From the Heart of a Community
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management
of public spaces. Put simply, it involves looking at, listening to, and asking
questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover
their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common
vision for that place. The vision can evolve quickly into an implementation strategy,
beginning with small-scale, do-able improvements that can immediately bring benefits
to public spaces and the people who use them.
Placemaking capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential,
ultimately creating good public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness,
and well being. When PPS asked visitors to pps.org what Placemaking means to them,
responses suggested that this process is essential–even sacred–to people who truly
care about the places in their lives.
When you focus on place, you do everything differently
For PPS, Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy. It takes root when a
community expresses needs and desires about places in their lives, even if there
is not yet a clearly defined plan of action. The yearning to unite people around
a larger vision for a particular place is often present long before the word “Placemaking”
is ever mentioned. Once the term is introduced, however, it enables people to
realize just how inspiring their collective vision can be, and allows them to
look with fresh eyes at the potential of parks, downtowns, waterfronts, plazas,
neighborhoods, streets, markets, campuses and public buildings. It sparks an exciting
re-examination of everyday settings and experiences in our lives.
Unfortunately the way our communities are built today has become so institutionalized
that community stakeholders seldom have a chance to voice ideas and aspirations
about the places they inhabit. Placemaking breaks through this by showing planners,
designers, and engineers how to move beyond their habit of looking at communities
through the narrow lens of single-minded goals or rigid professional disciplines.
The first step is listening to best experts in the field—the people who live,
work and play in a place.
Experience has shown us that when developers and planners welcome as much grassroots
involvement as possible, they spare themselves a lot of headaches. Common problems
like traffic-dominated streets, little-used parks, and isolated, underperforming
development projects can be avoided by embracing the Placemaking perspective that
views a place in its entirety, rather than zeroing in on isolated fragments of
the whole.
For more than 35 years, PPS has acted as an advocate and resource center for
Placemaking, continually making the case that a collaborative community process
that pays attention to issues on the small scale is the best approach in creating
and revitalizing public spaces.
The Bedrock Foundation of Placemaking
A Placemaking approach provides communities with the springboard they need to
revitalize their communities. To start, we draw upon the 11 Principles of Placemaking,
which have grown out of our experiences working with communities in 26 countries
and nearly every state in the U.S. and province in Canada. These are guidelines
that help communities integrate diverse opinions into a vision, then translate
that vision into a plan and program of uses, and finally see that the plan is
properly implemented.
Community input is essential to the Placemaking process, but so is an understanding
of a particular place and of the ways that great places foster successful social
networks and initiatives. Using the 11 Principles and other tools PPS has developed
for improving places (such as the Power of 10 and the Place Diagram) PPS has helped
citizens bring immense changes to their communities–sometimes more than stakeholders
ever dreamed possible. Improving public spaces and the lives of people who use
them means finding the patience to take small steps, to truly listen to people,
and to see what works best, eventually turning a group vision into the reality
of a great public place.
Read the full article and more about Placemaking