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:
“I wish to come to know you get to know you all
Let your belief in me and me in you stand tall
Just like a project of which no one tells
Or do ya still think that I’m somebody else?”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)