May 12, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Fred Kent is not trained as an architect, but his ideas have helped shape some of the most attractive urban places in the country, says Governing magazine (April). As president of a New York nonprofit group, Project for Public Spaces, Mr. Kent is finding that more and more government agencies are enlisting his services as they consider how to fight sprawl, win back businesses from the suburbs, and make cities more livable, says the magazine.
Mr. Kent, 62, has spent more than three decades campaigning for changes in the way people design urban spaces. Architects and engineers rarely pay close attention to how city dwellers interact with the spaces around them, he says, or what makes people want to spend time in a certain place.
“We need places that people feel comfortable in and connect to, that they can be affectionate in, smile, laugh, engage, tell stories. It’s about bliss, really,” Mr. Kent tells the magazine.
Along with his colleagues, Mr. Kent has spent countless hours studying films of parking lots and traffic circles, measuring benches and stairs to see which ones people choose, and sketching where visitors cluster in parks, to refine his notions of what makes for an enticing place.
Blank walls and exposed heating and air-conditioning infrastructure encourage pedestrians to speed up their pace, he says, while the clustering of attractions like a coffee shop, a playground, and a laundromat cause people to linger.
City planners in droves are beginning to heed Mr. Kent and his co-workers’ advice, the magazine says. The transit agency in San Mateo County, Calif., has asked Mr. Kent to redesign El Camino Real, a vast and colorless highway strip, and a group of federal and municipal agencies, as well as several neighborhood groups, have sought out Mr. Kent’s help in designing or reshaping urban spots in Corpus Christi, Tex., Philadelphia, and Seattle.
The article is available at http://www.governing.com/archive/2005/apr/spaces.txt.
