Placemaking

Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, 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 and promote people's health, happiness, and well-being. It is political due to the nature of place identity. 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, such as extending sidewalks with chalk, paint, and planters, or open streets events such as Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovía. Good placemaking makes use of underutilized space to enhance the urban experience at the pedestrian scale to build habits of locals.
The concepts behind placemaking originated in the 1960s, when writers like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte 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 architects, architects and urban planners to describe the process of creating squares, plazas, parks, streets and waterfronts to 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 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.
According to Project for Public Spaces, successful placemaking is based on eleven basic principles:
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 and the Assembly Project, funded by the Knight Foundation and focusing on research related to Shaping Space for Civic Life, looked at the evidence base showing how health and wellbeing were impacted by where a person lives and the opportunities available to them.
There is an increasing focus on using placemaking as a way to "connect blueways and greenways" - to address the physical disconnect between the urban streams and greenways through 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.
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 was very little variation in the primary drivers of attachment rates when compared between different cities across the United States.
Drivers of attachment include:
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 streetscape lends special attention to the streets livability by representing a sense of security, sense of place, visible employment, variety of transportation options, meaningful interactions between residents, "eyes on the street" as well as "social capital". 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.
Tools and practices of placemaking that benefit from utilizing the mesoscale context include:
As society changes to accommodate new technologies, urban planners and citizens alike are attempting to utilize 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. 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 and Nextdoor to voice concerns, critiques and desires. In a sense, these new platforms have become a Third Place, in reference to Ray Oldenburg'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 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 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 Pulse of Boston used local WiFi signals to create online hyperlocal communities in five different locations around the city.