Kathy Madden
Kathy Madden was one of the pioneers of the modern placemaking movement and a co-founder of Project for Public Spaces, where she spent more than four decades studying a deceptively simple question: What makes a public space work for people?
An environmental designer by training, Kathy began her career observing how people actually used streets, parks, benches, and other public spaces. After working for the New York City Parks Department, she joined the small team that became Project for Public Spaces in 1975, building on the observational methods and ideas of William “Holly” Whyte. Over the decades that followed, she helped turn those observations into a practical approach to placemaking that could be used by communities around the world.
At PPS, Kathy directed more than 300 research, urban design, and training projects in the United States and abroad. She led the organization’s placemaking training, public-space research, and publications programs and founded its Urban Parks Institute, which brought together thousands of park leaders to share ideas about making urban parks stronger community places.
She was also the driving force behind How to Turn a Place Around, the enormously influential PPS guide that helped translate decades of observation and experimentation into tools communities could actually use. Kathy co-authored the book and later led development of its second edition. The book, and the training program she developed around it, helped introduce generations of planners, designers, community leaders, and ordinary citizens to placemaking. It has been translated into more than ten languages.
There is something particularly appropriate about Kathy's role in developing the language of placemaking. PPS remembers her as a famously ruthless editor, capable of reducing long, complicated explanations to a sentence or two. The organization credits her educational materials with some of its earliest use of the word “placemaking” to describe its collaborative approach to designing and managing public spaces.
After leaving the PPS staff in 2018, Kathy continued the work with her husband and longtime collaborator Fred Kent through the Placemaking Fund, PlacemakingX, and The Social Life Project, documenting and sharing examples of public spaces and public life from around the world.
Kathy died on October 20, 2025, at her home in Brooklyn, at the age of 78. Her death came the same week I was preparing for an early Sidewalk Ballet conversation with Nate Storring of Project for Public Spaces. So although I never had the opportunity to speak with Kathy herself, her presence was very much a part of that conversation—and of a field she spent much of her life helping to create.
Her legacy can be found not only in the organizations, books, and methodologies she helped build, but in thousands of places around the world where someone has stopped to observe what people are actually doing before deciding what a place ought to become.