Five introductory reflections on placemaking

Over the past few months we've been talking to our partners and students on the TAP project about what placemaking is. It can be a slippery term, so we're setting out some of the ideas we've been discussing below. For anyone unsure about what placemaking means, this might be a good place to start. This isn't a final definition - like placemaking itself it's a work-in-progress.

 

1. Placemaking is about connections between people and place

Placemaking is a shorthand term that describes how places are made through our interactions with them. It’s about how “place” always means more than a set of geographical coordinates. It’s about feelings and attitudes and the stories we tell ourselves and each other about place. Placemaking is as much about human beings as it is the built environment, nature and infrastructure. As people and communities interact with the physical environments in which they live, work and play, a particular ‘sense of place’ comes about. It’s what gives each place its uniqueness and what makes Sheffield Sheffield, and Strasbourg Strasbourg. We can say, then, that placemaking is a local practice and it happens differently in different places. For this reason, it’s hard to provide a universal definition.

 

Placemaking has a second broad meaning. It has come to be understood not only as an everyday practice, involving literally everyone, but as an agenda and a tool for  improving the quality, attractiveness and usability of a place, thereby also enhancing its value and image. Placemaking involves working out what is good and less good about a place, getting the right people involved to address those issues, creating a plan for improvement and finding the resource to implement it.  

 

However, there are some concerns about this. For some, the term ‘placemaking’ suggests that there was no place previously, and this is clearly wrong. Places, like people, have memories and histories that can’t be forgotten. For other critics, placemaking has been co-opted in place branding (or corporate design) initiatives, which don’t take into account the diversity of places and people, and focus instead on overarching and potentially exclusive narratives for the purposes of ‘selling’ a city or region. Many people believe that placemaking is inherently tied up with gentrification and that it can amplify existing inequalities. Some analysts have argued that placemaking avoids the real issues. It focuses on making material tweaks, rather than addressing the structural problems that affect our experiences of living in a certain place (Tim Cresswell). Placemaking might also focus on certain (privileged) groups and fail to address important issues such as racial inequalities and differing experiences of place.

 

2. Transforming and activating places?

Placemaking happens everywhere, every day, intentionally and unconsciously. If we want to make better places in which to live and flourish, then we have to think more explicitly and proactively about how placemaking happens - and how we want it to happen in the future. We also have to engage with placemaking as a strategy and agenda, addressing the problems it might ignore, amplify and create. We need to comprehend more fully the connections people have with place, as well as better understand how we impact on place and place impacts on us.  

 

Places are always in the process of activating and transforming, and they activate and transform in different ways. They change and grow as populations, local economies and shared values come and go. Adding to, enriching and editing places is always a work-in-progress and means sharing knowledge and experience across a multitude of stakeholders from communities, businesses and local authorities. For this reason, placemaking work is never finished. 

 

 

3. Placemaking is - and should be - messy

It’s been said that the very term ‘urban planning’ implies a sense of neatness and order that contradicts the lived experience of places as messy, spontaneous and cacophonous.  

 

But placemaking involves so many stakeholders, human and non-human, that there will always need to be lots of negotiation - and consensus will never be easily reached. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If we’re to find creative, ethical and collaborative approaches to placemaking, then we need to emerge from our silos and speak - but most importantly, listen - to each other. This will be a messy, noisy process and there will be difficult power structures to address. It won’t necessarily feel ‘planned’ at all. 

 

The arts and humanities, with their capacity to embrace contradiction and accommodate multiple voices and perspectives, can play an important role in helping good things emerge from the messiness. Their focus on the importance of stories, art and the role of imagination might help us better understand our relationship with places and encourage us to push the limits of how we define and interact with them. 

 

4. We are all placemakers

 

It's tempting to think of placemaking in the abstract, as an activity done by architects or urban planners sitting around a table, but placemaking isn’t the job of one person or one organisation. From the student to the business owner, the street cleaner to the urban planner, we all do it. With so many people involved, to acknowledge only a single vision of a place is to disregard the whole story. We should also always be alert to whose voices are or are not included in conversations about placemaking. As Muna pointed out to us in relation to equity and justice - it's not enough to ask 'who is the room?', we should also ask 'who is trying to get into the room but can't?'  

 

Place is something experienced by different people in different ways. It has multiple meanings, uses, possibilities and limitations depending on who is experiencing it. These numerous lived experiences and competing outlooks are equally valuable and all serve to make a place. 

 

With such a diversity of perspectives, finding a common, accessible language for discussing placemaking - for making sense of place - is vital. 

 

 

5. Small acts have big impacts

 

Thinking about placemaking inevitably leads us to the biggest issues of our time - racial and climate justice, rising inequality, Covid-19 - because all of these have a significant impact on place. This can feel overwhelming, but connecting with place can also mean (re)connecting with our humanity in small but nourishing ways. 

 

Small contributions and experiences - an afternoon spent in a community garden, a conversation with someone on a bench, attending a parkrun - can make a big difference to how we feel about ourselves and the ways in which we feel we belong to the places where we live. In this way, placemaking embedded in the here and now of public spaces and in the everyday interactions between people.