![Manhattan-1674404 1920](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Manhattan-1674404_1920.jpg)
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the
planning
Planning is the process of thinking regarding the activities required to achieve a desired goal. Planning is based on foresight, the fundamental capacity for mental time travel. The evolution of forethought, the capacity to think ahead, is consi ...
, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that improve
urban vitality
Urban vitality is the quality of those spaces in cities that are capable of attracting heterogeneous people for different types of activities throughout varied time schedules. The areas of the city with high vitality are perceived as alive, live ...
and promote people's health, happiness, and well-being. It is political due to the nature of
place identity
Place identity or place-based identity refers to a cluster of ideas about place and identity in the fields of geography, urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, environmental psychology, ecocriticism and urban sociology/ecological s ...
. Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy that makes use of urban design principles. It can be either official and government led, or community driven grassroots
tactical urbanism
Tactical urbanism, also commonly referred to as guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, city repair, D.I.Y. urbanism, planning-by-doing, urban acupuncture, and urban prototyping, is a low-cost, temporary change to the built environment, usually in cit ...
, such as extending sidewalks with chalk, paint, and planters, or open streets events such as
Bogotá
Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city of Colombia, and one of the larges ...
,
Colombia
Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...
's
Ciclovía
Ciclovía (, ), also ''ciclovia'' or ''cyclovia'', is a Spanish term that means "cycleway", either a permanent bike path or the temporary closing of certain streets to automobiles for cyclists and pedestrians, a practice sometimes called open s ...
. Good placemaking makes use of underutilized space to enhance the urban experience at the pedestrian scale to build habits of locals.
History
![Jane Jacobs](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Jane_Jacobs.jpg)
The concepts behind placemaking originated in the 1960s, when writers like
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs (''née'' Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book '' The Death and Life of Great American Cities ...
and
William H. Whyte
William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte Jr. (July 11, 1917 – July 11, 1999) was an American urbanist, sociologist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher. He identified the elements that create vibrant public spaces within the city ...
offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers. Their work focused on the importance of lively neighborhoods and inviting public spaces. Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of "eyes on the street." Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.
The term came into use in the 1970s by
landscape architect
A landscape architect is a person who is educated in the field of landscape architecture. The practice of landscape architecture includes: site analysis, site inventory, site planning, land planning, planting design, grading, storm water manageme ...
s,
architect
An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...
s and
urban planner
An urban planner (also known as town planner) is a professional who practices in the field of town planning, urban planning or city planning.
An urban planner may focus on a specific area of practice and have a title such as city planner, town ...
s to describe the process of creating squares, plazas, parks, streets and waterfronts that will attract people because they are pleasurable or interesting. Landscape often plays an important role in the design process. The term encourages disciplines involved in designing the built environment to work together in pursuit of qualities that they each alone are unable to achieve.
Bernard Hunt, of HTA Architects noted that: "We have theories, specialisms, regulations, exhortations, demonstration projects. We have planners. We have highway engineers. We have mixed use, mixed tenure, architecture, community architecture, urban design, neighbourhood strategy. But what seems to have happened is that we have simply lost the art of placemaking; or, put another way, we have lost the simple art of placemaking. We are good at putting up buildings but we are bad at making places."
Jan Gehl has said "First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works"; and "In a Society becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make the cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life."
The writings of poet
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of ...
have contributed to an imaginative grasp of place and placemaking, particularly with reference to local ecology and local economy. He writes that, "If what we see and experience, if our country, does not become real in imagination, then it never can become real to us, and we are forever divided from it... Imagination is a particularizing and a local force, native to the ground underfoot."
In recent years, placemaking has been widely applied in the field of Sports Management and the sports industry. Often times, the idea of placemaking centers around urban real estate development, centralized around a stadium or sports district.
Principles
According to
Project for Public Spaces
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization based in New York dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities, in an effort often termed placemaking
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the pla ...
