Community Visioning For Place Making

Community Visioning for Place Making is a groundbreaking guide to engaging with communities in order to design better public spaces. It provides a toolkit to encourage and assist organizations, municipalities, and neighborhoods in organizing visually based community participation workshops, used to evaluate their existing community and translate images into plans that embody their ideal characteristics of places and spaces. The book is based on results generated from hundreds of public participation visioning sessions in a broad range of cities and regions, portraying images of what people liked and disliked. These community visioning sessions have been instrumental in generating policies, physical plans, recommendations, and codes for adoption and implementation in a range of urban, suburban, and rural spaces, and the book serves as a bottom-up tool for designers and public officials to make decisions that make their communities more appealing. The book will appeal to community and neighborhood organizations, professional planners, social and psychological professionals, policy analysts, architects, urban designers, engineers, and municipal officials seeking an alternative vision for their future.

Communities have practiced strategic planning for decades using a variety of tools and programs based on the initial Take Charge programs of the early 1990s. These efforts generated a large amount of research regarding their effectiveness, as well as ways to measure long-term outcomes and other related issues, in efforts to better understand the process of community change. This book provides contributions written by researchers and practitioners describing both visioning and other strategic planning efforts. The Great Recession challenged the future of many small and medium sized cities, especially in non-metropolitan areas, renewing the interests of community leaders and elected officials in finding innovative ways to revitalize their local employment base and economic opportunities. Having access to a collection of best practices and successful approaches can greatly assist these practitioners in selecting strategies and techniques for use in their community efforts. The material in this book is especially useful because it includes both methodologies as well as case studies of how and why various approaches used in alternative cultural settings have succeeded. This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

How to Turn a Place Around is a user-friendly, common sense guide for everyone from community residents to mayors on how to create successful places. The ideas presented in this book reflect over 40 years of Project for Public Spaces experience helping people understand and improve their public spaces. The book illustrates a community-based, place-oriented process organized around eleven basic principles for creating successful public spaces, as well as methods that anyone can use to evaluate a space. People who read this handbook will learn how short-term actions and visible changes can lead to better public spaces in their own communities. Through examples of people's experiences in other cities, Project for Public Spaces demonstrates that, with an understanding of how a place works, any place can be "turned around." In the final section of the book, tools such as observations and surveys are described in a simple, how-to manner that will help citizens get all the information they need to understand why some spaces are successful and why some are not. It also provides steps to help the reader lead a community-based visioning process and begin to improve their neighborhood. Expanded Second Edition: When it was first released in 2000, this user-friendly guidebook helped launch the placemaking movement. Along with a brand new design and vibrant color photos, this second edition adds new tools, like the "Power of 10" exercise and "Place Performance Game"; inspiring new case studies; and a more comprehensive section on how to run a successful placemaking process, from community engagement to creating a vision to implementation.

As a project undertaken before, during and in the aftermath of a global pandemic, The Place Economy Volume 3 represents an increased appreciation of our need as humans for place and community. Spanning 80-plus stories, featuring the work of more than 100 global experts, you will find a celebration of the people, places and ideas that make cities great, alongside close examination of the barriers and challenges still facing communities in Australia and abroad. As with Volume 1 and 2, every story here presents compelling evidence of the better return on investment that occurs for developers and communities alike when insightful placemaking underpins a vision.

Common sense guide for everyone from community residents to mayors on how to understand and improve the public spaces in their communities.

From the author of Small Change comes this engaging guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context. Drawing on four decades of practical and teaching experience, the author offers fresh insight into the complexities faced by practitioners when working to improve the communities, lives and livelihoods of people the world over. The book shows how these complexities are a context for, rather than a barrier to, creative work. The book also critiques the single vision top down approach to design and planning. Using examples of successful professional practice across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and post-tsunami Asia, the author demonstrates how good policy can derive from good practices when reasoned backwards, as well as how plans can emerge in practice without a preponderance of planning. Reasoning backwards is shown to be a more effective and inclusive way of planning forwards with significant improvements to the quality of process and place. The book also offers a variety of methods and tools for analyzing the issues, engaging with communities and other stakeholders for design and settlement planning and for improving the skills of all involved in placemaking. Ultimately the book serves as an inspiring guide, and a distillation of decades of practical wisdom and experience. The resulting practical handbook is for all those involved in doing, learning and teaching placemaking and urban development world-wide.

The regeneration of critical urban areas through the redesign of public space with the intense involvement of local communities seems to be the central focus of place-making according to some widespread practices in academic and professional circles. Recently, new expertise maintains that place-making could be an innovative and potentially autonomous field, competing with more traditional disciplines like urban planning, urban design, architecture and others. This book affirms that the question of 'making better places for people' should be understood in a broader sense, as a symptom of the non-contingent limitations of the urban and spatial disciplines. It maintains that research should not be oriented only towards new technical or merely formal solutions but rather towards the profound rethinking of disciplinary paradigms. In the fields of urban planning, urban design and policy-making, the challenge of place-making provides scholars and practitioners a great opportunity for a much-needed critical review. Only the substantial reappraisal of long-standing (technical, cultural, institutional and social) premises and perspectives can truly improve place-making practices. The pressing need for place-making implies trespassing undue disciplinary boundaries and experimenting a place-based approach that can innovate and integrate planning regulations, strategic spatial visioning and urban development projects. Moreover, the place-making challenge compels urban experts and policy-makers to critically reflect upon the physical and social contexts of their interventions. In this sense, facing place-making today is a way to renew the civic and social role of urban planning and urban design.

Discusses how transit impacts and improves community life in the United States.