The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking

Cara Courage, Tom Borrup, Maria Rosario Jackson, Kylie Legge, Anita Mckeown, Louise Platt, Jason Schupbach, Cara Courage, Tom Borrup, Maria Rosario Jackson, Kylie Legge, Anita Mckeown, Louise Platt, Jason Schupbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000319606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This Handbook is the first to explore the emergent field of 'placemaking' in terms of the recent research, teaching and learning, and practice agenda for the next few years. Offering valuable theoretical and practical insights from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, it provides cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the placemaking sector.

Placemaking has seen a paradigmatic shift in urban design, planning, and policy to engage the community voice. This Handbook examines the development of placemaking, its emerging theories, and its future directions. The book is structured in seven distinct sections curated by experts in the areas concerned. Section One provides a glimpse at the history and key theories of placemaking and its interpretations by different community sectors. Section Two studies the transformative potential of placemaking practice through case studies on different places, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. It also reveals placemaking's potential to nurture a holistic community engagement, social justice, and human-centric urban environments. Section Three looks at the politics of placemaking to consider who is included and who is excluded from its practice and if the concept of placemaking needs to be reconstructed. Section Four deals with the scales and scopes of art-based placemaking, moving from the city to the neighborhood and further to the individual practice. It juxtaposes the voice of the practitioner and professional alongside that of the researcher and academic. Section Five tackles the socio-economic and environmental placemaking issues deemed pertinent to emerge more sustainable placemaking practices. Section Six emphasizes placemaking's intersection with urban design and planning sectors and incudes case studies of generative planning practice. The final seventh section draws on the expertise of placemakers, researchers, and evaluators to present the key questions today, new methods and approaches to evaluation of placemaking in related fields, and notions for the future of evaluation practices. Each section opens with an introduction to help the reader navigate the text. This organization of the book considers the sectors that operate alongside the core placemaking practice.

This seminal Handbook offers a timely contribution and international perspectives for the growing field of placemaking. It will be of interest to academics and students of placemaking, urban design, urban planning and policy, architecture, geography, cultural studies, and the arts.

1
Introduction

What really matters: moving placemaking into a new epoch

Cara Courage

This Handbook was initiated at a time when the ten-year anniversary of the Markusen and Gadwa (2010) National Endowment for the Arts Creative Placemaking White Paper was on the near horizon; was being written when the nomenclature of climate change was changing to climate and ecological emergency; and its final editing took place during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginnings of the global Black Lives Matter and race justice protests after the (at the time of writing, accused) murder of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. The Markusen and Gadwa White Paper became an era-defining moment for placemaking, and as we look from 2020 to 2030 and beyond, undoubtedly COVID-19 and racial and climate justice will engender change in placemaking practice, and these concerns are foregrounded in this Handbook: indeed, as this book calls for looking again at current placemaking narratives and demands new ones, it signals the time for placemaking to evolve, as is only correct for a people- and place-responsive practice with a radical potential at its core.

COVID-19 has put what really matters in our public realm into sharp relief, and in sum, what matters is the human. The pandemic is anti-place: in particular, it is counter to the particularly urban design of collective occupation, and has created a fear of human proximity and taken from us our familiar collective social experiences and sites of serendipitous encounter (Sennett, 2012, p. 38; Soja, 1997, p. 20; Watson, 2006, p. 6) in the public realm. Our common response of a physical distancing from others is contra to the human desire for interaction and contra to public-realm and built-environment design: these places are designed to be animated. As fiscal economies suffer worldwide, so too we find ourselves in something akin to a place-based social or cultural recession. There is an emotional toll in seeing from a distance but feeling ever close the places we have a connection with, that we have made and shaped in our own lifetimes, lost to us, even if, we hope at the time of writing, temporarily. Singularly and cumulatively, the virus does not discriminate – but the pandemic, within our structural and social systems of oppression, does, cleaving further open structures of intersectional discrimination and vulnerability, and, in large part, the burden of social distancing and care falling upon the marginalised and the lowest paid. Those that kept our places working for us but who were previously consigned to its margins – the street cleaners, the bus drivers, the delivery drivers, amongst many others – are not ‘unskilled workers’ but ‘key workers’; public life has not shrunk for them, their worth far in excess of their remuneration. What has placemaking ever looked like for those that have been overlooked in public realm life?

