The Third Person

Fred Kent founded The Project for Public Spaces over 40 years ago. He likes to say that if architecture is frozen music, then urban planning is composition and placemaking is improvisational street performance. Very early on in his career, he became part of a community of people -- Margaret Mead, Jane Jacobs and William H. White -- that formed a thesis around thriving public spaces not through the cold snapshots of a city from an aerial viewpoint, or the sterile abstractions of data, but through the keen power of human observation and the belief that richness is all around us if we're only willing to look. These pioneering urbanists famously stood up to Robert Moses and other destructive notions that prioritized traffic and sales over basic human needs with an approach that was as radical in its simplicity as it was transformative.  Based on lightweight design tenets from community organizing that help facilitate public life with the help of the public, Fred has helped local communities reimagine and tra