Mission

PlacemakingUS brings together placemakers from the US and around the world to help communities create better places.

Purpose

PlacemakingUS is a national network organized to unleash community power to build living, interconnected places together. Through our “United Streets of America” program, we prioritize working with frontline communities that have been uprooted and looted by destructive urban planning, auto-oriented development, racist policies, and unequal investment. Our network is fighting back by equipping communities across the country with a range of tools, experiences, funding, and new relationships to regenerate their neighborhoods into complex, resilient systems transformed to face 21^st-century issues like climate change, isolation/polarization, economic inequity, and public health.

Placemaking is a humanistic, multi-disciplined approach to urbanism promoted by the United Nations New Urban Agenda and deeply rooted in the studies and approaches of American thinkers and do-ers like Margaret Mead, Jane Jacobs, William White, Christopher Alexander, the Project for Public Spaces and many more since.

At the Project for Public Space’s 2019 US Placemaking Week, Ethan Kent of PlacemakingX tasked Ryan Smolar with initiating a new placemaking network to cover the United States.