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:
“From a bed in this hotel Seargent S. Prentiss arose in the middle of the night and made a speech in defense of a bedbug that had bitten him. It was heard by a mock jury and judge, and the bedbug was formally acquitted.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“When I saw it I was so glad I could not speak. My eyes seemed too little to see it all.... I was a long time without speaking to my friend. To see me always looking and never speaking he thought I had lost my mind. I could not understand where all this could come from.”
—For the State of Maine, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)