The Virtuous Cycle of Placemaking

Place

We interact with the places where we live, work and play to shape our circumstances, our personality and our sense of belonging. Place underpins cultural activities and social opportunities. Since the 1970's, the concept of place has come to include political and social relationships. The cultural, historical, and geographic setting of a place influences how common goods and services are provided and whom has access. This includes necessities such as food and medical care, as well as wherewithal to raise a healthy family in safety and comfort.

The quality of place influences and is influenced by many factors including housing conditions, real estate markets and our use of technology. The experience of place is fundamental to our physical and mental health and sense of well-being. Place has an impact on the way we govern ourselves, on our inclusion in local decision making, on community togetherness, and much more. Placemaking as a practice deliberately shapes an environment to foster social interaction and improve a community's quality of life.

Placemaking

The industrial age's focus on machine efficiency, and suburbanization in the 20^th century led governmentally funded efforts to replace dilapidated urban center infrastructure. Bypass highway construction encouraged car-friendly developments like strip malls while urban renewal and slum clearance projects dismantled many public places and community relationships. Then, as it happens today, poor and marginalized communities within those geographic spaces were often displaced or otherwise excluded from benefits of rebuilding.

Present-day placemaking is an ambitious response to the resulting loss of human-friendly and community centric spaces that took place during urban renewal efforts. Placemaking aims to improve the quality of a public place and with it the lives of its community. The scope of placemaking projects ranges from grassroots, pop-up events to a developer's deliberate and decades-long neighborhood transformation around an organizing theme.

The Process

The importance of the placemaking process is often overlooked in an emphasis on measurable hard results such as jobs created or housing units gained. Susan Silderberg and her colleagues' 2013 research at MIT found that the most empowered communities excelled in the making process. Like an empty new house, space may be said to not include the relationships and experiences that place brings to mind. In placemaking, the important transformation happens in the minds of the participants, not simply in the space itself.

When well done, the making process causes stakeholders to awaken a mutual stewardship of place and community. Urban planners and sociologists call this collaboration the virtuous cycle of placemaking. The relationship of places and their communities is not linear, but cyclical, and mutually influential. Places grow out of the needs and actions of their formational communities, and in turn shape the way these communities behave and grow. Often, a new cycle begins once the initial making is finished. The place is never truly finished, nor is the community. Momentum develops in the cycle and stakeholders may enter the process from many perspectives, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Virtuous Cycle of Placemaking. The model is a loop which includes many entry points to the continually evolving process. Source: Places in the Making, Silderberg et al. 2013.

Placemakers address the pressing needs of our cities in a way that transcends physical space and empowers communities to address these challenges. The goals of building social capital, increasing civic engagement and advocating for the right to the city are as central to contemporary placemaking as are the creation of beautiful park spaces and vibrant squares.

In recent years placemaking has become a movement in which communities are not only recipients, but active participants. The professional who traditionally translated wishes to reality has become a facilitator rather than the one driving the vision. The process empowers everyday users to become makers, to share ideas, and to form alliances between communities as well as within. When successful, these efforts build broad consensus and create financing mechanisms that bring unexpected collaborators to the table.

This article has defined placemaking as a continual process in which a community of any size can assert its right to shape its environment, its manner of interactions, and its future, taking the responsibility from entirely top-down governance. This process brings stakeholders to interact in ways they would not have otherwise, and to build a trustworthiness from doing so that enriches the community to further improve initiatives beyond the planning processes.

References and Resources

Adams, David and Steve Tiesdell. 2012. Shaping Places: Urban Planning, Design, and Development. Abington, UK: Routledge

Carmona, Matthew. 2019. Place value: place quality and its impact on health, social, economic and environmental outcomes. Journal of Urban Design 24(1): 1-48.

Carmona, Matthew. 2019. Place value wiki. University of London, United Kingdom. Accessed on 26 May 2020.

Lefebvre, Henri, Robert Bononno, et al. 2003. Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 224 p.

Lindemann, J. 2019. Gardens and Green Spaces: Placemaking and Black Entrepreneurialism in Cleveland, Ohio. Agric Hum Values 36:867–878.

Jacobs, Jane. The Center for the Living City. Website formed 2005. Accessed on 27 May 2020.

National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Creative Placemaking Research Resources. Accessed on 26 May 2020.

Silderberg, Susan, Katie Lorah, Rebecca Disbrow, and Anna Meussig. 2013. Places in the Making: How Placemaking Builds Places and Communities. MIT. Department of Urban Studies and Planning 72 p.

US Forest Service. February 2013. Environmental Justice Briefing. US Forest Service Research and Development.Accessed on 25 May 2020.