While those are not the exact Sound of Music lyrics we remember, I am as guilty as anyone for hyping Placemaking Week in Vancouver, British Columbia (which begins September 12), using the increasingly popular twitter hashtag, #placemaking. Three initiatives, under the umbrella of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces (PPS), will come together this week for overlapping conferences (including the PPS Placemaking Leadership Council, Future of Places and ProWalk/ProBike/Pro Place). For PPS, a carefully studied, bottom-up approach is often the secret sauce of successful urban places. However, like imposed urban design, conference agendas also impose a direction and control, which is ironically anathema to a bottom-up approach. I'm not so interested anymore about who owns the ideas, or whether a design professional is needed to implement a livable city.

Source: Huffington Post September 11, 2016 19:41 UTC