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What is Placemaking?

‘Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.

What if we built our communities around places?

Placemaking is the process through which we collectively shape our public realm to maximize shared value. Rooted in community-based participation, Placemaking involves the planning, design, management and programming of public spaces. More than just creating better urban design of public spaces, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of activities and connections (cultural, economic, social, ecological) that define a place and support its ongoing evolution. Placemaking is how people are more collectively and intentionally shaping our world, and our future on this planet.

With the increasing awareness that our human environment is shaping us, Placemaking is how we shape humanity’s future. While environmentalism has challenged human impact on our planet, it is not the planet that is threatened but humanity’s ability to live viably here. Placemaking is building both the settlement patterns, and the communal capacity, for people to thrive with each other and our natural world.

It takes a place to create a community, and a community to create a place

An effective Placemaking process 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 we 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.

True Placemaking begins at the smallest scale.

The PPS Placemaking process, evovled out of our work with William “Holly” Whyte in the 1970s, and still 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.

For us, 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.

When you focus on place, you do everything differently

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.

Since 1975, 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. Indeed, cities fail and succeed as the place scale, but it is still this scale that goes ignored.

Cities ultimately fail or succeed at the “place” scale

Key Principles 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 43 countries and 50 U.S. and 3000 communties. 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 we’ve developed for improving places (such as the Power of 10 and the Place Diagram, below) we’ve helped citizens bring immense changes to their communities–sometimes more than stakeholders ever dreamed possible.

The Place Diagram is one of the tools PPS has developed to help communities evaluate places. The inner ring represents key attributes, the middle ring intangible qualities, and the outer ring measurable data.

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.

Placemaking is not a new idea

The concepts behind Placemaking originated in the 1960s, when visionaries like Jane Jacobs and  William H. Whyte (who was the editor of Fortune Magazina that got Jacobs to write Death and Life of Great American Cities) offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers. Their work focused on the importance of lively neighborhoods and inviting public spaces. Jane Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of “eyes on the street.” Holly Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.

Applying the wisdom of Jacobs, Whyte, and others, PPS gradually developed a comprehensive Placemaking approach for helping communities make better public spaces beginning in 1975. The term can be heard in many settings–not only by citizens committed to grassroots community improvement but by planners and developers who use it as a fashionable “brand” that implies authenticity and quality even when their projects don’t always live up to that promise. But using “Placemaking” to label a process that really isn’t rooted in public participation or result in lively, genuine communities dilutes the true value of this powerful philosophy.

PPS first started consistent use of the term in the mid-nineties and first published a book with a definition of the term in 1997.

It takes a broader set of skills than any one discipline can offer to create a place

Placemaking is at the heart of PPS’s work and mission, but we do not trademark it as our property. It belongs to anyone who is sincere about creating great places by drawing on the collective wisdom, energy and action of those who live, work and play there. We do feel, however, it is our responsibility to continue to protect and perpetuate the community-driven, bottom-up approach that Placemaking describes. Placemaking requires adn supports great leadership and action on all levels, often allowing leaders to not have the answers but allow an even bolder process to unfold.

We believe that the public’s attraction to the essential qualities of Placemaking will ensure that the term does not lose its original meaning or promise. Making a place is not the same as constructing a building, designing a plaza, or developing a commercial zone. When people enjoy a place for its special social and physical attributes, and when they are allowed to influence decision-making about that space, then you see genuine Placemaking in action.

Placemaking grows into an international movement

As more communities engage in Placemaking and more professionals call their work “Placemaking,” it is now essential to preserve the integrity of Placemaking. A great public space cannot be measured simply by physical attributes; it must serve people as a vital place where function is put ahead of form. PPS encourages everyone–citizens and professionals alike–to focus on places and the people who use them.

Placemaking strikes a balance between the built, the social, the ecological and even the spiritual qualities of a place. Fortunately, we can all be inspired by the examples of many great Placemakers who have worked to promote this vision through the years. Through the development of a Placemaking Leadership Council PPS is working to support a broad network to support the further evolution of Placemaking and build its potential impact as a movement. Through bringing together our partnerships with UN Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson create the Future Of Places conference series to support the prominence and impact of Placemaking internationally, with a focus on developing cities.

Placemaking belongs to everyone: its message and mission is bigger than any one person or organization. PPS remains dedicated to supporting the Placemaking movement as a “backbone organization”, growing the network and offering our resources and experiences to all the other Placemakers out there.

