Downtowns

Our Approach to Downtowns

PPS facilitates a visioning process that leads a city and its staff to strategies for creating and sustaining a great system of public places and streets. Our concern is the public realm, which we define as everything between a person’s home and office! It is essentially the ground floor of a community – making up the bulk of how people experience their city.

We start with a few key principles. First, it is essential to start with a clear understanding of the activities that are going to occur in a downtown and bring life to its streets. Working in an open process with stakeholders, businesses, residents, cultural institutions, and the city (and working within the context of planning that has already been completed) we facilitate and develop a plan of the key places that can become the magnets of a downtown – places that draw people and businesses and can lead a transformation for other areas. We develop concepts for what activities would attract people to visit each of the key places, and then connect them, through recommendations for streets and sidewalks and how they can support adjacent building and commercial uses. The product of this phase is typically an overall plan of the system, locating the key places and with an intricate program of the uses and activities that will occur throughout. “Streetscape” is not a term we use, since it boils the problem and solution down to an over-simple concept that planting trees and arranging benches will solve a street’s problems. Design cannot be the beginning point for a plan for a great place. However, with the program and concepts developed through Placemaking, designers can then evolve designs and develop the concepts further with details about character and amenities that will make the destinations a reality.