The Agora Coalition is a not-for-profit coalition of professionals from New York City, Philadelphia and New Jersey who are dedicated to creating, conserving and where necessary recreating public and civic space in towns, commercial spaces such as malls, and regions of suburban sprawl. Too many Americans live in places without a center, where the absence of an "agora" -- that remarkable open civic and market space around which the ancient Greek polis turned - is acutely felt.

The Agora Coalition is a marriage of idealism and real-world business practices. Under the guidance of its two founders, the renown democratic theorist and practitioner Benjamin Barber and the visionary developer Ron Sher, and under the direction of our President, Tracy Challenger, the coalition brings together the highest level of professional expertise around a vision of democratic public space that can transform how suburbia looks, lives and feels. Whether communities are dealing with the challenges of downtown revitalization, suburban sprawl, failed commercial malls or issues of conservation, The Agora Coalition's professionals can help to recreate modern day agoras.

An agora approach aims to create modern day Agora put civic space in the midst of homogenous commercial space, offering diversity, culture, liveliness and human scale. It can offer towns new understandings of civic identity rooted in architecture, history, planning and design. It can provide a fulcrum for local leaders to manage the growth and development of a community and offer citizens direct interaction with professionals and elected officials. Equally important, the agora approach to planning offers opportunities for a community to come together around civic, cultural and community ideals that are more encompassing than commerce and more inspiring than private lives. The agora approach puts citizenship at the center of community and strengthens the civic bonds on which locality, state and nation depend. This has never been more important than in this new age of uncertainty, globalization and insecurity.

Coalition member David Specter, a distinguished architect and author, has written: "The successful public space will be a dynamic and complex blend of the rational and irrational, the planned and the unintentional. Its universal constant will be its essential humanity, its accommodation of people's need to be at once individuals and part of their community." This is a portrait in words of the Agora Coalition's vision for civic community. The Coalition's founders bring a wealth of theoretical and practical experience to its work. Dr. Barber is a best selling author on democracy, civil society and globalization: a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, he is a principal of the Democracy Collaborative (under whose aegis the Coalition operates). He consults with governments in Europe and America and has been an informal advisor to President Bill Clinton. Ron Sher is a businessman. He is the owner of nationally recognized shopping centers (Crossroads in Seattle and the Grove at Shrewsbury) and the founder and owner of Third Place Books. Tracy Challenger, the President of the Agora Coalition, brings twelve years of experience in downtown revitalization. Just prior to being named the President of The Agora Coalition, she was the Executive Director of Red Bank's Downtown Revitalization Corporation. Red Bank serves as a leading model for downtown revitalization and citizen based community development.

The Agora Coalition engages leading planners, architects, developers, historians, retailers, urban designers, landscape architects and academics in its work. The collective experience and skills of these professionals, who have met together over the years in conferences and work settings and share a common vision of civic community, allow us to provide a full range of planning, design, real estate development, and economic development consulting services, including diagnostics, one-day workshops, planning, design and project management.