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It’s an exciting week here at Project for Public Spaces! After another successful year of reimagining public spaces in communities around the country, we are ready to begin accepting applications for
the 2016 Southwest Airlines Heart of the Community grant program.
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Arts-based 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.
Since creativity fuels place value, the benefits of using arts and culture to tap into a place’s unique character extend well beyond the art world. Across sectors and at all levels, today’s leaders and policymakers are increasingly recognizing how arts-based
Placemaking initiatives can simultaneously advance their missions in transportation, housing, employment, health care, environmental sustainability, and education.
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The city of Carmel, Indiana, is a national leader in attracting new businesses and residents by fostering a vibrant art-scene, installing innovative transportation solutions, and promoting dense, walkable,
mixed-use development. Last week, the Mayor of Carmel, Jim Brainard, stopped by PPS to showcase some of the projects, programs, and policies that have made Carmel one of the most livable cities in the United States.
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The growing success of “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC) projects all over the world is proof that expensive and labor-intensive initiatives are not the only, or even the most effective, ways to bring
energy and life into a community’s public space. The proliferation these efforts all over the world shows that more and more people are beginning to see how communities can be created and transformed by making a series of affordable, human-scale, and immediate
changes.
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Streets are our most fundamental shared public spaces, but they are also one of the most contested and overlooked. Today, and for most of the last century, we have taken for granted the idea that our
streets are primarily zones for cars, parking, and the transporting of goods. This has not been the case, however, throughout most of history. Across many cultures and times – since the beginning of civilization, in fact – the street has held vast social,
commercial, and political significance as a powerful symbol of the public realm.
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"The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."
- Geographer David Harvey, in "The
Right to the City" |
quoted in The
Guardian
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