporate and community resources, these civically-grounded cities are inspiring and transforming lives; building strong and healthy communities, and fostering brighter futures.

“Playful City USA reflects the hope, opportunity and possibility inherent in municipal collaborations anchored by a shared vision for play,” said Darell Hammond, Co-Founder and CEO of KaBOOM! “The innovative practices these cities adopted are a call-to-action for other municipalities across the country to rally behind proactive, city-wide agendas in support of broader physical activity and play.”

Founding members of Playful City USA include:

Ankeny, IA, Atlanta, Ga., Canton, Ga., Cedar City, UT, Chandler, Ariz., Creedmoor, N.C., Dothan, Ala., East Cleveland, OH, El Paso, TX, Gilbert, Ariz., Greenbelt, Md., Jamestown, N.Y., Kenner, La., Kerman, Calif., Kingsburg, Calif., Lake Charles, La., Lake Worth, Fla., Longview, Wash., Mountain Grove, Mo., New Lenox, Ill., New Roads, La., Norfolk, Va., Phoenix, Ariz. , Portsmouth, OH, San Francisco, Calif., San Jose, Calif., Shirley, Mass., Spartanburg, S.C., Tucson, Ariz., Wapello, IA, Yuma, Ariz.

A number of Playful City USA founding members have created and implemented pioneering play commitments.  In San Francisco, the Department of Parks and Recreation, along with the non-profit National Parks Council and Mayor Gavin Newsom, created Parkscan to assess the conditions and safety of the city’s playgrounds. In a city where identifying and maintaining open space can be a challenge, communities are now working together to improve and enhance failing playgrounds and play spaces.  City Council members in Creedmoor, NC have enacted legislation to ensure developers include playgrounds and open space in every new neighborhood.  Each May residents in El Paso, TX gather for the annual Ciclovia celebration which closes major thoroughfares and opens them up for walking, family time and safe connections to the city’s playgrounds and open space.

Along with receiving national recognition for blazing a playful trail for other cities, 2007 founding members are eligible to apply for a grant of up to $25,000 to help support one of their playful initiatives.

For cities interested in applying for Playful City USA 2008, KaBOOM! is teaming up with America’s Promise Alliance 100 Best Communities for Young People to provide one lucky city with a brand new KaBOOM! playground. 100 Best is an annual competition that recognizes those cities and towns across America that go above and beyond for children and youth.  Communities who are named one of the 100 Best, and also apply to be named a Playful City USA, will be eligible to receive a new playground in their area.

KaBOOM! is a national nonprofit organization that envisions a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America.  Since 1995, KaBOOM! has used its innovative community-build model to bring together business and community interests to construct more than 1,200 new playgrounds, skateparks, sports fields and ice rinks across North America.  KaBOOM! also offers a variety of online resources, regional and national trainings, and the KaBOOM! National Campaign for Play which includes Playful City USA and the Playmaker Network- a national network of individual advocates for play. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., KaBOOM! also has offices in Chicago, Atlanta and San Mateo, CA.   For more information, visit www.kaboom.org.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The U.S. General Services Administration, manager of 8,600 federal properties across the nation and steward of 425 historic landmarks, has published a new workbook to help guide GSA property managers on how to enhance public spaces in federal buildings.

“Federal buildings in many communities are the government’s most prominent representative, a symbol of democracy,” said David Winstead, Commissioner for GSA’s Public Buildings Service. “It’s important that these spaces are accessible to the public and that they convey a positive image of the federal government.”

GSA produced, Achieving Great Federal Public Spaces - A Property Manager’s Guide in collaboration with the Project for Public Spaces. The workbook provides GSA property managers with a step-by-step process on how to enhance public spaces such as plazas, lobbies, atria and grounds. It suggests short, medium, and long-term improvements — from actions as simple as reducing clutter and inviting civic organizations to use public spaces for activities and events, to more elaborate measures such as buildings enhancements, including the streamlining of the security process in lobbies.

“When managed effectively, these spaces support neighborhood goals and play an important role in how our client agencies view their workplaces,” commented Anthony Costa, Deputy Commissioner for Public Buildings. “It is in our collective interests that we make the most of our public spaces.”