Cynthia Nikitin has earned a reputation as a persuasive advocate for “Placemaking” as an approach to city planning and urban design.  With a portfolio of more than 300 projects during her time at the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), Cynthia’s technical expertise stretches from the development of main street master plans and corridor enhancement projects to the creation of transit station area plans and public art master plans for major cities. This includes facilitating approximately 40 public workshops, visioning sessions, and public meetings annually. Cynthia is currently directing the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts focused on providing technical design assistance to rural communities and small towns across the United States. She also heads the “Heart of the Community” program, providing Placemaking grants to cities through PPS’s partnership with Southwest Airlines.

In her Keynote address, Placemaking: The Ultimate Art Form, Cynthia will highlight projects that integrate placemaking and historic preservation and will demonstrate how placemaking leads to the creation vibrant public spaces in and around heritage buildings, districts, and downtowns; supports the rehabilitation of historic parks to increase use; fosters the senstive, adaptive and logical reuse of historic structures to meet community needs; helps restore the historic social functions of a building, park, or a heritage district; widens the overall impact of preservation projects; and builds a broader constituency for the preservation movement.

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