When considering integrated land use and transport planning, Placemaking promotes a simple principle: if you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places. The power of this simple idea is that it reflects basic truths that are rarely acknowledged. One such truth is that more traffic and road capacity are not the inevitable results of growth. They are in fact the products of very deliberate choices that have been made to shape our communities around the private automobile. We have the ability to make different choices–starting with the decision to design our streets as comfortable places for people.
That is from our friends at Projects for Public Spaces. If you have not looked at their site, you need to. They have much to offer in linking us to planners, city leaders and international markets. So don’t forget to mark September 2012 for Cleveland OH trip for their International Public Market Conference.