The Placemaking Round-Up
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
The Biweekly Bazaar
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
A biweekly newsletter with public space news, resources, and opportunities.
A curated dispatch on all things public markets plus the latest announcements from the Market Cities Program.
By Kathy Madden
When we decided to produce The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking, we knew that we would be tapping into a well of grassroots interactions, solutions, and collaborations in the neighborhoods that we examined. The richness, and simplicity, of the stories we encountered opened our eyes to the opportunities for people everywhere to turn their neighborhood into a Great Neighborhood.
When it comes to revitalizing communities, the importance of the average citizen cannot be over-estimated. That's one of the main reasons we created this book -- to highlight the success stories of everyday people that can inspire you to do similar things in your own communities.
Our excitement about neighborhoods' potential isn't hard to understand. Neighborhoods--whether in cities, suburbs, or small towns--are the level where people interact most regularly and naturally. Neighborhoods provide a ready-made forum for tackling problems like traffic, crime, or social alienation that seem too daunting to address on the national or municipal scale. Even in communities where there are no pressing troubles, the neighborhood remains an ideal setting for important work such as restoring a park, enlivening a business district, or boosting an inherent "sense of community."
For us at PPS, we see The Great Neighborhood Book as the first step in a whole program of activities and resources that we would like to develop for people trying to effect change in their own neighborhood. The seeds of our "Neighborhoods First" program are being sown as I write this, with the launch of our Great Neighborhood Party Kit and the creation of our new Great Neighborhood Discussion Forum where we hope people will take the time to visit to share their own success stories or connect to others in fruitful conversation about how to tackle a shared problem. And there will be more to come...
I hope you take great pleasure in reading the excerpts from the book that we have included in this special "Great Neighborhoods" edition of Making Places, to coincide with the "National Night-Out" event on August 7th.
Enjoy your evening!
Kathy Madden
PPS's Great Neighborhood Book, full of inspiring examples of how neighbors are tackling important issues in their own backyards, is available to Making Places readers through our online store.
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