Strengthening the Bond between People and Placemaking

Explore the interactions between placemaking, community participation, and the expanding ways communities are collaborating to make great public places.

Today marks an important occasion in the evolution of the Placemaking movement. When the foundational work for what we call Placemaking today was taking place, back in the 1960s, pioneers like Holly Whyte and Jane Jacobs were on the outside of the castle walls, shouting to be heard. "Expert" urban planners were razing finely-grained neighborhoods and building lifeless housing developments and parking lots, tangled up in endless gray ribbons of expressway. Streets and squares known as places for commerce and social interaction were being sacrificed, left and right, on the altar of "efficiency," and our cities, decades later, are still struggling to recover.

Today, though, Placemaking is being recognized, through the release of a groundbreaking new white paper, by no less than the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the world’s foremost educational institution for urban planning and design. The paper, Places in the Making, casts aside the idea of the monolithic expert, and argues clearly and cohesively for the importance of Placemaking as a vital part of community-building, rather than a fuzzy "extra." It is a project, launched at the inaugural meeting of the Placemaking Leadership Council this past spring and made possible through the generous support of Southwest Airlines, in which we’ve been thrilled to be involved, and are even more excited to share with you today.

Full Story: http://www.pps.org/reference/places-in-the-making-mit-report-highlights-the-virtuous-cycle-of-placemaking/