Who We Are

Ethan B. Kent

Ethan Kent is an authority in the practice of Placemaking, with experience on over 100 PPS projects. He is driven by the potential for places to build communities and for communities to build places. His experiences evaluating and photographing public spaces in hundreds of cities around the world, forms the foundation of his work.

During the past 8 years at PPS, Ethan has worked on a broad spectrum of PPS technical assistance projects. In recent years he has led Placemaking efforts to re-envision Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland Oregon, generate a downtown plan for Kent, WA, revamp a transit square in Santiago, Chile and shape a proposal for a billion dollar development project in Los Angeles.

Utilizing lessons learned in project work, Ethan has also created and conducted Placemaking training courses for professionals of various disciplines in many contexts, from city planning staff in Vancouver, BC, to community development corporations in Detroit; from public housing developers in Sweden to traffic engineers in New Jersey.

To further leverage PPS expertise, Ethan defined and launched the Great Cities Initiative that employs city-wide evaluation, training, and capacity building to catalyze targeted projects with high level influence and cross-cutting partnerships. In this vein, he co-founded and manages the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign with two other local non-profits, an effort to challenge auto-centric transportation policy in NYC, and to facilitate, inform and inspire a public realization of streets as public space destinations.

He has also guided content development and management for the PPS website and for PPS' collection of over half a million images. His writing for the PPS newsletter and website has been featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Downtown Idea Exchange and on Prime Time Radio. Ethan also contributes around 10,000 images per year to the PPS image collection from around 50 cities and 10 countries, with many of these images appearing in a wide range of media.

An inspiring and persuasive speaker, Ethan has brought PPS' Placemaking message to many groups around the world. In addition to being hosted by many communities, he has recently presented to graduate planning and design audiences at Yale, Columbia, University of Washington and Harvard, and conferences of Urban Land Institute, Local Initiative Support Corp., Planners Network, Eco Metropolis and the World Social Forum.

Ethan studied sociology, environmental studies and economics at Bowdoin College in Maine. He explored local development issues in the context of globalization during a year spent traveling around the world as a participant in the International Honors Program. Ethan completed all course work for a Masters Degree in Environment and Community at Antioch University Seattle. He attributes much of his education, as well as any “miseducation”, to his father who founded PPS.

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