New York | Visiting Project for Public Spaces
Between New York's snorkelling blocks, we find Project for Public Spaces ' office, located on Manhattan's Broadway, right next to NYU and Washington Square Park. Here, Street Studies is greeted by Senior Vice President Cynthia Nikitin, who has worked for Project for Public Spaces for the past 25 years.
PPS ' vision is based on helping people create and sustain public spaces that contribute to strong communities. The place-oriented urban development with the local community in a distinctive role, became known as Placemaking-a concept that emerged from PPS ' early work, with William Whyte and the world-famous city room activist Jane Jacobs in the center. They have been recognized as the world leader in this particular, and one of the most leading organizations.
Over the 44 years that PPS has existed, they have managed to create a global network that helps connect people with ideas, resources and expertise within placemaking. At the same time, they have focused on creative placemaking-the ability of the creator to support change in urban areas-as the key to solving some society's greatest challenges in modern city planning. A number of their experience from over 3000 communities in 47 countries has been published in the book "How to turn a Place around", which provides concrete tools for meaningful urban space transformations.
For Street Studies, it was therefore a great opportunity for sparring and networking to meet PPS. Street Studies Manager Steffen Gray was invited to hold a presentation for them about our experience with their models, Danish fee-for-service models as a non-profit NGO and the link between our community work and our commitment to the world's leading Graffiti & street Art Festivals, Meeeting of Styles.
This resulted in questions about our way of dealing with creative placemaking, as well as new ideas on how Street Studies can be even sharper in the profile. In this way, potential future collaborations, where Street Studies and Project for Public Spaces can be sparing together and developing together, have been created.
Cynthia Nikitin comes to Denmark under the Meeting of Styles Copenhagen 2019 to keep a presentation on creative placemaking to our event Murals, Community and place for urban professionals d. 20 July 2019.
/Signe Darré
