Governing Magazine, April 2005

...[Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces] rarely ventures outside without a camera hanging around his neck, and he figures he now has about 750,000 photographs of people using public spaces...a child holding hands with a bronze statue; a couple kissing on a street; a knot of older men jovially hanging out in front of a barbershop; people on park benches watching passersby.

What they have in common is that the people in them seem relaxed and happy -- "You don't see affection in bad places," Kent says; "it's an amazing indicator of the quality of a place." [editor's note: I was powerfully struck by this when we walked the streets in Paris] All of this is in marked contrast, say, to the picture he likes to show of a group of frustrated elderly women standing on the yellow line in the middle of an intimidatingly huge street in Sydney Australia, peering at oncoming traffic as they wait to get across. "That's an 800-foot block," Kent remarks, "and of course the traffic engineers weren't thinking that people might like to cross in the middle of it." If you know how to pay attention, in other words, people will tell you by their behavior what they like, what they don't like and what they want.

"Jumble and chaos on the street are great," he insists, "and we're not allowed to have it. We've narrowed the experiences people can have. It's an atrocity, and the design professionals don't even know they do it." Even worse, he argues, the people who hire the design professionals often seem powerless to stop them. "I think there are a lot of mayors who are real humanists," Kent says, "but they come up against the disciplines that control a city."...

...For years, Kent reserved his greatest scorn for traffic engineers. "Whatever a traffic engineer tells you to do," he liked to say, "do the opposite and you'll improve your community."

That was until he and PPS began to work with the New Jersey Department of Transportation, and in particular with its director of project development, Gary Toth. As was true in a number of states, NJDOT began in the 1980s and '90s to encounter furious community opposition to its roadbuilding plans. Toth, along with a few of his colleagues, began to realize, as he himself puts it, "that maybe what we were trained to do -- that is, jam cars down people's throats -- wasn't going to fly." He began casting about for new ways of thinking about road-building, and in the late 1990s his search led him to PPS and Kent.

By the time Toth hooked up with them, PPS had developed what it calls "the place game," in which it sends a group of people interested in a particular spot -- from shopkeepers to residents to city officials -- out to study it. That's what Kent and his colleagues did with Toth's highway engineers. They trooped them out to a major street in New Brunswick, a street that had been widened over the years to the point where it moved traffic well, but was a nightmare for anyone who wasn't in a car. Then they asked the engineers to put themselves in other people's shoes: Imagine being a parent of a child who has to cross the road to get to school; or a shopkeeper trying to make a living from passersby; or a resident for whom the street was essentially a front yard. "I had some trepidation about how the engineers would react," Toth says, dryly.

What happened stunned him. The engineers bubbled over with changes they wanted to see: The road needed narrowing, some new crosswalks, slower traffic. "They started looking at it as a place," he says, "and understanding that a street has more than one use: It's not just to get cars through, but people live there." It was the beginning of a cultural change. "What struck me," Toth says, "was how there were a lot of people in this organization who were behaving a certain way not because it was how they should behave, but because they believed that was expected. When we showed the engineers a different way of looking at it -- 'Hey, we should be thinking about pedestrians and the life of these neighborhoods' -- most of them instantly got it. Yet they'd never tried to push for that in 30 years, because the organization didn't expect it"...

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