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, Fred has undertaken consultancy work and given talks across the U.S. as well as internationally. Each year, he and the PPS staff train 10,000 people in Placemaking techniques.

Audiences Fred has addressed include the Smart Growth Network, Federal Highway Administration, U.S. General Services Administration, American Society of Landscape Architects, American Public Transit Association, U.S Forest Service, the World Bank, New Jersey DOT, New York DOT, Ford Foundation, Caltrans, Connecticut Main Street Center, and the Princes Foundation. He has trained over 1,000 transportation professionals from statewide DOTs, in addition to many thousands of community and neighborhood groups across the country.

Fred 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.

The research resulted in the now classic 'The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces', published in 1980, which laid out conclusions based on decades of meticulous observation and documentation of human behavior in the urban environment.

In 1968, Fred 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 in New York City under Mayor John Lindsay. In 1970, and again in 1990, Fred 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.