,
successful placemaking is based on eleven basic principles:
The Community Knows Best
An important aspect of placemaking is taking into account inputs of the people who will be using the public space most. That is, to say, the community for which the public space is intended. This is important because members of the community are likely to have useful insights into how the space does - or should - function, as well as a historical perspective of the area, and an understanding of what does and does not matter to other members of the community.
Places, Not Designs
Placemaking is not just about designing a park or plaza with efficient pedestrian circulation. It involves taking into account the interrelations between surrounding retailers, vendors, amenities provided, and activities taking place in the space, then fine-tuning the space with landscape changes, additions of seating, etc., to make all of those elements mesh. The end result should be a cohesive unit that creates greater value for the community than just the sum of its parts.
Placemaking is a Group Effort
Partners for political, financial, and intellectual backing are crucial to getting a public space improvement project off the ground. These partners can range from individuals, to private or municipal institutions, to museums, to schools.
Make and Act on Observations
By observing how a public space is used, it is possible to gain an understanding of what the community does and does not like about it. This understanding can be used to assess what activities and amenities may be missing from the space. Even after a public space has been built, observation is key to properly managing it, and evolving it to better suit the community's needs over time.
Requires a Vision
As with many other types of project, a placemaking project needs a vision to succeed. This vision should not be the grand design of a single person, but the aggregate conception of the entire community.
Requires Patience
A placemaking project does not happen overnight. Do not be discouraged if things do not go exactly as planned at first, or if progress seems slow.
Triangulate
![La Candelaria, Bogota](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/La_Candelaria%2C_Bogota.jpg)
Triangulation, simply put, is the strategic placement of amenities, such that they encourage social interaction, and are used more frequently. For example, "if a children's reading room in a new library is located so that it is next to a children's playground in a park and a food kiosk is added, more activity will occur than if these facilities were located separately."
Ignore Naysayers
Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done. What it does mean is that there are few people, in either the private or public sectors, who have the job of creating places.
Form Supports Function
A public space's form factor should be formulated with its intended function(s) in mind.
Money Should Not Be an Issue
If networking and team building have been executed correctly, public sentiment towards the project should be positive enough to overlook its monetary cost.
Placemaking is an Ongoing Process
Placemaking is never "done". Minor tweaks can be made to improve the space's usefulness to its community over time, and regular maintenance/upkeep of facilities and amenities is a fact of life.
Healthy Placemaking - The Link Between ''Place'' and ''Health''
Both the opportunities available to individuals and the choices made based on those opportunities impact individual, family, and community health. The World Health Organization's definition of health
provides an appropriate, broad-reaching understanding of health as a "resource for everyday life, not the object of living" and an important frame for discussing the interconnections between ''Place'' and ''Health''. A 2016 report
The Case for Healthy Places'' from
Project for Public Spaces
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization based in New York dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities, in an effort often termed placemaking
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the pla ...
and the
Assembly Project'' funded by the
Knight Foundation and focusing on research related to Shaping Space for Civic Life both offer insight into the current evidence base showing how health and wellbeing are impacted by where you live and the opportunities available to you.
Connecting blueways and greenways through placemaking
There is an increasing focus on using placemaking as a way to address the physical disconnect between the urban streams and greenways through placemaking.
The Arts and Creative Placemaking
While the arts and creative expression play a substantial part in establishing a sense of place, economic growth and production must also play an equally large role in creating a successful place. These two factors are not mutually exclusive, as the arts and cultural economic activity made up $729.6 billion (or 4.2%) of the United States GDP in 2014, and employed 4.7 million workers in 2012. This means that the arts can be deployed as a powerful tool in the creation or rehabilitation of urban spaces.
Jamie Bennett, executive director of ArtPlace America, has identified the following four tools used by communities while implementing creative placemaking.
* Anchoring: When a key arts institution, organization, or building in the area prompts additional foot traffic or regional draw. These anchors can attract additional business, and become a strong source of identity for the neighborhood.
* Activating: When visual or performing arts are brought into the public realm, it activates the space while creating interest, activity, and engagement. More people and eyes on the street drives curiosity to explore and establishes a sense of safety.
