Houston is North America's Placemaking Capital

         From PPS Project For Public Spaces...

How Cities in Texas are Turning Planning Upside Down

"Despite Houston's enduring image as a downtown office park ringed with highways -where every project strives to be bigger and glitzier than anything that came before- the city is now focusing on creating lively new public spaces.  This important shift is occurring in other Texas cities too, infusing downtowns and neighborhoods with a new sense of vibrancy and, most surprising of all, doing it by working at a smaller, human scale.

Houston has become a hot-spot by turning its planning process for  public spaces upside down. Instead of using a top down, project oriented and design-led approach, it is using a bottom up Placemaking approach. The vision for a public place is now defined by stakeholders in the community with leaders and professionals helping to implement this vision. This approach is already paying off--downtown Houston is thriving from hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment and never before have so many come downtown to enjoy the new amenties.

We're not the only ones to take notice of what's going on in Houston.  Recently Fast Company named Houston its "City of the Year", citing Discovery Green as "a symbol of the new Houston." Cities all around Texas (and soon, we hope, the country) are finding ways to follow suit.

Here are stories of several significant Placemaking projects in Texas:

	Discovery Green: Professionals Support, Not Drive, the Project. The concept for Discovery Green as a lush, beautiful, actively used park was developed through a groundbreaking planning model in which the community was the expert who defined the vision and professionals and consultants became resources for enabling that vision to become a reality. Today a "Community Backyard for the 21st Century," it's spurred massive reinvestment.
	Market Square Park: Management is the Key to a Great Public Space Today, neighbors say this well-programmed park "provides a wonderful focal point for the Historic District residents. It's created a close knit community, which never existed before its renovation and my property values have gone up." An outdoor café, water features, artwork, two dog runs, and many daily events such as movies and live music make it a city-wide draw throughout the day.
	Baker Ripley Neighborhood Center: Creating a Place, Not Just a Design Envisioned as a "community village," Baker-Ripley features a welcome center with an art building with studio space for local artists; a hall for performances and group activities; a business center for incubating new retail business as well as a community credit union; and a community park that includes a garden, market and picnic space for families. It's a cultural center on Houston's periphery.
	Upper Kirby Civic Center Complex: A Civic and Cultural Destination Neighbors in this dynamic community have long been working to create a civic and cultural hub to make the site a destination for people from across the city. When plans for a YMCA and a theater fell through, many residents were frustrated. PPS developed a community-driven plan for programming the civic center complex as a vibrant public space in itself that would connect to nearby Levy Park and its active community garden.
	Corpus Christi: If the People Lead, the Leaders Will Follow Often attributed to Gandhi, this quote sums up the amazing effort that has been undertaken by a small group of committed Corpus Christi residents who have begun to turn around their waterfront, and their city. It is truly one of the most extraordinary Placemaking efforts of its kind in the country.
	San Antonio: Digital Placemaking for a Better City San Antonio's Center City Development Office is embracing PPS' new Digital Placemaking service centered around the PlaceMap which helps crowdsource ideas from the local community about needs and opportunities in their city, increase engagement in the downtown public planning process, and inform strategic decisions about the downtown. Already piloted in Baltimore and Denver, integrating PPS' Digital Placemaking enhances overall Placemaking efforts and helps turn any set of projects into a hybrid online and offline grassroots planning campaign.
	Dallas: Right-Sizing and Revitalizing in the Big D The Better BlockTeam is an organization behind some of the best examples of community-led lighter, quicker, cheaper approaches to improving public spaces in Texas today. From community-led "right-sizing" events to an improved plaza in downtown Houston, the lighter, quicker, cheaper experimental changes to a community's streets and plazas led by "Better Block" are more than one-time events, are part of a larger planning process to create more livable streets."