Skip to content
Facebook iconYouTube iconTwitter iconFlickr iconLinkedInInstagram
Office of Planning, Environment, & Realty (HEP)
HEP Events Guidance Publications Glossary Awards Contacts

Benefits of CSS/D

Placemaking and Healthy Communities

Placemaking is a technique that can be used to apply CSS principles in transportation planning. Placemaking centers on a public-participation process defining and responding to community conditions and needs to achieve transportation design that is sensitive to its context. It capitalizes on a local assets, inspiration, and potential. By doing so, it creates good public spaces that promote health, happiness and well-being. Place-based planning and investment can restore confidence and create pride in community and neighborhoods.

Placemaking helps people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of their community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.1

Health

Placemaking process can also help bring health and transportation professionals and health practitioners together in a collaborative process to improve transportation decisions. This collaboration helps develop transportation options that promote and improve access to healthy and active lifestyles.

Federal Place-Based Initiatives, 2009 – 2016

Between 2009 and 2016 through increased interagency planning, 15 Federal agencies including USDOT administered nearly 20 place-based initiative programs totaling over 17 billion in investments. In total, over 1200 communities participated in these initiatives which are listed in the table below.

Table 1: Roll-out of Place-based Programs
2009-2010 2011-2013 2014-2016
The First Wave: Providing Lessons Learned The Second Wave: Underway The Third Wave: Recent Launches
Strong Cities Strong Communities Investing in Manufacturing Communities Generation Indigenous
Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative Partnership Build America Investment Initiative
Partnership for Sustainable Communities Promise Zones National Disaster Resilience Competition
StrikeForce Climate Action Champions POWER+
  Pay for Success Rural Child Poverty
Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youths  
My Brother’s Keeper Community Challenge
Rebuild by Design
Engagement with Innovation Communities
Mayor’s Challenge to End Veteran’s Homeless

Resources:


1 https://www.pps.org/reference/reference-categories/placemaking-tools/

Updated: 8/4/2017
HEP Home Planning Environment Real Estate
Federal Highway Administration | 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE | Washington, DC 20590 | 202-366-4000