Ethan Kent
Ethan Kent practices Placemaking as a Vice President with Project for Public Spaces. His experiences photographing, evaluating and helping to improve public spaces in hundreds of cities around the world form the foundation of his work. Ethan helped found the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign and leads PPSs efforts in NYC, managing PPSs role in the campaign.
Recent Posts
Indianapolis Paves the Way for Bikes and Pedestrians
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Construction is underway on what may be the nation’s most advanced urban greenway system. Indianapolis, Indiana is making what could be the boldest step of any North American city towards supporting bicyclists and pedestrians. Known as an extremely auto-oriented city, most closely associated with the Indianapolis 500, this is one of the last cities we […]
Melbourne, Australia After a Decade of Focus on Public Spaces
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With apologies for my carbon footprint, I recently returned from a working tour of eight cities Down Under. The trip included an invitation to Melbourne to work with the staff of the city’s successful new public space development, Federation Square, and to help lead a Placemaking training course that included many city staff, local developers […]
Ciclovia: Is NYC Ready?
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With a successful Bike Month now behind us and a spectacular Tour de Brooklyn completed, we perhaps have an opportunity to dream bigger for how we can celebrate our bicyclists, our streets and communities in this city. I was recently in Bogotá for their weekly Ciclovia event and experienced first hand what may be one […]
Theodore Kheel: My Proposal to Robert Moses
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Theodore Kheel (pictured right), has been called by The New York Times "the most influential peacemaker in New York City in the last half-century" in light of the fact that he has participated in the resolution of more than 30,000 labor disputes. Kheel has founded several related foundations devoted to resolving the conflict between the […]
The Seed of a Revolution in Red Hook
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How can we get drivers to respect the communities they are driving though? How can we make traffic slow down if we can’t change the design of the street or the timing of the lights? How can a community reclaim its neighborhood streets? For a few short hours last weekend, Red Hook, Brooklyn, had an […]
Where the Sidewalk Ends: Dubai
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A few of us from Project for Public Spaces were recently in Dubai to train a group of the city’s leading real estate developers in Placemaking. The largest city in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai has experienced explosive growth in recent years, emerging as the region’s financial and cultural capital. The real estate development boom […]
Learning From a Streets Renaissance in Hong Kong
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If New York or other large cities are looking for a solution to congestion and its negative impact on the economy, Hong Kong offers an excellent strategy and success story. I was there a few weeks back working on waterfront issues (that rival New York City for unrealized opportunities), and was struck by changes that have taken […]
Street Renaissance Antics on Atlantic Avenue
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Yesterday was the Atlantic Antic, the annual, day-long festival along Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, in its 32nd year now. What a beautiful day. You’d be hard-pressed to find a place where as diverse a range of people and activities are brought together in such a natural and comfortable way: This is what Atlantic Avenue looked like […]
Signs of Crooked Pedestrian Priorities
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A pedestrian crossing sign slants over the middle of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, meant to remind drivers that human beings may try to cross the seven lanes of moving traffic on foot. It is little comfort to the pedestrians standing exposed on the 2 foot wide median noticing that the sign was recently run into. […]
The Suburbanization of NYC’s Waterfront
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Recently, a bunch of us took a bike excursion along the East River waterfront from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn to the new Water Taxi Beach in Hunters Point, Queens. Traffic was light most of the way and street life relatively heavy. Though currently dominated by old industrial buildings, the thriving neighborhoods adjacent to the waterfront seem […]
Traffic Continues to Disappear in Paris
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In 2001, shortly after being elected the Mayor of Paris on a platform promising to "fight, with all the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile," Bertrand Delanoë began implementing a series of far-reaching transportation reforms throughout the City of Light. With New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner […]
Vehicle City
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Foreign correspondence from Ethan Kent at Project for Public Spaces: I was working in Flint, Michigan the first part of this week. Remarkably, for a city that was planned for everything but people, there are still some great people working to create a genuine "Steets Rennaissance." Flint originally built itself around the car and, after […]