Interview with Kathy Madden, Vice President of PPS (Project for Public Spaces)
by Lorenzo Venturini and Ilaria Salvadori

Kathy Madden is an expert in the field of placemaking as it relates to urban design and livability. As director of the Urban Parks institute at PPS (Project for Public Spaces), she is a leading authority on parks, plazas and open spaces.


Kathy Madden and Lorenzo Venturini in the PPS office

What are the emerging findings of the Urban Parks Conference and the PPS expectations?
What the conference was really about is the preservation, recapturing and development of the public realm: the place where people spend time, and we are losing that. In the last fifty years the US citizens in the US have not recognized the thing important. And the park is the jewel of the public realm as plazas, street corners, markets, as any places where the public goes to. I think that was the first intention: to draw attention to the fact that great parks or great places make great cities. The second intention was to encourage people in the world who are interested in great places and great parks to come to the conference, we didn't want only professionals, we wanted everybody who cares to come to the conference because we wanted them to lead other people to care about that. And also, we encouraged people to come in teams so that when they went back to their cities they would talk about that and say: "We learned all these things at the conference and now we can make a difference in our city". We wanted people coming from different professions (architects, doctors, lawyers), different size cities: ultimately we had one hundred cities and twelve countries represented.

A very important theme that seemed to emerge from the conference is the private/public partnership as a new trend of park management in the U.S. Can you discuss about it?
We need to broaden our definition of a park, a small square or a small neighborhood park that needed to be a plaza (?), there is an inner park and an outer park, but the edges are just as important as the middle. The park is not just an object in space as many that are being built nowadays, they are rather places that are connected to their surroundings. We need to think of flexibility: that a place should not be rigid but a place that change all the times, and in order to have that flexibility places should be managed and pure parks are not really managed but maintained. We need to develop management system for public spaces and there should probably be a public partnership managing the public realm in the most effective way possible. In NYC we have this public partnership, but it's something that we need to develop more in other places. We need to create places usable by children and older people and teenagers. We should focus on the users, the types of activities they would do there and reproduce that on a design statement.
Such spaces should provide a good image, or identity for the city, like, for example, what would New York be without Central Park or Brooklyn without Prospect Park or Green Wood Cemetery? So we know that these places have done well to create an identity for the city. Parks are also spiritual places, community places where people gather, for example Union Square or Central Park after 9/11 it were the places where everybody went to. People went to Union Square, Prospect Park, Central Park, they immediately went to a public place.
So, the neighborhood steps forward and says: "we can help and we will do it" everything from "Friends" groups around a particular park to a sophisticated organization like the Central Park Conservancy or Prospect Park Alliance, the Bryant Park Association, all these corporations that have large budgets and staff, or just very effective volunteer groups. Philadelphia Green is one of the most innovative groups in the US; it is one of the oldest private/public partnerships.
What is interesting about them is that they work in low-income areas: they clean, they work in community to plant trees, they have educational programs, but they have mechanisms for generating some of the funds for their operations, for example through organizing annual flower shows in Philadelphia. You don't see that much in Europe, do you?

Yes, we don't have it that much in Europe. In fact, what I found interesting about the conference was the emphasis you put on management and public/private partnership instead of design. Why so?
We talked about design in terms of understanding this historic precedence of some of these parks. I wanted to do more in design but it is very difficult to find anyone, who can talk about park design in a way that is helpful to people these days. The question is: how do you design an entrance to a park that is desirable to people, how do you design a path so that people would want to walk on it, where would you put the benches so that the people would be able to sit on them and not abuse them, benches that don't attract "undesirables"? People who understand the historic design would understand more about the element that are the underpinnings of a good park.

In your opinion, what are the social benefits of parks? Can you quantify those benefits?
Yes, and we've done this for many years. Through interviews and surveys you can have people's view, you can ask: "do you come to the park alone, or with a member of your family?" you can quantify the social interaction that is going on in a park. There are some techniques to quantify the social benefits (of a public space). In terms of quality, it is a place where you can feel connected with your community, you feel like your community is livable place to be. I think New York has great neighborhood parks, there are people who live in New York so many more years that they would have if there weren't any parks.

You mentioned the economic part
I think we had this problem more in the past, when people didn't want to live near a park because they thought that people hanging there would make their property less valuable, but now that the community is so involved they see that parks add value to their property. For example now you see ads that say: "located on a green way, bike to work!" And now green is considered an asset. Now people understand that a good community is a community in which you can walk and you don't have to have a car.

We talked about the tools and the process to make great public spaces. What about the subjects, the actors operating in this field?
I think the most important actors are the people that are in that community, that work there and operate near the parks. So, the goal would be to understand people's views and develop ways to empower them. I think the most important thing is to start to draw resources from the community to give them a sense of ownership of that place. And I think the role of the government is to encourage this process. The government should say "yes" to the efforts of people instead of say: "no, we don't do flowers or it takes five months to do that, and we don't have the money".

Final thoughts: what would you advice to make European public places more flexible and usable by people?
I think that this process is very important: in fact one of the greatest parks is in the west side of Barcelona. It's called "Val del Paradis" and originally it was a dump. The Director of the City Park Department got young people to clean it up and somebody to take care of the water. There was a creek that was turned into a gigantic swimming pool, and they used solar collectors to heat the water. And in winter they give kayaking lessons. And they are developing a restaurant which is an income generator and it can be rented for conferences. The park is also easy to reach by public transportation. This is an
example of how good a park can be.