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- What If We Built Our Cities Around Places?
- Great Waterfronts of the World
- Pride of Place
Governing Magazine - Placemaker Profile: Allan Jacobs
Training
Some 10,000 people attend our workshops annually, and since 2001, PPS's training programs have truly kicked into high gear. In addition to teaching our Placemaking philosophy through partnerships with the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Neighborhood Reinvestment Training Institute (NRTI), we also developed three programs which specialize in training targeted audiences in Placemaking philosophies and methodologies: a specialized course in context-sensitive solutions designed for traffic engineers; a session for a broad spectrum of professionals and community activists, How to Turn a Place Around, based on our publication by the same name; and the How to Create Successful Markets course which builds upon the work PPS does around the world creating public markets as a catalyst for social and economic change.
In August 2001, PPS staff introduced 300 building managers - the men and women in charge of every federal building west of the Mississippi - to our philosophy of Placemaking at a training session in Denver, Colorado. In the spring and fall of that year, we focused on "Creating a Sense of Place in Neighborhoods" at Neighborhood Reinvestment Training Institutes in Chicago and Minneapolis.
Our 5-day course on Context-Sensitive Design offers a new approach to transportation planning, looking "beyond the pavement" to the role that streets and roads can play in enhancing communities and natural environments, and encouraging transportation professionals to collaborate with communities. Developed for the New Jersey Department of Transportation, more than 600 of the agency's employees and "customers" have attended so far; we're also working to expand the program to other state transportation agencies. Finally, we kicked off our national program in creating great places in April 2002, conducting our first "How To Turn A Place Around" training course for 35 participants in New York. The two-day session included site tours, an extensive site analysis, and workshops on Placemaking - and due to popular demand we've held the course every year since, once in the spring and once in the fall.
Community Workshops
PPS creates and conducts visioning workshops that help communities identify salient issues and needs to collaboratively develop recommendations to address them. Our workshops typically involve a slide presentation and discussion, followed by small breakout groups that explore individual issues in depth. Often, PPS's "Place Performance Evaluation Game"© (see below) is used in this process. In conjunction with this participatory process, PPS also helps communities develop implementation strategies that can be carried out in a short time within a longer range context, sometimes by community members themselves, including residents and local businesses.
Place Performance Evaluation Game©
PPS has developed the Place Performance Evaluation Game©, a short, user-friendly exercise that synthesizes PPS's observation, interview, and analysis techniques to help people conduct quick but productive site assessments. PPS has successfully used this process for groups of up to 400 in conferences, meetings, and community workshops. It gives participants an opportunity to observe on-site conditions for themselves and understand the dynamics and needs of a particular space within a structured context, allowing them to very quickly see the good and bad qualities of a place. The evaluation allows participants to use their common sense and intuition; it can be conducted by any observant individual, from a highly trained professional to a lay person.
Training and Educational Workshops
PPS offers training sessions in which communities can learn how to gather and analyze data, observe activities, conduct interviews, utilize research, and other techniques to help them understand the problems and opportunities of their public spaces and how to improve them. PPS also organizes special educational workshops, which may include speakers with expertise in the specific issues being addressed and/or representatives from other communities who recount their own experience in dealing with similar issues successfully, followed by an on-site visit (or visits) to the area(s) of concern and discussion of potential solutions. Transit facilities, streets, parks and public markets are among the topics that can be addressed individually.
Presentations
Individual PPS staff members give some 30 to 50 one-day customized presentations each year concerning public space and pedestrian issues, community concerns, and revitalization of local economies. Supplementary meetings are often scheduled on the same day, as well as a tour of the area of concern.
Contact Kathleen Ziegenfuss at kziegenfuss@pps.org or Kathy Madden at kmadden@pps.org, or call (212) 620-5660.
