conclusion
Creative Placemaking Strategies in Smaller Communities
Greg Richards
This final chapter reviews the main themes of the book and contextualizes them within emerging trends of creative tourism, and within the larger field of creative placemaking. This volume brings together an impressive range of analyses of creative tourism in small places around the world. These are based on many different analytical perspectives, including sustainable development, networking, co-creation, producer collaboration, digital technologies, and Indigenous cultures.
Creative tourism is often linked with areas that are in some way disadvantaged in regards to tourism, because it arguably gives places lacking in more traditional tourism resources new opportunities (Duxbury and Richards 2019). For many of these places, small size is a major disadvantage. It often means physical isolation, as in the case of the Azores or the Canadian Arctic, but it also implies a relative lack of the tangible heritage resources that are usually the backbone of traditional cultural tourism.
One of the points made by this volume is that being small can often also be an advantage. For one thing, small places already know they canāt engage in the global competitive rat race of city branding and iconic architecture. This is in many ways a good thing, because city branding tends to be superficial, concentrating on just one image or story of a place, blocking all alternative voices for the sake of being āon brand.ā Although place branding and marketing is where the big money is, there are alternatives for small places that want to put themselves on the map and make themselves better places to live in. The most important of these is āplacemaking,ā which can be viewed as an alternative to place marketing (Richards and Duif 2018). As Hildreth (2009) has pointed out, marketing and branding simply do not work unless the reality of a place matches the image. He suggests, then, that places that want to be successful should improve their reality. The image will follow. If a place is good to live in, it will also be good to visit and to invest in. And places of any size can be good to live in.
This is why there is growing attention nowadays to placemaking. However, while placemaking is in vogue, it is poorly understood. There are many different definitions, and most of these relate to a fairly narrow concept of placemaking as an intervention in the physical environment of a place. But as I will argue here, placemaking is far more than a physical intervention. It is, rather, a complete social practice that involves physical change, as well as changes in thinking and doing.
Placemaking for Smaller, Happier Places
Historically, placemaking has been the preserve of architects and planners. Not surprisingly, they tend to concentrate on the construction of the built environment and how this can improve peopleās lives. Providing better places to live and work was an ideal of the garden cities movement, and of Jane Jacobs (1961). Many recent scholars have also drawn on Lefebvreās (1991) ideas about the nature of space to show how people interact with the places they inhabit. He argued that physical space was just one element of space as a whole. People also make space through their use of itāthe ālived spaceā of everyday life. And planners and designers and politicians also create ideas about space that influence the way space is ...
