Making Placelessness?

Making Placelessness?

One of the paradoxes of place is that it is both universal (all humans live in places) and particular (it is central to the idea of place that no two are the same). When we talk of a sense of place one of the things we mean is that a place stands out from other places. When we encounter somewhere that seems in some way cookie-cutter, or generic, we write of placelessness or, following the French anthropologist, Marc Auge, “non-place”. One of the things that placemakers are attempting to do, is to create distinctive places – places you might want to visit and return to.

It was for this reason that I was struck by some things that jogged my memory when I read about Edinburgh’s planned “West Town” – to be built, we are told, in ways informed by placemaking. The list of attributes for the new neighbourhood includes a significant number of trees planted along its new streets, “green corridors”, an emphasis on small and medium size parks, and, most specifically “varying rooflines”. It was this last attribute that took me back to the decade or so I spent 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.^[1] 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 – a unique place if ever there was one. The market had been the largest open-air market in North America since its origins in the 1880s, and by many accounts, a very lively kind of place. Descriptions of the new “village” had all the hallmarks of placemaking discourse – lively public spaces, ground floor retail opportunities, and, of course, the use of the term “village” to designate a positive kind of place. A pamphlet mailed to University employees promoted University Village in familiar terms:

“Yesterday’s Heritage. Tomorrow’s Treasure”

   Chicago’s newest, most convenient, most thoughtfully planned neighborhood ... a great life in the city.

   University Village presents traditional Chicago style architecture on tree-lined streets.

   Townhome exteriors feature varying rooflines,

   The site features neighborhood parks and green space corridors.

            “Chicago’s next great neighborhood”

If we look at the list of attributes of Chicago’s University Village – tree-lined streets, green spaces and corridors, and “varying rooflines” – we can see that they are almost exactly the same as the attributes of Edinburgh’s planned West Town. These examples are thousands of miles and several decades apart. Placemaking processes, it seems, are likely to produces places every bit as similar as Starbucks outlets or shiny glass skyscrapers. This is diametrically opposed to the focus on particularity at the heart of the idea of ‘sense of place’. Is it possible that the activities of placemakers are actually succeeding in doing the opposite – producing a new kind of algorithmic placelessness?

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^[1] Tim Cresswell, Maxwell Street: writing and thinking place (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).