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The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking (NCCP) was created to build capacity for sustainable and cost-effective creative placemaking. Creative placemaking is a new way of making communities more livable and prosperous through the arts, and making them better places for the arts. Creative placemaking is about more than public art or performing arts centers. It is about making places better for everyone.

Creative placemaking is a new way of making communities more livable and prosperous through the arts, and making them better places for the arts. Creative placemaking is about more than public art or performing arts centers. It is about making places better for everyone. Traditional approaches to using arts as a revitalization tool tend to focus on building large institutions, districts or just 'doing projects.' Creative placemaking starts with building effective partnerships. Our approach to creative placemaking is based on six key elements: Building diverse and productive partnerships in communities and with local leadership to implement ideas. Enhancing quality of life for more people in communities Increasing economic opportunity for more stakeholders in communities Building healthier climates for creativity and cultural expression Engaging existing assets (both physical and human) as much as possible Promoting the best and distinct qualities of a place Our work is guided by the teachings of reflective practice, double-loop learning, asset-based community development, fifth level leadership, arts-based community development, communicative practice, environmental justice, and other current and cutting-edge philosophies of practice.  

WHAT IF WE BUILT OUR COMMUNITIES AROUND PLACES? As both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, Placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, Placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.

At the Placemaking Leadership Forum this fall, more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners and policymakers came together to chart the future of the placemaking movement. The second day of the event was structured around ten major issues that converge in public space, which we at PPS refer to as "transformative agendas."

One placemaking premise is to avoid politics and pedantic debate (such as "new" v. "landscape" urbanism)-one of the tenets of the movement is efficiency, often without "starchitecture" or directed urban redevelopment. Rather, placemaking is frequently a low-cost, facilitated exercise which helps enhance people's faith in their cities and neighborhoods.

We wrote this guide to introduce creative placemaking to transportation planners, public works agencies and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects.

To get a higher return on our public investments requires an understanding of what it takes to build great towns and neighborhoods. The following are principles of placemaking for Strong Towns.

Placemaking, a collaborative process by which we (residents, architects, activists, community leaders and planners alike) shape our public realm together, is fundamentally about inclusion and shared community ownership.

The Codes Study is a collaborative effort led by Hazel Borys and Emily Talen, and contributed to by many public and private planners, tracking the prevalence of form-based codes worldwide. As of November 2012, we've tracked 433 codes that meet criteria established by the Form-Based Codes Institute (FBCI), as well as an additional 14 form-based guidelines. 252 of these are adopted, with others in progress. Even though form-based codes are 30 years old, 82% have been adopted since 2003.

"Personally, I consider the social leg to be the most critical, as I'm unconvinced that we'll ever be able to effectively handle the challenges of the other two - especially at the local level in times of turmoil and change - in the absence of the rich social interdependencies that used to define us."

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people's health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

We help build enthusiastic communities of future owners, tenants and customers for progressive, urban real estate developments targeting creatives committed to a triple bottom line vision. We use the modern market and product development system of crowdsourcing (ie Wikipedia, YouTube, Linux), applied to the authentic placemaking principles of natural cultural districts. For a more complete description of the program, check out our visual guide to crowdsourced placemaking and economic development, Crowdsourcing Cool Places for Creatives and peruse how our clients are taking advantage of crowdsourced placemaking in the examples prominently displayed on this site.

Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. Our pioneering Placemaking approach helps citizens transform their public spaces into vital places that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation and serve common needs.

Building inclusive, healthy, functional, and productive cities is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity today, and there are no easy solutions. A key part of the puzzle, though, lies right at the heart of the world's urban areas: its public spaces. Here are ten ways you can help strengthen the social fabric of your community and jump-start economic development by creating and sustaining healthy public spaces.

We are a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. But, design of elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects is not what we do. The leaders of our organization spent the majority of our careers with large firms designing complex, expensive projects, only to later realize we were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. We acknowledged that before we could do more of the types of projects our communities need, we'd have to change how people think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. Rather than sit back and wait, we started VERDUNITY to help lead this change.

Art works to improve the lives of America's citizens in many ways. Communities across our nation are engaging design and leveraging the arts to create livable, sustainable neighborhoods with enhanced quality of life, increased creative activity, distinct identities, a sense of place, and vibrant local economies that capitalize on existing local assets. The NEA defines these efforts as Creative Placemaking:

Facebook for Project for Public Spaces (PPS) a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. Our pioneering Placemaking approach helps citizens transform their public spaces into vital places that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation and serve common needs.

William H.(Holly) Whyte (1917-1999) is considered the mentor for Project for Public Spaces because of his seminal work in the study of human behavior in urban settings. While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to wonder how newly planned city spaces were actually working out - something that no one had previously researched. This curiosity led to the Street Life Project, a pioneering study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics.

Some may be surprised to hear PPS echoing a version of the modernist mantra "form ever follows function" (see principle 9), but it's important for us to remember what that phrase is really all about. When it was first coined by Louis Sullivan, it was a humanist idea: that the form of a building should serve first and foremost the human uses that animate it. But over time, as Jane Jacobs observed, the idea of function underwent a "drift from humanism to gimmickry."