What Placemaking Is–and what it isn’t

Placemaking IS:

· Community-driven

· Visionary

· Function before form

· Adaptable

· Inclusive

· Focused on creating destinations

· Flexible

· Culturally aware

· Ever changing

· Multi-disciplinary

· Transformative

· Context-sensitive

· Inspiring

· Collaborative

· Sociable

Placemaking ISN’T:

· Imposed from above

· Reactive

· Design-driven

· A blanket solution

· Exclusionary

· Monolithic development

· Overly accommodating of the car

· One-size-fits-all

· Static

· Discipline-driven

· Privatized

· One-dimensional

· Dependent on regulatory controls

· A cost/benefit analysis

· Project-focused

· A quick fix

Eleven Principles for Creating Great Community Places

Effective public spaces are extremely difficult to accomplish, because their complexity is rarely understood. As William (Holly) Whyte said, “It’s hard to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”

PPS has identified 11 key elements in transforming public spaces into vibrant community places, whether they’re parks, plazas, public squares, streets, sidewalks or the myriad other outdoor and indoor spaces that have public uses in common. These elements are:

· The Community Is The Expert


· The important starting point in developing a concept for any public space is to identify the talents and assets within the community. In any community there are people who can provide an historical perspective, valuable insights into how the area functions, and an understanding of the critical issues and what is meaningful to people. Tapping this information at the beginning of the process will help to create a sense of community ownership in the project that can be of great benefit to both the project sponsor and the community.

· Create a Place, Not a Design
If your goal is to create a place (which we think it should be), a design will not be enough. To make an under-performing space into a vital “place,” physical elements must be introduced that would make people welcome and comfortable, such as seating and new landscaping, and also through “management” changes in the pedestrian circulation pattern and by developing more effective relationships between the surrounding retail and the activities going on in the public spaces. The goal is to create a place that has both a strong sense of community and a comfortable image, as well as a setting and activities and uses that collectively add up to something more than the sum of its often simple parts. This is easy to say, but difficult to accomplish.

· Look for Partners
Partners are critical to the future success and image of a public space improvement project. Whether you want partners at the beginning to plan for the project or you want to brainstorm and develop scenarios with a dozen partners who might participate in the future, they are invaluable in providing support and getting a project off the ground. They can be local institutions, museums, schools and others.

· You Can See a Lot Just By Observing
We can all learn a great deal from others’ successes and failures. By looking at how people are using (or not using) public spaces and finding out what they like and don’t like about them, it is possible to assess what makes them work or not work. Through these observations, it will be clear what kinds of activities are missing and what might be incorporated. And when the spaces are built, continuing to observe them will teach even more about how to evolve and manage them over time.

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· Have a Vision


· The vision needs to come out of each individual community. However, essential to a vision for any public space is an idea of what kinds of activities might be happening in the space, a view that the space should be comfortable and have a good image, and that it should be an important place where people want to be. It should instill a sense of pride in the people who live and work in the surrounding area.

· Start with the Petunias: Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper
The complexity of public spaces is such that you cannot expect to do everything right initially. The best spaces experiment with short term improvements that can be tested and refined over many years! Elements such as seating, outdoor cafes, public art, striping of crosswalks and pedestrian havens, community gardens and murals are examples of improvements that can be accomplished in a short time.

· Triangulate
“Triangulation is the process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other” (Holly Whyte). In a public space, the choice and arrangement of different elements in relation to each other can put the triangulation process in motion (or not). For example, if a bench, a wastebasket and a telephone are placed with no connection to each other, each may receive a very limited use, but when they are arranged together along with other amenities such as a coffee cart, they will naturally bring people together (or triangulate!). On a broader level, if a children’s reading room in a new library is located so that it is next to a children’s playground in a park and a food kiosk is added, more activity will occur than if these facilities were located separately.

· They Always Say “It Can’t Be Done”
One of Yogi Berra’s great sayings is “If they say it can’t be done, it doesn’t always work out that way,” and we have found it to be appropriate for our work as well. Creating good public spaces is inevitably about encountering obstacles, because no one in either the public or private sectors has the job or responsibility to “create places.” For example, professionals such as traffic engineers, transit operators, urban planners and architects all have narrow definitions of their job – facilitating traffic or making trains run on time or creating long term schemes for building cities or designing buildings. Their job, evident in most cities, is not to create “places.” Starting with small scale community-nurturing improvements can demonstrate the importance of “places” and help to overcome obstacles.

· Form Supports Function


· The input from the community and potential partners, the understanding of how other spaces function, the experimentation, and overcoming the obstacles and naysayers provides the concept for the space. Although design is important, these other elements tell you what “form” you need to accomplish the future vision for the space.

· Money Is Not the Issue
This statement can apply in a number of ways. For example, once you’ve put in the basic infrastructure of the public spaces, the elements that are added that will make it work (e.g., vendors, cafes, flowers and seating) will not be expensive. In addition, if the community and other partners are involved in programming and other activities, this can also reduce costs. More important is that by following these steps, people will have so much enthusiasm for the project that the cost is viewed much more broadly and consequently as not significant when compared with the benefits.

· You Are Never Finished


· By nature good public spaces that respond to the needs, the opinions and the ongoing changes of the community require attention. Amenities wear out, needs change and other things happen in an urban environment. Being open to the need for change and having the management flexibility to enact that change is what builds great public spaces and great cities and towns.