Friday, August 10, 2012

From Shareable.net ― 40 Top Public Spaces

Granville Island Public Market Photo: Hutch 
Every community needs a commons where people can gather as friends, neighbors and citizens. This can be a grand public square, a humble Main Street or a vacant lot with a few handmade benches where locals sit down for conversation. Or even a bridge, beach or bus station, as the examples below show.
What’s important are the connections made among people, which can lead to wonderful things: friendships, love affairs, partnerships that flower into new ideas for businesses or community projects.
Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based group that works around the world helping citizens boost the sense of community in their neighborhoods, compiled a comprehensive catalog of more than 600 of the best public spaces around the world. Here is a selection of some of the most inspiring, many of them very modest and in surprisingly humble locations, which can offer ideas about creating or improving a commons in your own town.
You can find out more—including practical information about elements what make these places succeed as commons—and nominate your own favorite public spaces at Project for Public Spaces’s Great Public Spaces Hall of Fame. You can peruse PPS’s Hall of Shame to learn what mistakes not to repeat from over 60 of the most disappointing public spaces around the world.

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