The most obvious flaw in the logic of placemaking, is that places are made out of and over places that already exist. For this to happen, a process of unmaking place must occur. Just as placemaking includes making both a material landscape and a sense of place, so unmaking place involved the dereliction and destruction of an already existing built environment and the production of a negative sense of place – one that needs improving.
Advocates of placemaking argue for places that are aesthetically appealing, well serviced by an efficient infrastructure, environmentally sustainable, and socially lively. There is little to argue against in such a formulation. Most of us, I would guess, want to live in such places. For placemakers to move in, however, there has to be at least the suggestion that the location in question is failing on all these scores. There are two problems with this. The first is that, if a place has failed in these ways, it is often because it has been neglected, and often deliberately. Whole swathes of cities have been subjected to austerity and disinvestment as well as malign neglect. It is these processes of material deprivation that lead to places that can be unmade and then made again. Capitalism constantly unmakes places so that they can become sites for new rounds of placemaking – processes that bring with them the possibility of profit. It is rarely the inhabitants of the unmade place who benefit from the placemaking processes. Placemaking brings with it increases in rent and property values along with an aesthetic facelift and the provision of a few coffee stands and a refurnished public park – often complete with benches that make it impossible for the unhoused to get a few hours rest.
The second problem involves the more subjective notion of sense of place. It is not just the material structure of place that gets undone, so too, does its meaning. In many cases, a significant amount of work must go into what geographer Tom Slater and sociologist Loic Wacquant call “territorial stigmatization”. This is the process by which stories and images of disorder are layered onto particular places – normally places inhabited by the most marginalised in society. These stories include everything from aesthetic ugliness, to litter, vandalism, graffiti and criminality. The stories are rarely told in the context of the material neglect and disinvestment mentioned earlier. They are stories that insinuate that the cause of the problems is the inhabitants themselves. This was the process that occurred, for instance, in Manhattan’s Bryant Park – one of the earliest examples of urban transformation which used the term “placemaking” and was informed by the work of the Project for Public Places. While Bryant Park has been associated with the world of drugs and the unhoused, it was transformed in the 1990s into what it is now – a space largely inhabited by people like me (white, well to do, etc.) enjoying a coffee or an ice cream. Little is said, in accounts of this positive transformation, about what happened to the people who previously inhabited the space. Such questions, it seems, are beyond the remit of placemaking.
I spent a decade of so studying the area around the old Maxwell Street Market in Chicago – just to the south and west of the Loop, adjacent to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. When I first started visiting the area, there were billboards advertising the new “University Village”. The “village”, it turns out, was being built entirely over the area where the lively, mostly immigrant centered, market had once been. Descriptions of the “village” had all the hallmarks of placemaking discourse – lively public spaces, varying rooflines, ground floor retail opportunities, the use of the term “village”, and even occasional references to its past as North America’s largest open air market – a place inhabited by both immigrants (Eastern European, Jewish, Irish, Italian etc.) and African-Americans who has moved up from the Southern states and invented, among other things, Zoot Suits and the urban Chicago Blues. Along the remaining couple of blocks of Maxwell Street you can find bronze statues of blues musicians and market stall holders – replicas of what had to be removed to make way for the new place. In between the place where actual blues musicians and market stall holders could be found, and the one where bronze replicas can be now be found, the place was ruthlessly stigmatized by politicians, university administrators, and the press as a site of filth, bad odour, and crime. The place has been stigmatized and a negative “sense of place” produced to lay the groundwork for a new round of placemaking. The stigmatization process was accompanied by deliberate material neglect with the University and others buying property and then leaving it to be condemned and demolished. The same unholy alliance of city government and capital that put money into the new place of University Village was instrumental in producing the landscape that needed to be renewed. The largely Black and Brown population that previously inhabited the area have been replaced by a disproportionately White set of residents who can enjoy the references to the place it once was as they sip their lattes.
A negative sense of place, or territorial stigma, is a very hard thing to shift. I imagine we can all think of places, often ones we have never been to, that have overwhelmingly negative images. Very often these are areas of cities where poor people live. They are places that seem very far from the ideals of placemakers. Indeed, the more a place is made to conform to the internationally agreed set of characteristics that make a ‘good place’, the less likely the poor are to live there. Often however, and in spite of the very real deprivation that residents of such places endure, these are places that people are attached to, where they go to school, fall in love, make a living, and grow old. Yes, they would like their place to be improved, but not to the point where they no longer afford to live there. Placemaking thus runs the risk of both displacing people who already live in places, and removing the very places that give people sustenance from under their feet.
Note - for a video of a talk I gave about place and Maxwell Street at the Pratt Institute in New York click here
There's definitely the dark side of placemaking, and I appreciate your approach on this topic---one that people should definitely think more about, Tim. Hope you're well this week? Cheers, -Thalia