Social Life Project的动态

Happy 50th Birthday to Project for Public Spaces! ?Although I didn’t join PPS until three years later, I wanted to share a few quotes from “Project for Public Spaces: A Prospectus (1975)."?Looking back, it amazes me how?Fred Kent, Bob Cook, Don Miles, and the other original visionaries had so much right from the get-go... except for the last quote from the document! (In the photo, you can see comments by Holly Whyte in the margins, including, "Raising expectations--what deliver?" Fifty years later, we can answer that question that we raised expectations AND delivered!) “The quality of urban life is unique…[and] largely defined by the city’s open spaces – its streets, sidewalks, parks, playgrounds, plazas, pedestrian malls and even its building lobbies.” “There is enormous potential for improvement in these public spaces through changes that are not necessarily time-consuming or expensive to implement and are often remarkably simple.?The Project for Public Spaces will work to bring about these changes.” “Cities must respond because well-functioning public spaces are indispensable to the life of cities as we know them.” “Even a cursory examination of the applicative laws reveals the multifarious, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping responsibilities of city agencies for the use, maintenance, design, construction, and planning of city-owned or -controlled public open space, particularly streets and sidewalks….No one voice speaks for the interest of the pedestrian.” “It is all too obvious that transportation planning is done almost exclusively with the object of moving vehicles, often at the expense of pedestrians – through sidewalk narrowing, traffic light timing and so on.” “Our experience has indicated that the design and use of urban public spaces requires a perspective broader than that of the architect or designer.?We believe in an interdisciplinary approach." “Our planned mode of operation will have four major components: programming, evaluation and design, legal and governmental, and education, training and publications.” “From the evaluations, the programming experience, the legal and economic explorations, lawsuits, proposal and the designs and redesigns of public spaces will come a wealth of knowledge about how to further evaluate, interpret, promote, and design public spaces.?Documentation in the form of movies, slide shows, pamphlets, booklets, exhibits and lectures will publicize this Project.” “The Project for Public Spaces will have a lifetime of three years. We have imposed this time limit because…it is a realistic time period in which to accomplish our objectives and a relatively short term period will force us to act as a catalyst rather than as an operating organization, and that will give us needed flexibility.” While much has changed over 50 years, it's good to see that the fundamentals have held up! It turns out we could be a catalyst and an operating organization.