Oak Park Newspaper

VOTE
Vision Community Action
Annabel Abraham
Jim Balanoff
Robert Milstein
Gary Schwab
Political Ad

Free Readers Ensemble

Wm. B. Sullivan Realty & Co.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Fred Kent, Founder and President, Project for Public Spaces begins his Talk with Displays and Comments. (more below)
© Photo by Christine Papierniak for Suburban Journals of Chicago Inc.

Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF)
and Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC)

COMMUNITY BUILDING: DESIGN INNOVATION AND
NEIGHBORHOOD REVITALIZATION
Thursday, March 15, 2007

PRESENTATIONS BY

Cheri Heramb, Acting Commissioner,
Chicago Department of Transportation
Fred Kent, Founder and President,
Project for Public Spaces

PANEL DISCUSSION FEATURING
Marisa Novara, Member, Ogden Avenue Redesign
Coordinating Committee
Ald. Mary Ann Smith (Chicago-48th Ward)

------------------------------------------------------------------
Oak Park Village President David Pope and the Village
Manager were both on hand to hear the presentation.

The photos below will give an abbreviated view of the
talk, sans discussion.

© Photo by Christine Papierniak for Suburban Journals of Chicago Inc.

MPC Spring 2007 Roundtable Series
March 15, 2007

12:00-1:30 p.m.

11:45

Doors open and Lunch

12:00

Welcome and introductions
Kit Hodge
Metropolitan Planning Council

Diane Legge Kemp
DLK Civic Design

12:05

Keynote presentation
Cheri Heramb
Chicago Department of Transportation

Fred Kent
Project for PubLic Spaces

Panelist presentations

Marisa Novara
Ogden Avenue Redesign Coordinating Committee

AId. Mary Ann Smith
Chicago-48th Ward

Tony Smith
S.B. Friedman & Company

1:00

Moderated questions from the audience

1:30

Adjourn

PRESENTATIONS BY:

Cheri Heramb, Acting Commissioner,
Chicago Department of Transportation
As acting commissioner, a post she has held since
June 2005, Heramb is responsible for management of
Chicago’s ground transportation infrastructure and
regulation of the public way. CDOT responsibilities
include maintaining streets, sidewalks, alleys, and
transit stations as well as various neighborhood
public way greening and beautification. She oversees
a department of more than 1,200 employees and an
annual budget of more than $500 million.

Heramb has served CDOT for 12 years, working as
managing deputy commissioner, deputy commissioner
of administration and planning, senior director of
transportation programming and ptanning, and director
of transportation planning. Among the large-scale
planning projects she worked on are the Central
Area Plan, the Chicago Region Environmental and
Transportation Efficiency (CR EATE) rail improvement
program, Central Lakefront Transportation Study,
and two federal transportation bill reauthorizations.

A lifelong Chicago resident, Heramb earned a master’s
degree in urban planning and policy from the University
of Illinois in Chicago, and bachelor’s degrees in
psychology and political science from the University
of Illinois in Chicago.

Fred Kent, Founder and President, Project for Public
Spaces, New York, NY. Fred Kent is a leading authority
on revitalizing city spaces and one of the foremost
thinkers on livability, smart growth and the future of
the city. As founder and president of Project for Public
Spaces, he is known throughout the world as a dynamic
speaker and prolific ideas man.

Traveling over 150,000 miles each year across the U.S.
and globe, Kent and the PPS staff train 1o,ooo people
annually in Placemaking techniques. He has trained over
1,ooo transportation professionals from state DOTs, in
addition to many thousands of community and neighborhood
groups across the country.

In 1968, Kent founded the Academy for Black and Latin
Education (ABLE), a street academy for high school
dropouts. He was program director for the Mayor’s Council
on the Environment under New York Mayor John Lindsay.
In 1970, and again in 1990, Kent was the coordinator
and chairman of New York City’s Earth Day. He has taken
over half a million photographs of public spaces and their users, which have appeared in exhibits, publications and articles.

Kent attended Columbia University’s Graduate and
Undergraduate Schools, where he studied Geography,
Economics, Transportation, Planning, and Anthropology.
He studied with Margaret Mead and worked with William H.
Whyte on the Street Life Project, assisting in observations and film analysis of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City.

Marisa Novara, Member, Ogden Avenue Redesign Coordinating
Committee Marisa Novara first came to the North Lawndale
community as an intern in 1999, where she worked on a
Welfare to Work program and as a policy advocacy for child care and housing issues at the Carole Robertson Center for
Learning. She was a program officer for Housing and Economic
Development for the Steans Family Foundation, and currently manages multiple real estate development projects for Lawndale Christian Development Corporation.

Novara holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of
Michigan, an AM from the University of Chicago School of
Social Service Administration, and is a graduate of the
Urban Developers’ Program at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. She is a board member of the Lawndale office of
Neighborhood Housing Services and serves on the Community Development Committee of The Resurrection Project.