Ethan Kent works to support public space organizations, projects, and leadership around the world to build a global placemaking movement. Ethan has traveled to more than 1000 cities, in 60 countries, to advance the cause of leading urban development with inclusive public spaces and placemaking. In 2019 he co-founded PlacemakingX to network, amplify and accelerate placemaking leadership and impact globally. Ethan has helped initiate and grow 24+ regional placemaking networks covering much of the globe, while also supporting the PlacemakingUS network, and the Social Life Project.

He builds on more than 20 years of working on placemaking projects and campaigns with Project for Public Spaces. Ethan has been integral to the development of placemaking as a transformative approach to economic development, environmentalism, transportation planning, governance, resilience, social equity, design, placekeeping, digital space, inclusion, tourism and innovation.

Ethan has keynoted well over 100 top urbanism conferences and helped organize dozens of the placemaking conferences that have most shaped the movement.

Ethan has led a broad spectrum of Placemaking efforts, providing comprehensive public engagement, user analysis, planning, and visioning for high-profile public spaces on six continents.

Ethan worked on over 200 Project for Public Spaces placemaking projects, including: Times Square and Astor Place in New York; Congress Square in Portland, ME, Kennedy Plaza in Providence, RI; Pompey Square, Nassau, Bahamas; Garden Place in Hamilton, New Zealand; Sub Centro Las Condes in Santiago, Chile. He has also worked with some of the most high profile developments in the world to help maximize public space outcomes in Hong Kong, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Auckland, Parramatta, and Sao Paulo.

Utilizing lessons learned through his project work, Ethan regularly creates and conducts Placemaking training courses, with audiences ranging from: city planning staff in Vancouver, Toronto and across Australia; community development corporations in Detroit; public housing developers in Sweden; traffic engineers in New Jersey; the public works department of Quito, Ecuador; planners and developers in Pimpri-Chinchwad, India; and the leadership of Durban, South Africa; and Main Street managers in Wyoming.

Ethan has developed many major partnerships and programs to advance placemaking:

• Founded PlacemakingX to globally network, accelerate and amplify placemaking advocacy and impact.
• Starting in 2012, successfully developed and managed a partnership with UN Habitat, including the Future of Places program, to include public space and placemaking in the New Urban Agenda and at Habitat 3, and making public space and placemaking a global cause.
• Helped lead the formation of the Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking with The Brookings Institution.
• Led the creation of the "Heart of the Community" grant making program with Southwest Airlines, supported its communications and media, and was central to the development of ten of the twenty demonstration projects. Pioneered placemaking as a focus of corporate social responsibility.
• Co-directed the CommunityMatters Partnership, and wrote the successful proposal to get PPS, and the CM Partnership, selected to run the "Citizens Institute on Rural Design" for the National Endowment for the Arts and USDA;
• Convened four Placemaking Funders Forums and launched a Philanthropy for Placemaking program to further establish, measure, and communicate placemaking as a philanthropic cause.

• No one use, or user group, should dominate a public space or a placemaking process. If they do, they limit the outcomes for others and themselves. Great placemaking layers uses and users in ways that are additive. In such a process, the potential for places to support people are infinite.
• We need to network the placemaking movement globally to enable us to grow collective learning, advocacy, and action while preventing the movement from being dominated by any ideology, demographic, or discipline.
• Let’s turn upside-down transportation planning to start with creating the places people want to go to — in order to reduce trips and create places and systems compatible with walking, biking, and transit.
• In a good placemaking process, bad ideas, negative people, and mistakes can be made useful for driving better outcomes.
• Successful public spaces are the new anchor tenant. Great placemaking should drive investment and attract new people on the terms of the existing population - resisting negative gentrification.