If we ever took it for granted, we now appreciate the full value of human-centred public space when it has been taken away from us – not least, the right to protest in it, and remark has to be given to those places mentioned in this Handbook that have now become sites of Black Lives Matter protest and of police brutality. We see people resist the term ‘social distancing,’ in favour of ‘physical distancing,’ as they take their social life online and animate their neighbourliness on the front step when clapping and banging pots and pans for the pandemic frontline workers in the UK for example, and as they give time to street-level community support networks. Our spatial perspective has pivoted to the hyperlocal of place, where grocery shopping is a walk away and people buy from suppliers in the local economy. Outdoor exercise is within a close-by boundary, and people are using parks and discovering walks previously unknown or out of reach to them in their previous day-to-day routines: a ‘relocalism,’ if you will. If the public realm has changed, our need for social ritual hasn’t. Its site may have moved, however: rainbow posters in windows, balconies as galleries and concert venues, rooftops becoming distanced gym classes. Our distanced sociability affirms to ourselves and to others that we are still here, that the public realm is still there, and that our community is relevant and must be seen and heard.

What is placemaking?

Ask those balcony singers, rooftop exercisers, or street cleaners what placemaking is however, and its highly probable that you will be met with a blank look. Despite the intense and pervasive placemaking activity of the past ten years, and indeed the years before it, there is still a need to explain what placemaking is to those within our sibling sectors as much as to those outside them. In all my research and practice, I have not come across one single placemaking definition that is used by all (and indeed, different definitions appear throughout this Handbook), and to a degree, definitions are avoided. One could be left wondering if placemaking is even ‘a thing,’ if it is so amorphous or undefinable. There are several reasons why a placemaking practitioner or organisation would want to avoid a definition: naming what you do too tightly may limit funding and commercial opportunities, and for the individual practitioner, one can define one’s own work and position in and vis-à-vis this field. Conversely, naming what you do as placemaking, in your own definition, is a self-fulfilling prophecy – ‘I make place, therefore I am a placemaker’ covers a wide range of practices in opposition to each other from ideological purviews (see below.) Placemaking may be so new as sector, when placed next to architecture or urban design for example, that it could also be fair to say that we are still defining the field – and indeed, that is a function of this Handbook. But equally, could the term placemaking have become meaningless as a result of its disparate, diluted, and obscured use? While not having an accepted definition of placemaking can be used to one’s advantage, it is far from certain that this is to the sector’s advantage. Just as with the terms ‘green’ or ‘eco,’ and their use to the point of losing any meaning, the placemaking term is being applied to almost any project in place, and those projects – urban farmers’ markets, an outdoor cinema, a pop-up park – are all looking familiar no matter where in the world you may find them, despite their relative merit.

For me, what differentiates placemaking from other built environment sectors, and should be central to any understanding or definition of it, is that placemaking is an approach and a set of tools that puts the community front and centre of deciding how their place looks and how it functions. There is a community imperative in placemaking. As artist Jeanne van Heeswijk said, ‘The community is the expert in being the community’ (van Heeswijk, 2012): in placemaking, the community, however defined in the particular context, is recognised and valued as the expert in being the community. The moment you take the community out of placemaking as both spearheading and equal stakeholder in its process, the process is no longer placemaking and the radical potential of this place-based process is completely lost. Placemaking, when done well, has an agency of relative expertism (Courage, 2017), joining equitably community (however self-defined), architects, urban designers, artists, policymakers, planners, developers, Mayors and city administrations, educators, housing departments… and uses the existing assets of a place to their best effect and facilitates creative patterns of activities and connections – cultural, economic, social, environmental – that define a place and support its ongoing evolution. Placemaking represents a paradigm shift in thinking about planning and urban design, from a primary focus on buildings and macro urban form to a focus on public space and human activity – what happens in these spaces, why, how, and with and by whom, and not: this is all the stuff of placemaking. There is a twofold need for the processes of placemaking. First, it demands all those involved to work across sectors and out of silos, and often with art practice, especially that of community and social practice or socially engaged art. These particular art practices, as collaborative and transdisciplinary, are best placed to lead by example here, and indeed to break some of our sibling sectors’ fear of the trial-and-error of process. Second, there is a need for architects, urban designers, and planners to pay ever more attention to local knowledges and desires in order to give depth to the meaning of their place designs, in a generative, open source, and open-ended process without, or with an unknown, built environment output. Again, artists have a vital role here, driving and incubating the conversations through community-based and explorative and testing methodologies.

