Reflecting on the 50th Year of Building the Placemaking Movement

2025 was a year full of important moments for PlacemakingX and Social Life Project. We have reached key milestones and made great strides in expanding the Placemaking Movement. We have grown our thought leadership, presented our work at pivotal events, reflected on decades of impactful work, and hosted another Global Placemaking Summit. We have also suffered a deep loss with the passing of our co-founder, Kathy Madden. It was a year of high highs and low lows, and now that we are starting 2026, we would like to take a look back at the moments that defined 2025.

Milestones

This year, the Placemaking Movement reached several important milestones worth celebrating. We've come a long way since our early days, and we've still got a long way to go.

50th Anniversary of Project for Public Spaces

This year marked the 50th Anniversary of Project for Public Spaces. Fred Kent founded PPS with Kathy Madden and Steve Davies to help improve underperforming public spaces. Recognizing the harm that car-centric planning and soulless architecture were doing to cities in the 70s, PPS practiced a collaborative process of shaping the public realm with the community as an active participant, leading to shared spaces that reflected their needs, wants, and interests and that nurtured community life.

Some quotes from the organization's original 1975 Prospectus show how prescient their vision was, with messages we still promote today!

“The quality of urban life is unique…[and] largely defined by the city’s open spaces – its streets, sidewalks, parks, playgrounds, plazas, pedestrian malls and even its building lobbies.”

“There is enormous potential for improvement in these public spaces through changes that are not necessarily time-consuming or expensive to implement and are often remarkably simple. The Project for Public Spaces will work to bring about these changes.”

“Cities must respond because well-functioning public spaces are indispensable to the life of cities as we know them.”

Since its inception, the organization has helped 3,200 communities in 52 countries, hosted 38 conferences for over 16,000 professionals, and trained 10,o00+ placemakers. What started as a local effort to improve New York City has become a global movement to create better public spaces, a healthier environment, and stronger communities. The placemaking network now includes 200+ leaders and 2,000+ advocates from 100+ countries working on impactful projects on the ground, and PlacemakingX is supporting the development of 30+ regional and national placemaking networks worldwide.

Over 50 years of work in communities around the world have given us mountains of experience and insights into what exactly makes a place great. Social Life Project in parallel with the global network PlacemakingX provides thought leadership, resources, collaboration, and guidance to anyone seeking to improve their shared spaces.

We gave Social Life Project the name we did as an homage to urbanist Holly Whyte’s 1980 documentary film and book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both were based on research by Holly's Street Life Project, during which he and a team, including SLP co-founder Fred Kent, observed how people were actually using public spaces (mainly in Midtown Manhattan) and why some worked well while others didn't.

Opening Night Screening of "The Social LIfe of Small Urban Spaces" at Anthology Film Archives (credit: Project for Public Spaces)

One of our biggest achievements this year, the 55th anniversary of the film, was to help bring new life to Holly's groundbreaking project. We're thrilled that Anthology Film Archives digitally restored an original print of the film from the SLP archives and released it during a week of sold-out screenings, in partnership with the Municipal Arts Society and Project for Public Spaces.

Holly was a key mentor to us from the beginning and his work has been foundational to ours, a great source of inspiration to this day. His "praise for small spaces" and their multiplier effect on the quality of urban life are core principles at the Social Life Project.

Second Global Placemaking Summit

After a fantastic first Global Placemaking Summit in Mexico City in 2023, we knew we had to do it again, bigger and better. This summer, we did, hosting the second Global Placemaking Summit in Toronto, Canada. Together with placemaking leaders from all around the world over several days full of workshops, presentations, activities, and roundtables, we explored techniques for strengthening communities, improving public places, and paving the future of placemaking work.

Summit Report:

Top Pieces of Content of 2025

We have put together many pieces of thought leadership over the course of this year that we are proud of. Below are a few of our favorites that we hope can enrich your understanding of public space revitalization and community life.

