William H. Whyte Award
Principal at the Townscape Institute, Urban Planner and Designer, Preservation Advocate, Environmental Educator and Critic, for his visionary discussions of visual literacy and place making in the American community.
For 30 years, Ron Fleming has been a historic preservationist, a public art advocate and practitioner, a campaigner against unattractive design and development, and a spokesperson to help organizations and corporations understand that good design for communities can also be good for business. The various roles he has played in his life paint a picture of someone who is deeply dedicated to finding and exploring new and innovative methods to enhance place identity, and to making places stronger and more livable by investing in the built environment.
Fleming’s early “Main Street” projects were some of the first in the nation and had a long-term impact on the New England communities in which they were implemented. As designer, he developed with artists and artisans a series of placemaking commissions which connect people to the historical and emotional associations that enrich the meaning of place. As the founding chairman of the Cambridge Arts Council, he made the initial contacts with the Department of Transportation that resulted in the innovative ‘Arts on the Line’ program and generated more than a million dollars for arts commissions on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority system. Fleming’s 1988 Radnor Gateways Enhancement Strategy, a collaborative design with artists and landscape architects, “re-imagined” a megalithic landscape along a five mile highway corridor on Philadelphia’s Main Line. This project won numerous design awards and was recognized by the Federal Highway Administration through instructional videos for highway engineers as a creative way to enhance highway design.
In addition to his work in practice, Fleming engaged the wider public with prolific articles and books that transmit his knowledge and experience. His trilogy, The Power of Place, which includes Place Makers: Creating Public Art That Tells You Where You Are (second edition, 1987), On Common Ground: Caring for Shared Land from Village Green to Urban Park (1982), and Facade Stories: Changing Faces of Main Street and How to Care for Them (1982), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. He continues to write, and in 2002 the American Planning Association published Saving Face: How Corporate Franchise Design Can Respect Community Identity. His upcoming book is The Art of Place Making: Creating Public Art, Urban Design and Interpretation That Tell You Where You Are.
Since 1979, Fleming has been the Principal at the Townscape Institute, an organization dedicated to visual enhancement of the built environment and projects combining public art and urban design.Fleming has traveled the world, lectured all over, and has a visual repertoire of images that makes any audience open their imagination to beauty. He is a unique renaissance man whose passion is community, palate is design, and skill is public art.