EDITOR'S LETTER

PLACE DIALOGUES

In the Fall semester of 2015, the Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) began offering a Masters Degree in Urban Placemaking and Management (UPM). Placemaking as a field has a long history that dates back fifty years to the work of William H. Whyte, has been practiced by the organization he started, Project for Public Spaces and many others since. And although placemaking has been an elective for many years in Pratt’s City and Regional Planning program, this is the first academic program (anywhere) completely dedicated to the subject and organized to train professionals in this emerging field.

UPM provides a distinct view of how responsive, peoplecentered planning, programming and management of Places can serve individual, community and civic needs. It shows that Places are not the left-over space between buildings or the unconsidered space within them, but the first, rather than the last consideration of an environment in service of society.

When Professor Stuart Pertz and I developed the curriculum for the UPM program we found that much of the discourse around “place” could not be found in architecture and planning literature, but in the fields of humanistic geography and anthropology. We also noted that there was no widely-read outlet for new thinking and writing that specifically focused on place. Stuart felt that we should start our own publication to satisfy that need.

Prof. Stuart Pertz (1936-2015)

Some three years later we are launching this first issue of PlaceDialogues. Stuart’s family created a foundation in his name that could help support the work he began. We are grateful that funds from that foundation have supported this publication. This issue is dedicated to Stuart.

We hope that PlaceDialogues will serve as a journal that supports the UPM program, provides a portal for information on the subject and a vehicle for discussing ongoing work performed by the students, faculty and professionals in the field and other associated fields that deal with issues related to Place. The academic underpinnings of Placemaking stretches across fields of geography, anthropology, sociology, psychology and law - as well as the more obvious fields of planning, urban design, landscape architecture and architecture. It is our intention that PlaceDialogues serves to start conversations across disciplines, about Place.

This first volume of PlaceDialogues is an edited journal of essay by students, faculty and alumni of Pratt that address the question of Place. We hope it starts a conversation and sets the parameters for what we hope will be a series of publications.

David Burney January 2018