Placemaking

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"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, ultimately creating good public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and well being. Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy.

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. Jane Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of “eyes on the street.” William H. Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.

Placemaking is a term that began to be used in the 1970s by architects and planners to describe the process of creating squares, plazas, parks, streets and waterfronts that will attract people because they are pleasurable or interesting. Landscape often plays an important role in the design process.

The writings of Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, have contributed to an imaginative grasp of place and place-making, 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." (This particular view of the imagination connects nicely to the work of Charles Taylor and his concept of the "social imaginary.") Place-making becomes political because place-identity is contested: individuals and groups have their own narratives of place. For example, the stories an indigenous group (their "place memories") will relate with regard to a particular valley will be very different than those of a multi-national corporation that has discovered oil there." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placemaking)