* Fixing: Taking vacant, underutilized, or blighted spaces in a neighborhood and treating them as an opportunity for new art and design projects. This can change how people think about these spaces and the opportunities that they represent.
* Planning By using the arts and creative community meeting strategies, stakeholder enthusiasm can be bolstered, resulting in valuable input for community design. Bringing artists into the planning process can upend the familiar and allow participants to mentally "unhook" from their preconceived notions.
Community Attachment
Great places must do more than meet the basic requirements if they want to foster greater community attachment. A strong sense of attachment can result in residents who are more committed to the growth and success of their community. The
Knight Foundation conducted a study measuring community attachment, and found that there
![ChicagoNow chalk-blog (3822844217)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/ChicagoNow_chalk-blog_%283822844217%29.jpg)
was very little variation in the primary drivers of attachment rates when compared between different cities across the United States.
Drivers of Attachment
* Social Offerings - Gathering places that foster face-to-face interactions, building trust with others, and an environment where people care for one another. This includes perceptions of a healthy nightlife, an arts and cultural scene, and community events.
* Openness - How inclusive the community is to a wide range of people and lifestyles. Openness is measured by perception that the place is good for old people, racial and ethnic minorities, families and children, gays and lesbians, college grads looking for work, immigrants, and young adults without children.
* Aesthetics - The physical beauty of the place. Mostly focusing on the availability of open green space, parks, playgrounds, and recreational trails.
Attachment Trends
Livable Streetscapes
![Incremental Development 300 TP](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Incremental_Development_300_TP.jpg)
Streets are the stage for activity of everyday life within a city and they have the most potential to be designed to harness a high-quality sense of place. Effective placemaking in the
street
A street is a public thoroughfare in a built environment. It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, ...
scape lends special attention to the streets livability by representing a sense of security,
sense of place
The term sense of place has been used in many different ways. It is a multidimensional, complex construct used to characterize the relationship between people and spatial settings. It is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some ...
, visible employment, variety of transportation options, meaningful interactions between residents, "eyes on the street" as well as "
social capital
Social capital is "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively". It involves the effective functioning of social groups through interpersonal relationships ...
".
All of these interactions take place at the ''mesoscale''. Mesoscale is described as the city level of observation between ''macroscale''—being birdseye view—and ''microscale--''being textures and individual elements of the streetscape (streetlamp type, building textures, etc.); in other words, mesoscale is the area observable from a humans eyes, for example: between buildings, including storefronts, sidewalks, street trees, and people. Placemaking for a street takes place at both mesoscale and microscale. To be effective placemakers, it is important that planners, architects, and engineers consider designing in the mesoscale when designing for places that are intended to be livable by
Whyte's standards.
Placemaking tools and practices
Tools and practices of placemaking that benefit from utilizing the mesoscale context include:
*
Form-Based Codes
A Form-Based Code (FBC) is a means of regulating land development to achieve a specific urban form. Form-Based Codes foster predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the or ...
*
Infill Development
*
Urban Forestry PracticesCivil Engineering
Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewage ...
Architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
Social Media and Placemaking
As society changes to accommodate new technologies,
urban planner
An urban planner (also known as town planner) is a professional who practices in the field of town planning, urban planning or city planning.
An urban planner may focus on a specific area of practice and have a title such as city planner, town ...
s and citizens alike are attempting to utilise those technologies to enact physical change. One thing that has had a massive impact on western society is the advent of digital technologies, like
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
. Urban decision makers are increasingly attempting to plan cities based on feedback from
community engagement so as to ensure the development of a durable, livable place. With the invention of niche social technologies, communities have shifted their engagement away from
local-government-led forums and platforms, to social media groups on websites such as
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
and
Nextdoor
Nextdoor Holdings, Inc. is an American company which operates a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. Nextdoor launched in the United States in October ...
to voice concerns, critiques and desires.
In a sense, these new platforms have become a
Third Place
In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public ...
