Agenda Spotlight: Placemaking and Health

• The world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.
   
• Lower income neighborhoods report poorer health outcomes, and often lack public space amenities that can significantly impact individual and community health.
   
• A commitment to inclusion means providing better access for all populations to well-maintained parks, safe recreational facilities, open green spaces, as well as supermarkets and other places to obtain healthy, fresh food. 

Creative Placemaking

• Creative placemaking is an integrative approach to urban planning and community building that stimulates local economies and leads to increased innovation, cultural diversity, and civic engagement.

• Today's leaders and policymakers are increasingly recognizing how arts-based placemaking can simultaneously advance their missions in transportation, housing, employment, health care, environmental sustainability, and education.

• Explains UPenn professor Mark Stern, "It's not simply that the arts promote social well-being; they are indispensable elements of social well-being. Just as you can't strip out health or housing or transportation from social well-being, neither can you remove the arts."

Architecture of Place: Buildings that Work for People

• Architects and planners fall far short of their potential when they focus all of their talent on creating an artistic statement rather than considering how to support the creation of meaningful places for people to use and enjoy.

• Design ideas have a huge impact on our built environment. As Jane Jacobs once said: "First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image."

• Our collective images—of the good life, the public good, and how to achieve them both—shape our everyday city-building machinery. So what do we want to build? How do we need to adapt our complex machinery to get what we want?

Revitalizing Rural Communities

• Residents in America's small towns and rural communities care deeply about the future of their towns, and they value their uniqueness and strong sense of community.
   
• But they also face urgent challenges: How can they add jobs and support local businesses? How do they create a positive future for their kids? How can they most effectively use limited financial and infrastructural resources?
   
• Developing locally-driven solutions to these challenges in critical to the long-term vitality of these communities, and placemaking can play a powerful role in this process.

Place Governance: Placemaking Powered Localism

• When it comes to public space, neighborhood residents are too often removed from the stewardship of the places they share, with responsibility for management divided between government agencies with narrow objectives

• In challenging this "turf" mentality, many placemakers from around the world are creating new models of Place Governance that test the limits of localism. 

• For more on PPS's approach to Place Governance, click here and here. 

• A month without cars in South Korea (City Lab)
• Seven cities that transformed their riverfronts (Wired)
• Brooklyn Bridge might just get better for people (Next City)
• Embracing commerce in public space (Slow Streets Blog)
• And, a highway becomes a beloved public space in Sao Paolo (CBC Brazil)

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