Fred's Favorite

Reflecting on our many visits to Belfast, Maine, we were always in awe of how every small improvement in the community had character and a stamp of uniqueness. In other words, local involvement and improvisation are at the heart of much of what makes Belfast great. The local-led changes leave the impression that the population is eager to participate in improving their community. They respect and embrace the great diversity of skills and talents present in town, which creates a feeling that Belfast is a place full of "proud, engaged people."

Ethan's Favorite

The heart of an affordable, vibrant and inclusive city needs to be public spaces that support more informal local economies, informal social life, and informal local culture. Street vending that activates public spaces can be central to supporting a full spectrum of informal to formal retail, enabling upward mobility and social integration. We need to look holistically at how we enable opportunities to enter the economy and access affordable products through the public realm – and how this aspect of public life and entrepreneurship can make our spaces safer, healthier, and more fun.

Tayana's Favorite

My favorite article of 2025 is actually a compilation of articles – specifically, the resource guides for our 11 agendas. The 11 agendas are a collection of focus areas that we believe cities should turn their attention to if they want to transform and revitalize. They include things like amenities, waterfronts, social hubs, etc. This piece organizes our content on the agendas in an easy-to-navigate way, creating a one-stop resource for people seeking inspiration on how to improve their built environments.

Katherine's Favorite

We all know how crucial accessibility is in creating authentic places – but it goes beyond the structural elements of a space to the softer, less tangible attributes that make it feel genuinely welcoming. This article explains why New York City’s dining sheds were a boon to local-level access, and highlights a broader theme: that making a space more accessible benefits everyone.

Meg's Favorite

This year, my favorite article was The Social Life of Places Where Families Thrive. It resonated deeply on a personal level because earlier this year, my partner and I welcomed our first child! What this article captures so well is that thriving family life doesn’t just happen at home. It happens in places that are accessible, engaging, safe, multi-layered, and alive with social possibility.

At a moment when our world suddenly felt both smaller and more interconnected, this article reaffirmed why designing places that foster belonging, mutual support, and cross-generational connection matters so much—for parents, children, and communities alike.

Josh's Favorite

As someone who loves experiencing cities by bike, this article really resonated with me. I especially enjoyed the sections highlighting unique bikes and bikers—they capture how cycling isn’t just about mobility, but about seeing cities at a human pace, feeling more connected to the life of the street, and identity.

Steve's Favorite:

When William H. (“Holly”) Whyte's now-classic film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, was released in 1980, it had an immediate impact on people’s understanding of the importance of public spaces – and created a lifelong career for all of us. The print of the film, long in distribution, was of poor quality, however, and was rarely screened. Last January, I found what turned out to be an excellent original print of the film in the SLP archives. On October 1, 2025 — Holly Whyte’s birthday – Fred, Kathy, and I hosted a special screening of the restored version of the film at Anthology Film Archives. Poignantly, it was the last time the three of us would ever appear publicly together, as Kathy passed away soon after.

Panel Discussion following the screening of the "Social LIfe of Small Urban Spaces" film on October 1, 2025. (l to r) Nate Storing, Co-Executive Director of Project for Public Spaces, and Social Life team members Steve Davies, Kathy Madden, Fred Kent, and Ethan Kent.

Remembering Kathy

Our dear co-founder, Kathy Madden, passed away on October 21, 2025. A powerful force in the Placemaking Movement, she has trained thousands of community leaders over the years through in-person trainings and conferences, and through her pivotal, influential book, How to Turn a Place Around. Her unique way of seeing the world and identifying the features that made places either thrive or underperform helped us understand the key components of great places. Her teachings, which inspired so many placemakers around the world, will live on as the foundation of the movement.

Kathy was one of the pillars of the Placemaking Movement, intent on making the world a better place for communities, pedestrians, and social life. We want to continue her vision and legacy as we move into the next phase of our evolution, spreading placemaking to even more places around the world and further deepening its impacts.

Collaboration is at the forefront of everything we do because at its core, placemaking is about connection. We are therefore seeking to forge more partnerships and relationships moving forward so that we can grow the movement's reach and outcomes. If you would like to join us, let us know and let's work together on making the next 50 years of placemaking even better!