China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Building social value into design and placemaking
Published in Ani Raiden, Martin Loosemore, Andrew King, Chris Gorse, Social Value in Construction, 2018
If we take for granted that the primary objective of placemaking is to improve the quality of a place, also implicit in that objective must be to improve the quality of life for the people who will live, work and play there. Social value, therefore, is clearly embedded in the objectives for placemaking. There is an expectation that the built outcomes of placemaking will have an impact on the place and on people long after the construction ends. Increasingly, we are measuring the impact and social value of placemaking in these terms and learning about how changes to our built environment affect people’s social, cultural and economic opportunities and their overall quality of life.
Making change, design as moral mediator
Published in Tania Allen, Solving Critical Design Problems, 2019
With her mentor Walter H. Whyte (see Chapter 4), the author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), Jacobs proposed an alternative theory of planning that included community involvement and the examination of how successful urban communities actually worked. Her observations of successful urban districts like the North End in Boston illuminated the importance of diversity of business, variety of use, and integration of public and private space. Additionally, Jacobs advocated tirelessly for community involvement and partnership in the planning process. Her work has led to a theory of community-based city planning and architecture called placemaking. According the group, Project for Public Spaces—started by a contemporary of Whyte and Jacobs—placemaking is “More than just promoting better urban design, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution” (Project for Public Spaces, 2007). Community-based placemaking is a complex approach to urban development primarily because it challenges the idea of the master plan. Theories of placemaking focus on the positive impacts of integrating community participation into the design and planning process, and the simple power of observation. Placemaking advocates argue that community involvement encourages place-attachment—which creates a bond between people and the places that they occupy. By encouraging place-attachment, placemaking improves ownership, agency, and the reclaiming of space—not by planners and policymakers, but by the people who live in and manage them every day. Jacobs argued this self-governance was a core aspect to healthy neighborhoods, and the real goal of urban planning. Placemaking also aims to move design and planning beyond the physical space and into the cultural one. How can spaces help people trust each other more? Feel more accountable? Build stronger communities? The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the United States has built on this to consider how peacemaking might use creative endeavors to enhance the attachment to community. As the NEA has defined it: Communities across our nation are leveraging the arts and engaging design to make their communities more livable with enhanced quality of life, increased creative activity, a distinct sense of place, and vibrant local economies that together capitalize on their existing assets. The NEA defines these efforts as the process of creative placemaking.(Markusen and Gadwa, 2010)
The importance of place-based narrative in suburban forest planning
Published in Journal of Urban Design, 2021
This finding suggests that placemaking and co-governance are important components of successful urban forestry strategies and initiatives. This resonates with the literature on placemaking. Placemaking is a process of enhancing local place identity through a combination of place-specific design and community involvement (Porter 2015, 17) which seeks to strengthen the connection between people and places (Project for Public Spaces 2018). This place-specific design typically brings ‘a certain coherence to the multiform reality around us.’ Landscapes, from urban gardens and development sites through to protected wilderness areas, are ‘increasingly subject to a coherent system of identity construction’ (Porter 2015, 84). However, this has rarely been applied to urban forests or their planning.
The art of inclusion: phenomenology, placemaking and the role of the arts
Published in Journal of Urban Design, 2020
Across space and time, places are made and remade in a multitude of ways by a multiplicity of agents. Sometimes this happens as a result of government intervention, at other times through bottom-up initiatives. Taken together, academics commonly refer to this expansive church of activities as ‘placemaking’ (Aravot, 2002; Arefi 2014; Friedmann 2010; Hou 2010; Musterd and Kovács 2013; Palermo and Ponzini 2014). In a broad sense, placemaking is thereby the term commonly used by those in the related fields of architecture, planning and urban design to describe the processes of creating spaces that are desirable for people to live, work and visit (Marshall 2009). It is an endeavour normally conceived as bringing together designers and users in creating contextually sensitive interventions that respond to local economic, environmental and socio-cultural attributes (Thomas 2016). Academic research has sought to examine the many facets of this multidimensional activity, with informative studies exploring such topics as the importance of urban greening (Cilliers et al. 2015), heritage conservation (Parkinson, Scott, and Redmond 2017) and architecture (Schneekloth and Shibley 2000), among an array of other issues to the making of places.
Developing a sense of place: the role of the arts in regenerating communities
Published in Journal of Urban Design, 2021
The goals of placemaking include calling for greater interactions among people and fostering communities that are more socially, physically and economically viable. When this activity moves online it is called digital placemaking. A co-ordinated or transmedia communications strategy across multiple media platforms is preferred by many practising artists, companies and broadcasters. Each platform will of course attract different media audiences and can become very successful. Nevertheless, the importance of developing a media strategy as part of the overall project are noted.