The Thing about "Placemaking"
Recently, on a ride out to Edinburgh Airport from the city I spotted a sign by the road that informed me of a new town due to appear in the brief and greenish gap between the ring road and the airport. This was to be Edinburgh’s West Town – “Edinburgh’s New Neighbourhood”. Intrigued by the potential arrival of a new neighbourhood, I looked it up. West Town is to be a new residential development of 7,000 homes on a 205-acre site. The neighbourhood, the website told me, would address the City of Edinburgh’s recently declared housing emergency. It would become a “vibrant, high-density, mixed-use extension to the city with a focus on place-making, sustainability, connectivity, and biodiversity.” It added that the new development is “consistent with the West Edinburgh Placemaking Framework”. More internet sleuthing led to the framework and the discovery that it was, in turn, informed by Edinburgh’s City Plan 2030 which:
“...identifies West Edinburgh as a significant urban extension to the city, supporting economic development opportunities within West Edinburgh whilst introducing a balanced mix of uses that promote healthy, sustainable lifestyles and a strong sense of place through the 20-Minute Neighbourhood principle.”
Here we see a commitment to health, sustainability and “sense of place”. Accompanying images show an almost entirely car-free environment centered on an existing tram line that runs through it (ironically linking the new sustainable place to the very convenient airport that will be its immediate neighbour). There are plenty of people on bicycles and at least one in a wheelchair. The maps show “green-blue” networks of nature-based corridors as well as “active travel routes” separated from mechanised transport.
When did “placemaking” become a thing? While making places has always been one of the most important things that we humans do, and while we all do something related to making places every day of our lives, the term “placemaking” seems to be relatively recent. I checked this with the ever-handy Google ngram and my suspicions were kind of affirmed. It turns out that the term placemaking was almost never used (except for a brief blip around 1900) until 1970. It’s use gradually increased until about 1988 but has really taken off since 2004. The ngram tool ends in 2019 – at a point where the use of the word placemaking was easily at its highest and its use increasing rapidly.
The use of the term was inspired by the important work of urban critics Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and William H Whyte in the early 1960s and was taken up by architects starting around 1970. In general, it designates an approach that looks beyond the design and planning of buildings and public spaces by architects, and towards a focus on the liveliness of places and the connections between people that happen in and around buildings and public spaces. One definition that is widely cited comes from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and reads:
“Put into practice, placemaking seeks to build or improve public space, spark public discourse, create beauty and delight, engender civic pride, connect neighbourhoods, support community health and safety, grow social justice, catalyze economic development, promote environmental sustainability, and of course nurture an authentic sense of place.”
So far, so good. There is not much that it is easy to disagree with in this definition. It seems, belatedly, as though architects and planners are taking the idea of place seriously rather than just focusing on buildings. Placemaking seems to include commitments to health, sustainability, justice and the somewhat chimeric (not to mention Heideggerian) notion of an “authentic sense of place”.
My interest in the use of this term has been growing steadily as my encounters with it have become more frequent. One of the key advocates for the notion of placemaking has been the Project for Public Places and its founder Fred Kent who described himself as the “founder of the global placemaking movement.”[1]He started using the term in the 1990s just as the general use of the term properly took off. Together with Kathy Madden he founded the non-profit “placemaking fund” as well as The Social Life Project and PlacemakingX. For the most part, their work focused on public spaces. The transformation of Bryant Park in Manhattan into a place to hang out, drink coffee, and eat ice-cream was partly their doing. So was the planting of an artificial beach in the middle of traffic island in downtown Detroit. Both of these examples are a long way from creating a whole new neighbourhood on a greenfield site next to an airport. The plans for West Town certainly include provision of public spaces including a 5.5 acre central park, green corridors, and several “bustling urban squares”, but they are much more dramatic than that – including homes, businesses, and architectural details including varying heights of buildings to form “accents” and clear centers, and sightlines that would allow residents to see “Pentland Hills, the city, the air traffic control tower and the Forth Bridges (which) can add to the sense of place”.
There are many problems that have been identified with the ways placemaking has been used. Too often, the focus on community participation in the creation of places, and the focus on justice, gets lost as planners and others focus on aesthetic solutions to socio-economic problems. The obsession with potted plants and cast-iron railings in Chicago in the 1990s is an example of this. Too often, what is advertised as placemaking, is, in fact, “place branding” – a way of extracting capital from what are perceived to be moribund parts of the urban landscape. Perhaps more fundamental, is the problem of what placemaking makes places out of. Everyone, after all, is already making place as they go about their everyday lives. Places are made over other places and those places include people who have invested in them over many years. Despite the nod to community participation, the processes behind placemaking are likely to benefit the confident voices of well networked and active men – mostly white men. It is not surprising, therefore, that placemaking seems a little formulaic. And while I find little to fault with the components of the formula – sustainability, vibrant public spaces, green space, mixed use, etc. – it is, nevertheless likely to produce similar kinds of places in widely different contexts, ironically denuding the actual specificities that makes places unique in the first place. Our places might become like our algorithmically produced coffeeshops the world over, catering to a homogeneous clientele of people who look and act a lot like me.[2]
Admittedly, these problems might not be problems for Edinburgh’s West Town, as it is being built from scratch on a greenfield site (though even green fields are important places for some people). But the suggestion that the building of 7,000 new homes is a response to the housing emergency is a little disingenuous. That is more likely to be due to the out-of-control increases in both rent in Edinburgh, and the price of properties, as well as the diminished availability of social housing thanks to the legacies of Margaret Thatcher’s “right to buy” policy. And there lies another story. The glories of newly produced or repurposed places under the guise of “placemaking” does not happen in isolation, but is constantly related to other places which are constantly being unmade through neglect and stigmatization – processes I will return to another day.
[1] https://www.placemakingx.org/people/fred-kent (accessed 15 May 2024)
[2] I am drawing here on the work of Kyle Chayka and his book “Adapted from Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” published by Heligo.