In this placemaking, people have their love of place confirmed, renewed, valued; their place attachment activates as place stewardship; which leads to increased social cohesion and wellbeing; which in turn results in the genuine formation of the vibrant, liveable places that administrations, planners, and developers the world over are working to variously create or secure (Courage, 2017). When projects are done with integrity and hold the expertism of the community paramount, the community are active producers, not consumers, of the public realm. But like anything that happens in the public realm, placemaking is of contested power and politics. The very real situation for many at the community end of placemaking – or, at least, what is branded as placemaking – is of wholescale social cleansing, communities evicted and dispersed by developers, artists brought in to place wash (Pritchard, 2019). The reader may not recognise in this book what has become normative placemaking practice. This is not bad thing. This Handbook deliberately (re)situates into placemaking discourse non-normative, subaltern (Louai, 2012), and diverse knowledges.

Placemaking as a community of practice?

Placemakers have a concern with community as an outward entity, but we turn the lens inwards now, to the consideration of placemaking as a community of practice. Succinctly, a community of practice is a group of people who ‘share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it as they interact regularly’ (Wenger, 2006, p. 1). The community can be any group engaged in a common intentional process of knowledge sharing and creation (ibid.), developing unique perspectives on their shared concern and a body of common language and approaches (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 5). Activities undertaken by a community of practice may include: problem-solving, seeking experience, discussing developments, documentation projects, visits, mapping knowledge and identifying gaps (Wenger, 2006, p. 2), pondering common issues, exploring ideas, acting as sounding boards, creating tools and standards, and developing tacit shared knowledge (Wenger et al., 2002, pp. 4–5). Participation is essential to the community of practice: it is through participation that identity and mutual recognition and practices develop, and connection, meaning, negotiation, and action occur (Handley et al., 2006, p. 643). The outcome of this is a practice based on a ‘craft intimacy,’ ‘close interactions around shared problems and sense of commonality’ (Wenger et al., 2002, pp. 120–2). Communities of practice are comprised of three dimensions: the domain, its joint enterprise, what it is about; the community, its mutual engagement, how it functions; and the practice, its shared repertoire, what capability it produces (Wenger, 1998, p. 2; Wenger, 1998, p. 72ff, in Fuller, 2007, p. 21). Some members will participate as they care about the domain and want to see it developed; others because of the value of having a community to interact with as peers; and others to learn about the practice and develop craft (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 44).

The domain of placemaking, on first look, is self-evident, but in practice is contested and negotiated. Whereas one can identify as a placemaker, the intent and outcomes of one’s placemaking may be wholly different and in opposition – think here, the difference in practice between top-down and bottom-up placemaking (see, Placemaking Typology, Courage, 2017, pp. 72–76). However, as a relatively new practice, negotiating the domain is both the first task of the community and its ongoing task, critical as it is to community development (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 45). With placemaking, a global and intentional community, as understood above, and a body of knowledge is iteratively and generatively forming, comprised of a shared repertoire of resources – experiences, tools, language, problem-solving, for example (Wenger, 2006, p. 2). The activities undertaken by a community of practice are akin to those undertaken by placemakers through their practice, and, via increasing formal and informal knowledge exchange...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contents curated by topics
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• List of editors
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: What really matters: moving placemaking into a new epoch
• SECTION 1 History and theory of placemaking
• SECTION 2 Practices of placemaking
• SECTION 3 Problematizing placemaking
• SECTION 4 Art, artists, and placemaking
• SECTION 5 Placemaking, environment, and sustaining ecologies
• SECTION 6 Placemaking, urban design, and planning
• SECTION 7 Researching and evaluating placemaking
• Conclusion
• Index