Key takeaways from Placemaking Week in Vancouver

• PPS has just launched its online conference report for the Placemaking Leadership Forum 2016.
   
• The conference, which came together with Pro Walk / Pro Bike / Pro Place to make up the first ever Placemaking Week, brought over 450 placemakers from around the world to Vancouver, BC from September 14–17 in order to chart the future of placemaking.
   
• If you weren’t able to attend or just want to relive the event, check out the report for an executive summary and videos of all the plenary sessions, plus quotable quotes, photos, and more.
   
• Each day had a different theme/mission, but the overall goal was to tackle some of the most complex, systemic issues in placemaking with an emphasis on real examples that address them in practice. As attendee and speaker Lucinda Hartley put it, “This was a conference for problem-solvers, governments, community advocates, local business leaders, property developers and nonprofits who are walking the walk.”

Placemaking and the New Urban Agenda

• The priority given to place and public space in the New Urban Agenda marks an important shift for the global development community. But the New Urban Agenda is still playing catch-up to how communities, practitioners are mobilizing on this issue.

• As a culmination of Project for Public Space’s six-year collabration with UN-Habitat, this week we joined delegations from around the world in Quito, Ecuador for Habitat III, a conference about the future of cities that only happens every 20 years.

• To understand a bit more about how this impact is felt globally, we asked our audience, how can public spaces and placemaking support the New Urban Agenda. You can share your ideas, examples and stories too with #H3Places on Twitter and Instagram.

Jane Jacobs on funding great places

• Almost unnoticed and unremarked," explained Jane Jacobs in 1964 speech, "a great unbalance has developed in cities between money for building things and money for running things.

• Amazingly, this great unbalance—an embarrassment of riches for designing and building things and a dearth of support for managing, running and adjusting things—endures today, and is particularly pertinent to placemaking.

• This speech appears in Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, a collection co-edited by Samuel Zipp and PPS’s own Nate Storring.

Chamber musicians are placemakers too!

• While the creative placemaking movement is gaining momentum around the globe, it is most often associated with the visual arts rather than the performing arts.
   
• The Sound Places Program combines music, placemaking, and civic engagement by integrating musicians-in-residence into community life in two Louisiana Cultural Districts.
   
• The two pilot projects for Sound Places will launch in January 2017, when selected ensembles and communities will work together to develop unique music-infused placemaking projects. Are you a chamber musician and a placemaker? Read the article and stay tuned for more details on how to get involved.

PPS joins the Clinton Global Initiative

• At the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) PPS announced a new Commitment to Action to forge partnerships with national and international organizations to expand placemaking in their fields of practice and in the local communities they serve.

• During this 3-year commitment, PPS will work with local community leaders and municipal government to launch pilot projects with each partner organization in 1-3 public spaces by 2019 to build their long-term capacity for placemaking. 

• To date, members of the CGI community have made more than 3,500 Commitments to Action, which have improved the lives of over 430 million people in more than 180 countries.

• Our campaigns will include low-cost, short-term improvements to attract more people to a public space, which will set the stage for longer-term infrastructure changes, with subsequent interventions occurring incrementally.

• Vancouver’s laneways make (literally) vibrant public spaces (Next City)
• Streets become places in Hong Kong (The New York Times)
• 101 small ways you can improve your city (Curbed)
• How can we design a city for women? (City Lab)
• And what does Jane Jacobs have to do with this election season? (The Atlantic)