Vice President Ethan Ethan Kent is an authority in the practice of Placemaking, with experience on over 200 PPS projects. His experiences evaluating and photographing public spaces in hundreds of cities in over 50 countries forms the foundation of his work. During over 10 years at PPS, Ethan has led a broad spectrum of Placemaking efforts, providing technical assistance to activate, revamp or re-envision places in diverse settings from Providence, RI's Kennedy Plaza and Portland Oregon's Pioneer Courthouse Square to Santiago, Chile, to many of New York City's most underperforming public spaces. He has also helped to shape many new development plans including proposals for multi-billion dollar projects in Hong Kong, Dubai and Los Angeles. Utilizing lessons learned through his work with community members, Ethan has created and conducted Placemaking training courses for professionals of various disciplines from city planning staff in Vancouver, BC, to community development corporations in Detroit; from public housing developers in Sweden to traffic engineers in New Jersey. In order to apply Placemaking citywide, Ethan defined and launched the Great Cities Initiative to build local capacity and implement targeted projects while working to integrate Placemkaing into the culture of agencies and community-based organizations. This strategy has been successfully employed in a wide range of cities including Flint, MI, Bellingham, WA, Mississauga, Ontario, Indianapolis, IN, Chicago, IL and Melbourne, Australia. Ethan also leads PPS efforts in NYC, co-founding and managing PPS' role in the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign, an effort to challenge auto-centric transportation policy and inspire a new public vision of streets as dynamic destinations. To launch the campaign, he directed an educational exhibit called Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York, that has appeared at the Municipal Arts Society, the Conde Nast Building and the Brooklyn Public Library. In coordination with the campaign, Ethan has initiated and helped manage Placemaking processes with local stakeholders in some of NYC's most important yet auto-dominated areas including Times Square, the Meat Packing District, Hells Kitchen, Columbus Avenue, and Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. The campaign has been credited for helping to bring about a broad transformation at the NYC Department of Transportation and many on-the-ground street improvements.
