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, with the intention of creating public spaces that promote people's health, happiness, and well being. It is political due to the nature of place identity. 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. Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of "eyes on the street." Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.
The term came into use in the 1970s by landscape architects, architects and urban 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 term encourages disciplines involved in designing the built environment to work together in pursuit of qualities that they each alone are unable to achieve.
Bernard Hunt, of HTA Architects noted that: "We have theories, specialisms, regulations, exhortations, demonstration projects. We have planners. We have highway engineers. We have mixed use, mixed tenure, architecture, community architecture, urban design, neighbourhood strategy. But what seems to have happened is that we have simply lost the art of placemaking; or, put another way, we have lost the simple art of placemaking. We are good at putting up buildings but we are bad at making places."
Jan Gehl has said "First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works"; and "In a Society becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make the cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life."
The writings of poet Wendell Berry have contributed to an imaginative grasp of place and placemaking, 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."
Healthy Placemaking - The Link Between Place and Health
Both the opportunities available to individuals and the choices made based on those opportunities impact individual, family, and community health. The World Health Organization's definition of health provides an appropriate, broad-reaching understanding of health as a "resource for everyday life, not the object of living" and an important frame for discussing the interconnections between Place and Health. A 2016 report The Case for Healthy Places, from Project for Public Spaces and the Assembly Project, funded by the Knight Foundation and focusing on research related to Shaping Space for Civic Life both offer insight into the current evidence base showing how health and wellbeing are impacted by where you live and the opportunities available to you.
- "What is Placemaking? | Project for Public Spaces". Pps.org. 2009-12-31. Retrieved 2012-08-15.
- "Health Promotion Glossary" (PDF). Health Promotion Glossary. World Health Organization. 1998. Retrieved 11 September 2016.
- Imagination in Place, by Wendell Berry (2010)
- The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design, by Ronald Lee Fleming at The Townscape Institute (2007)
- Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities, by Lynda H. Schneekloth & Robert G. Shibley (1995)
- Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience, by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977)
- How to Turn a Place Around, by Project for Public Spaces (2000)
- The Ecology of Place, by Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning (1997)
- Pierce, Martin, Murphy, “Relational Place-Making: the networked politics of place.” The Royal Geographical Society (2010): 55.
- Sustainable placemaking site curated by Michigan State University professor
- Project for Public Spaces
- City Repair, Portland, Oregon Citizen activism for a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society
- Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, a placemaking journal
- VIDEO: The Atrium — An Example In Placemaking. Presented at The Canadian Institute of Planners 2013 conference