What are we making when we’re making place?

The recent proliferation of the use of the term “placemaking” naturally leads to the question of what, exactly, is being made by placemakers? Furniture makers make chairs, tables, beds, cabinets etc. Cheesemakers make cheese. But what do placemakers make? We perhaps feel that we know the answer to this instinctively. A nice new city square, perhaps, with benches neatly arranged, appropriately municipal trees, a brightly coloured mural, a coffee stand or two. We do not think of a factory floor, or a front room, or a private garden, despite the fact that these are all examples of places. When we see the term “placemaking” mobilized we imagine a uniformly positive aesthetic, a certain liveliness, a care for human interaction. When we see the term placemaking we are led to believe that whatever is being made will be better than whatever it is replacing.

It is worth returning to a basic definition of place. A place has a location, a locale (physical structure or landscape), and sense of place. Take each in turn. While you cannot “make” location in the absolute sense of the term - all the possible locations in terms of latitude and longitude on the Earth’s surface are already accounted for - locations are constantly being made in a relative sense. Another way of talking about location is that X is five miles east of Y, or X is beside the river, or Y is on top of the hill. Z is well connected by public transport or road networks. These are all examples of relative location. Placemaking, as currently practiced, is often about location. We know, for instance, that Edinburgh’s new West Town will be between the ring road and the airport, built around the tram line that connects the airport to the city, and close enough to the Pentland hills to provide pleasant views. To put it more prosaically, the website promoting the development tells us that “West Town is an ambitious vision for a new neighbourhood to be built on a 205-acre site located between Ingliston Park & Ride and Gogar Roundabout, to the west of Edinburgh.” The very (unimaginative) name, West Town indicates its relative location to the west of the city. By making a place on what are now green fields, the placemakers at work on West Town are not making a new location in an absolute sense, but they are in a relative sense. When the new neighbourhood is complete it will transform the world around it, bringing things into new relations with each other, scrumpling space and time to make a new place.

The locale - or physical presence - of West Town will be almost entirely new. What is now green fields will be a collection of buildings, roads, public spaces, greenways and other infrastructural elements that make up a neighbourhood - a place where people live and work. The plans for West Town are full of detail concerning the physical structure of the place they are making. It will include “schools, medical provision, civic and community space as well as bars, restaurants, cafes, retail and other commercial spaces.” In addition “there are plans for 27 acres of accessible green space … and a ‘wildlife’ corridor, criss-crossed by a network of cycle, running and walking tracks.” All of this to accompany 7000 promised homes. The plans for the actual built structures are even more detailed in the West Edinburgh Placemaking Framework, noting that “building heights vary across each block and individual frontages should create a varied roofscape and respond to sloping topography” and the houses should include “townhouses, terraced or colony style housing, low rise flatted blocks, specialist living accommodation”. Furthermore “Taller buildings may require visual mitigation to ensure integration into the landscape setting of the city. Measure may include the use of darker,  non-reflective finishes”. Making a place clearly involves the construction of a physical environment which conforms to currently favoured architectural aesthetic practices. These practices are not specific to Edinburgh, but part of an internationally circulating set of “best practices” which make it likely that West Town will look a lot like other places being planned for green field sites.

This brings us to our third aspect of place - sense of place. This is acknowledged as a key part of the plans for West Town Edinburgh. Plans note, for instance, the visual connections to the air traffic control tower of the nearby airport, as well as the nearby Pentland Hills, as giving potential residents a sense of where they are. The West Edinburgh Placemaking Framework calls for a “strong sense of place” alongside a mix of uses and economic development potential. While location and locale are fairly clear and instrumental, sense of place is not. It is a term usually used to refer to subjective elements of place, elements that make places stand out from other places. The word “sense” is important. It refer to both an overarching “sense” of place as a unified whole (a place that makes sense) and the importance of the senses. Places are seen, heard, smelled, and felt. They can also be tasted when specific food types and flavours are closely associated with them. While ‘sense of place’ is usually a positive term, denoting a rich and distinctive environment, it can also be negative. Dystopias have senses of place too - ones we generally want to avoid. A ‘sense of place’ is much harder to engineer or plan than either relative location or the built environment. Aesthetics is brought into the foreground and, for this reason, placemakers focus quite heavily on what a place will look like.

‘Placemaking’ is often paired with the adjective “creative” to form “creative placemaking” - a term which foregrounds what we might broadly think of as the role of the arts in making places distinctive and successful. While the term ‘placemaking’ became popular in the 1990s following its use by the Project for Public Spaces, ‘creative placemaking’ was coined in 2010 by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus for the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. Creative placemaking arises from the acknowledgement that the key to a successful place may be beyond the key functions of shelter and security and may, in fact, be connected to notions of shared identity and belonging that can best be approached through creative practices that produce and develop clear senses of place.  Just as large scale urban transformations have often depended on mega arts-based anchor institutions such a Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, placemakers at a smaller scale started to promote the proliferation of murals, busking spots, local museums, regular street festivals, and spaces dedicated to performance. The arts, it was argued, brought meaning to place and encouraged liveliness. Meaning and liveliness were seen as the key to developing a sense of place.

It is activities such as ‘creative placemaking’ that often lead to accusations of placemaking as place-branding, or even more tellingly, ‘artwashing’. Too often, the application of a metaphorical ‘lick of paint’ disguises underlying problems in a place - forms of inequity, social deprivation, and exclusion. Genuine senses of place, it might be argued, only really arise from sedimented forms of everyday life that make a place organically lively and rich in meaning for its inhabitants and it is sometimes these very quotidian lifeways that are erased by the practices of placemaking. The seemingly global currency of certain forms of aesthetic experience enjoyed by the relatively well-off produces weirdly paradoxical forms of uniformity in an effort to promote forms of the local. Often this is accompanied by aggressive policing and a rise in property values that makes these places unaffordable to those who lived there. It may be that the only space left for the ‘locals’ is through images on an elaborate mural celebrating local history.