A crowd of locals watch a movie at Discovery Green, Houston, TX, USA. Image Courtesy of PPS
This article was originally published by Project for Public Spaces as "What makes a successful place?", a brief guideline about how to develop great public spaces by following four qualities: Sociability, Uses & Activities, Access & Linkages, and Comfort & Image.
Great public spaces are those places where celebrations are held, social and economic exchanges occur, friends run into each other, and cultures mix. They are the “front porches” of our public institutions – libraries, field houses, schools – where we interact with each other and government. When these spaces work well, they serve as the stage for our public lives, but what makes some places succeed while others fail?
https://www.archdaily.com/914616/what-makes-a-great-public-placeProject for Public Spaces
Cultural flagships, from trendy breeding grounds to iconic cultural palaces, form the core of many urban cultural landscapes. Spaces of Culture is about the new construction and redevelopment of cultural buildings in Amsterdam in the period 2000-2016.
In the construction and development of new cultural spaces in the city, the precise location and architecture play a major role in connecting the venue to the changing needs of the public, the makers and the neighbourhood. Using various case studies, Spaces of Culture shows that the cultural sector could benefit from knowledge exchange between urban planners, developers and the world of architecture.
MK:U International Design Competition, images Luke Hayes
The MK:U International Design Competition seeks world-class design teams for a new model university in the Oxford to Cambridge innovation arc.
Beloved by architects as the most original and successful of the mid-twentieth century’s wave of ‘New Towns’, and famously ‘different by design’, Milton Keynes (MK) has successfully reinvented itself as a ‘Smart City’ and is a key contributor to the United Kingdom’s knowledge economy.
This success has highlighted the need for a university — MK is the largest urban area in the UK without its own university — and to resolve this, MKC and Cranfield University, a global leader for postgraduate
It’s well understood that a sense of place is an essential value for people, architecture, and cities. Everyone from designers to planners to city governments speak breathlessly of the power of places to transform cities for the better - but it’s not clear what placemaking really means.
https://www.archdaily.com/902961/this-week-in-architecture-what-makes-a-placeKatherine Allen
2017 Rudy Bruner Award Medalists (Photo Credits on RBA Website)
The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) celebrates transformative urban places distinguished by their economic and social contributions to our nation’s cities. Winners offer creative placemaking solutions that transcend the boundaries between architecture, urban design and planning and showcase innovative thinking about American cities. One Gold Medal of $50,000 and four Silver Medals of $10,000 will be awarded.
Amongst other placemaking-related news this year, the Boston Society of Architects’ Placemaking Network celebrated its 10-year anniversary by launching the Placemaking Manifesto in November. Co-authored by Christina Lanzl, Robert Tullis, and Anne-Catrin Schultz, the document set down six key ideas: “quality of life,” “sense of place,” “community identification,” “collaboration and communication” between “individuals of all backgrounds, interests and talents,” “inclusivity” and “greater civic engagement,” and “awareness of tradition with an embracing of new and emerging technologies.” While the basic principles that placemaking espouses are often hard to question, this manifesto in particular begs one question: Is placemaking understood and defined clearly enough for it to be a useful tool for urbanists?
In the past decade or so, placemaking has gained considerable momentum, spewing forth an array of approaches, countless lists of best practices (including, in essence, this new manifesto), and complicated sub-categorizations. It is simultaneously a much-lauded global movement, an academic discipline, a field, discourse, process, and tool, but is also, among other charges, heavily criticized for being an “ill-defined buzzword.”
https://www.archdaily.com/886275/placemaking-movement-manifesto-tool-buzzword-or-whatZoya Gul Hasan
For the last 30 years, street furniture and outdoor advertising have defined the grammar of our cities. In Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP), cities award long-term licenses for advertising in public space in relation to the partly necessary urban furniture and their maintenance (bus stops, public bathrooms, benches, trash bins, signposts, etc.). The business model is dominated by the few large, globally oriented companies with profits running into billions. For instance, for years Berlin has been “supplied” by the Wall AG - part of the international JCDecaux group as the number one outdoor advertiser worldwide since 2009 (with a turnover in 2014 of 2,8 billion euros in more than 60 countries with 11.900 employees).
2017 SEGD Global Design Awards Now Open for Entries
The 2017 SEGD Global Design Awards, the only international awards program focused on user experiences in the built environment, is now open for entries. Since 1987, the SEGD Global Design Awards have set the standard of excellence for environmental graphic design and experiential graphic design, honoring design work that connects people to place by providing direction, content and compelling experiences in public spaces.
