Last night I joined a faculty retreat at Pratt Institute’s Program for Planning and Sustainable Development.
The question at hand: How can the school strengthen its teaching about everything to do with the public realm?
Should the school offer a master’s degree, a post-professional degree, or a concentration in the field?
And what constitutes the field of public places anyway?
Many of New York’s leaders in public placemaking joined the discussion – from David Burney, commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction; to Andy Wiley-Schwartz and Wendy Feuer, assistant commissioners at the city’s department of transportation who head up initiatives in urban design, public art and reclaiming streets for public spaces; to leadership of the Design Trust for Public Space and staff of Project for Public Spaces.
The conversation, brisk and collegial, touched on numerous questions.
What would the audience for such an academic program be?
Who would the students be, and what careers would it prepare them for? One public official, asked why he would hire someone with this degree, said that public agency leaders and project managers need to be better clients for the public realm, and this type of program could help.
What public places should the program consider?
As the conversation evolved, so did the geography of public space – from parks and plazas to streets, to public facilities like airports, to college campuses.
What is the core knowledge a public space manager might need?
Existing coursework at Pratt focuses on a range of skills and current topics: green infrastructure, commuity design, active design, design guidelines, pedestrian planning, complete streets, main street management, public=private partnerships, and so on. Studio work integrates that course knowledge, as well as students in Pratt programs in planning, facilities management, historic preservation.
Some of the faculty and practitioners, however, argued that the core of the program should be to develop a deeper understanding of urbanism, how that shapes city form, and how that shapes urban spaces. These studies could involve comparative studies of culture, economy, politics and space, as well as how broad systems of hard and soft infrastructure — such as transit, water, information, food, stormwater, creative netoworks, cultural networks — impact the types and uses of public spaces.
Pratt will probably continue to consider the idea in future faculty retreats. One of the more interesting proposals was that Pratt should convene a number of topics on the issue over the coming year. It is a topic well worth Pratt’s efforts to explore, as much of New York’s history is written in the evolution of its public spaces, which never seem to stop reinventing themselves.
UPDATE
Pratt launched the program. Read about it here.