, in reference to
Ray Oldenburg
Ray Oldenburg (April 7, 1932 – November 21, 2022) was an American urban sociologist who is known for writing about the importance of informal public gathering places for a functioning civil society, democracy, and civic engagement. He coined th ...
's term.
Social media tools such as these show promise for the future of placemaking in that they are being used to reclaim, reinvigorate and activate spaces. These online neighborhood and event-centric groups and
forums provide a convenient non-physical space for
public discourse
The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the ...
and discussion through digital networked interactions to implement change on a
hyper-local level; this theory is sometimes referred to as
Urban Acupuncture. This type of shift towards a more
crowd-sourced
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...
planning method can lead to the creation of more relevant and useful and inclusive places with greater sense of place.
Other new technologies have also been used in placemaking, such as the WiFi-based project created by D.C. Denison and Michael Oh at Boston's South Station and other locations around Boston. The project was backed by
The Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
. Th
Pulse of Bostonref> used local WiFi signals to create online hyperlocal communities in five different locations around the city.
Notable people
Literature
* ''
The Image of the City
''The Image of the City'' is a 1960 book by American urban theorist Kevin Lynch. The book is the result of a five-year study of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles on how observers take in information of the city, and use it to make mental map ...
,'' by Kevin Lynch (1960)
* ''
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
''The Death and Life of Great American Cities'' is a 1961 book by writer and activist Jane Jacobs. The book is a critique of 1950s urban planning policy, which it holds responsible for the decline of many city neighborhoods in the United States ...
,'' by Jane Jacobs (1961)
* ''Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience'', by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977)
* ''Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities''] by Lynda H. Schneekloth & Robert G. Shibley (1995)
*
The Great Good Place (Oldenburg), ''The Great Good Place'', by Ray Oldenburg (1989)
* ''The Ecology of Place'', by Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning (1997)
* ''How to Turn a Place Around,'' by
Project for Public Spaces
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization based in New York dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities, in an effort often termed placemaking
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the pla ...
(2000)
* ''The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design'', by Ronald Lee Fleming at The Townscape Institute (2007)
* ''The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking'', by Cara Courage, Tom Borrup, Maria Rosario Jackson, Kylie Legge, Anita Mckeown, Louise Platt, Jason Schupbach (2021)
See also
*
Project for Public Spaces
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization based in New York dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities, in an effort often termed placemaking
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the pla ...
*
Community of place
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town ...
*
Place syntax
*
Urban informatics
Urban informatics refers to the study of people creating, applying and using information and communication technology and data in the context of cities and urban environments. It sits at the conjunction of urban science, geomatics, and informatics ...
*
Urban vitality
Urban vitality is the quality of those spaces in cities that are capable of attracting heterogeneous people for different types of activities throughout varied time schedules. The areas of the city with high vitality are perceived as alive, live ...
*
Walkability
Walkability is a term for planning concepts best understood by the mixed-use of amenities in high-density neighborhoods where people can access said amenities by foot. It is based on the idea that urban spaces should be more than just transport ...
*
Cyclability
Cyclability is the degree of ease of bicycle circulation. A greater degree of cyclability in cities is related, among others, to benefits for people's health, lower levels of air and noise pollution, improved fluidity of traffic or increased prod ...
References
{{Reflist
Articles
* Pierce, Martin, Murphy, "Relational Place-Making: the networked politics of place." The Royal Geographical Society (2010): 55.
* Sharma, A. (2022). PLUS GreeN: Reconciling Urban Streams and Greenways through Placemaking. European Journal of Architecture and Urban Planning, 1(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.24018/ejarch.2022.1.2.3
External links
Sustainable placemaking site curated by Michigan State University professorProject for Public Spaces City Repair, Portland, OregonCitizen activism for a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society
''Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm'' a placemaking journal
VIDEO: The Atrium — An Example In Placemaking.Presented at The Canadian Institute of Planners 2013 conference
Reconciling Urban Streams and Greenways through Placemaking, Herring run, Baltimore
StreetPlans: Tactical Urbanism Projects
Community
Urban studies and planning terminology
Urban design
Landscape architecture