Ronald
Lee Fleming, FAICP
Urban Planner and
Designer
Preservation Advocate
Environmental Educator and Critic
Ronald Lee Fleming
uses his role in public interest advocacy to address public policy issues
of enhancing place meaning and identity. His work finds opportunities
to create a synergism of effort among the often disparate forces affecting
the quality of the built environment. Mr. Fleming is recognized for
planning, public art and urban design projects seeking to merge the
skills of architects, historians and artists. The culmination of ten years' research, his most recent publication, The Art of Place Making: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design (Merrell Publishers 2007), provides case studies of public art that supports place, as well as providing professional analysis of interpretation, planning, trends and past failures in public art.
He and his associates
pioneered some of the early "Main Street" projects and, more
recently, he has used this cross-disciplinary approach to make contributions
in the area of environmental education and urban design. The Massachusetts
Historical Society nominated Mr. Fleming's early trilogy, The Power
of Place, for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. It 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). The series examines how
urban design elements, public spaces and building fronts can foster
constituencies with feelings of proprietorship as the basis for an ethic
of care. With architect Renata von Tscharner, he conceived the book
and poster series, New Providence: A Changing Cityscape, which
illustrates how an imaginary but typical American city evolves from
1875 to 1990.
As the founding
chairman of the Cambridge Arts Council, Mr. Fleming made the initial
contacts with the Department of Transportation that resulted in the
innovative Arts on the Line program, and generated more than $1 million
for arts commissions on the MBTA system. He was the first chairman of
Cambridge's One Percent for Public Art Committee, and remains engaged
with the issues of relating art to place. He is an alumnus of Pomona
College and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and is currently
an active board member of Scenic America, and the Public Policy Committee
of the Preservation Society for Newport County. He is the head of the
Historic Towns Committee of US International Council on Monuments and
Sites, and a principal in the Good Neighbor Policy partnership through
the National Trust. He was also the Governor's Appointee to the Massachusetts
Historical Commission from 1986 to 1990, and is a former trustee of
the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, the Trustees
of Reservations and the Victorian Society, and the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society.
Mr. Fleming's Radnor
Gateways Enhancement Strategy, a collaborative design with artists and
landscape architects that affirms local place meaning, has "reimagined"
a megalithic landscape including a giant cairn, Stonehenge circles,
and an enormous griffin along a five-mile highway corridor on Philadelphia's
Main Line. The work recalls the historic highway, and, deeper in the
past, the original Welsh settlers in the surrounding community. The
Federal Highway Administration included the Radnor project in an instructional
video for highway engineers that demonstrates creative ways to enhance
highway design. More recently, the project won the Environmental Design
Research Association/Places 1998 award for design. The Townscape Institute's
exhibit, "What So Proudly We Hailed," cosponsored by local
preservation organizations, traveled around the United States visually
documenting the need for a national heritage conservation policy protecting
cultural landscapes. Mr. Fleming's most recent book is entitled Saving
Face: How Corporate Franchise Design Can Respect Community Identity,
and was first published by the American Planning Association in 1994,
with a revised and expanded edition in 2002.
With over 35
years' experience, Mr. Fleming is uniquely qualified to take on a variety
of place making planning endeavors, including public art planning charrettes,
conceptual design, place making plans and urban design. Mr. Fleming
is also available for consulting and speaking engagements pertaining
to design review, corporate visual policy, place making design, proprietorship
of public spaces, Main Street revitalization, interpretation, place
making street furniture and urban design elements based on the Institute's
nationwide research on these topics for an upcoming book.
Please contact
us for more information and download Mr.
Fleming's CV for full details of his past projects.