The idea of revitalizing a public space by bringing improvement that brings people together should not generate suspicion or fear. However, specific examples of places that have seen the cost of living greatly increase after their revitalization have been creating paradoxes. After all, does this "new villain" called gentrification have any relation to placemaking?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Although it's not a direct relation of cause and effect, it is impossible to deny the tenuous line between the two concepts. By definition, gentrification, or "ennoblement," refers to the social, cultural, and economic improvement of a neighborhood or, on a larger scale, of an entire region. Placemaking is the process of planning quality public spaces that contribute to the well-being of the local community. The concepts may be similar, but the methods and consequences of the two are very different.
From Charlotte, North Carolina, to San Jose, California, cities around the country are looking to address major challenges and build more successful communities. The Knight Cities Challenge, which opens today, is an invitation to engage in that process. It asks civic innovators to answer the question: What’s your best idea to make cities more successful?
2015 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence Gold Medalist - Miller's Court - Baltimore, MD
The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) celebrates transformative urban places distinguished by their economic and social contributions to our nation’s cities. Winners offer creative placemaking solutions that transcend the boundaries between architecture, urban design and planning and showcase innovative thinking about American cities. One Gold Medal of $50,000 and four Silver Medals of $10,000 will be awarded.
The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence celebrates urban places that are distinguished by quality design and their social and economic contributions to our nation’s cities. Winners offer creative placemaking solutions that transcend the boundaries between architecture, urban design and planning and showcase innovative thinking about American cities.
One Gold Medal of $50,000 and four Silver Medals of $10,000 will be awarded. Projects must be a real place, not just a plan or a program, and be located in the 48 contiguous United States.
The Design Matters Conference presented by the Association of Architecture Organizations is the world’s only dedicated annual meeting that seeks to bring top designers, journalists and civic leaders into exploratory dialogue with those not-for-profit professionals and volunteers charged with creating cultural programs (exhibitions, tours, lectures and symposia, festivals and films, youth outreach) to spur broader public interest in architecture and design.
Ship Point Pop-Up Design Competition Poster / City of Victoria
The City of Victoria invites teams and individuals to submit creative design concepts to temporarily transform Ship Point Plaza, an underutilized paved plaza space along Victoria’s downtown waterfront, into a magnetic and memorable ‘pop-up’ public space during the 2016 summer season.
The Land Art Generator Initiative is delighted to announce that LAGI 2016 will be held in Southern California, with the City of Santa Monica as site partner. This free and open call ideas competition invites individuals or interdisciplinary teams to design a large-scale site-specific work of public art that also serves as clean energy and/or drinking water infrastructure for the City of Santa Monica.
In 2016 PUBLIC ideas go into action with FORM’s PUBLIC Platform taking creativity for the common good out into the streets and laneways. PUBLIC Platform invites you – the diverse creative minds from all parts of our community – to create installations and activation prototypes to enliven Claremont town centre during PUBLIC’s annual takeover on 2 & 3 April. Prototypes for citizens and by citizens will reimagine our public spaces and activities, and engage the public to participate, explore and play in their own city. Your big idea could bring our streets to life. Entries are due by January
Since childhood, growing up on a farm outside of Nashville, Wendell Burnette has been inspired by nature; indeed, the amplification of the natural site has highlighted his body of work. In the following question and answer by Guy Horton of Metropolis Magazine, the Pheonix-based architect speaks about memories, inspiration and experience.
Wendell Burnette’s journey through architecture has taken him from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin to some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, where he has designed a type of architecture that resonates with the power of natural surroundings. It has also taken him to one of the world’s fastest growing cities, Phoenix, Arizona, where his practice, Wendell Burnette Architects, is based and where he calls home. More recently it has brought him to Los Angeles where he is the current Nancy M. & Edward D. Fox Urban Design Critic at the USC School of Architecture. He is also Professor of Practice at The Design School at Arizona State University's Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts.
I spoke with Burnette about his approach to architecture, the importance of direct experience, and the meaning behind his current USC studio, “Earth Curvature”.
In 2011, UN-HABITAT and Project for Public Spaces (PPS) signed a 5-year cooperative agreement to aspire to raise international awareness of the importance of public space in cities, to foster a lively exchange of ideas among partners and to educate a new generation of planners, designers, community activists and other civic leaders about the benefits of what they call the "Placemaking methodology." Their partnership is helping to advance the development of cities where people of all income groups, social classes and ages can live safely, happily and in economic security and in order to reach these ambitious goals, the duo recently released 10 informative steps that cities and communities can take to improve the quality of their public spaces.
