Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization based in New York dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities. Planning and design rooted in the community form the cornerstone of PPS’s work. Building on the techniques of William H. Whyte's Street Life Project, this approach involves looking at, listening to and asking questions of the people in a community to discover their needs and aspirations.
Founded in 1975 by Fred Kent, PPS works with individuals and communities to create a vision around the places that they view as important to community life and to their daily experience. One key to this process is reaching out to people—including those who might not otherwise participate in an improvement effort—where they live, work and congregate. The process uses systematic on-site observations, time-lapse filming, and customized interviews and surveys to gather people's input and document and analyze their activities. Planning grows out of these observations as well as workshops and public forums where people have an opportunity to contribute ideas and concerns about improvements and physical changes in their neighborhoods.
PPS was a key in developing the concept of placemaking, which is not just the act of building or fixing up a space, but a whole process that fosters the creation of vital public destinations: the kind of places where people feel a strong stake in their communities and a commitment to making things better. Simply put, 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.
Famous quotes containing the words project, public and/or spaces:
“The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“[Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)