Fred Kent

Founder and President, Project for Public Spaces

Fred Kent is a leading authority on revitalizing city spaces and one of the foremost thinkers in livability, smart growth and the future of the city. As founder and president of Project for Public Spaces, he is known throughout the world as a dynamic speaker and prolific ideas man.

Fred has also been intimately involved with the expansion of Placemaking into a global agenda, helping to achieve a level of international engagement that rivals other major international development efforts. With over 150,000 people around the world following the work of PPS through emails, Twitter and Facebook, he has witnessed interest in Placemaking grow exponentially.

Before founding PPS, Fred studied with Margaret Mead and worked with William H. Whyte on the Street Life Project, assisting in observations and film analysis of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City. The research resulted in the now classic, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, published in 1980, which laid out conclusions based on decades of meticulous observation and documentation of human behavior in the urban environment. In 1970, and again in 1990, Fred was the coordinator and chairman of New York City’s Earth Day.

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