Placemaking

Placemaking

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Placemaking is the creation of a distinctive, livable space through community engagement. Initiated by the Project for Public Spaces, the concept is “not the same as constructing a building, designing a plaza, or developing a commercial zone.” [1] It is about creating authentic places, as opposed to fabricated, corporate developments. Placemaking is a collaborative process because real places are best achieved in gradual steps, as a community voices its own needs. Originating from the ideas of Jane Jacobs and William H. (Holly) Whyte, it emphasizes that cities and towns should be designed for people, not just for vehicles or businesses. The placemaking process helps to create livable streets that have a sense of vitality.

What is a place?

A real place is inviting, inclusive, and perhaps most importantly, accessible to the public. Its success or failure cannot be measured financially or in a board room. Instead, as former Bogata Mayor Enrique Peñalosa asserts, it “must be felt with the soul”. A real place has memorable physical characteristics. With a pleasant, safe atmosphere, it beckons people to linger. Such a place functions well for a variety of community activities. It is meaningful to both local inhabitants as well as transient visitors. A real place can be a park, a square, a downtown, a street corner, a market, a residential street, a garden, or a wide variety of other public destinations.

Project for Public Spaces

Founded in 1975, the New York-based Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is the clearinghouse for the global placemaking movement. They have observed public places for more than three decades, gathering information on what makes “good” places work, and what has gone wrong in unsuccessful places. They have conducted workshops, advised communities and assisted in improving all major types of public spaces. In the early years of the organization, it was a challenge to convince any developer to include a public space within a new commercial project; public gathering was seen as loitering — undesirable and potentially unsafe. Of course, this is the very form of safety that defines Jane Jacobs's “eyes on the street” concept. But PPS was battling entrenched interests when they started their revolutionary idea that “when you focus on Place first, you do everything differently”[2].

PPS’s program areas encompass most types of public spaces: parks, civic centers, downtowns, transportation corridors, mixed-use developments, campuses, squares and waterfronts. They have been directly involved in successful projects such as Chapel Street in New Haven, CT and Bryant Park in New York City (although, after a comeback, Bryant Park is endangered again [5]).

“Placemaking”, as conducted by PPS, is a planning and design process that incorporates public input before any formal plans are drawn up. At the outset, they facilitate community workshops that provide a vision for any new project. The information gathered from these sessions is then used to guide designers and developers as they work to create new spaces or revitalize existing areas.

PPS and Livable Streets

PPS’s has undertaken two important initiatives that are directly related to livable streets.

Their “Streets as Places” program looks to transform road networks from “supporting vehicle throughput” [3] into places for pedestrians and communities. This transformation is now facilitated by rising oil prices, as well as the realization that autocentric design has failed to “improve mobility and access to destinations” [3]. (Instead, the car culture has often produced isolation and confinement). Streets should not simply connect places; they should define them. For the last several decades, the surroundings of travel corridors have been ignored, but the context of our streets is crucial.

Also relevant to livable streets, PPS has partnered with Reconnecting America for an initiative called Thinking Beyond the Station [4], which looks to better integrate transit stops within communities through urban design, public art and architecture.

Caution about the term ‘placemaking’

As placemaking becomes trendy, the term is in danger of being co-opted in the same way that “mixed use” and “urban” have been exploited by some developers as a marketing tool for conventional projects.

PPS has come up with an instructive list of what placemaking is and and what it is not [1]:

Placemaking IS: Function before form; collaborative; visionary; flexible; focused on creating destinations; context-sensitive; culturally aware

Placemaking is NOT: Imposed from above; design-driven; overly accommodating of the car; homogenous; static; gentrification; privatization; a cost-benefit analysis; monolithic development