Is it a place? Thoughts on placemaking and our (built) environment

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

—Joy Harjo, 1983 from She Had Some Horses

A place I know

I grew up in a suburban town outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Strip malls and desert landscapes, highways and grassy lawns made up my day-to-day. I walked to elementary school on a sidewalk with landscaping that separated my path from the street. My parents drove those cars to get to their jobs in downtown Phoenix, about 20 miles away. 

I remember walking to the park, which was in my housing development area, and 7-Eleven and laundromat, which were both in a strip mall on the corner of the development. I spent my free time exploring the canals behind my grandparent’s house, where I’d go after school. We would ride bikes to the bigger parks nearby and I’m pretty sure I roller-skated.  In Middle School, I convinced my friends that it was cool to walk to Jamba Juice. That was pretty much the extent of my town exploration by foot. Other than that we drove pretty much everywhere. 

It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I was exposed to urban density — first in downtown Phoenix, then Los Angeles. As an adult, I went on to live in quintessentially urban and walkable cities — Madrid, Bilbao, San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York City. 

Cafe in my neighborhood with parklet and trees on sidewalk. LES, NYC.

Cafe in my neighborhood with parklet and trees on sidewalk. LES, NYC.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

a place I SEEK

I enjoy a mixed-use, transit-oriented, urban environment where I can get my daily needs met within a short walkable distance to my home and work place. I also enjoy greenery and evidence of people living in a place via cultural happenings, artistic use of buildings or space, and the feeling of community. I feel part of a place when I run into people I know, am accepted for who I am, what I look like, and what language I speak, and I know where to go for different needs, like where to get groceries or where to see live music. 

Big cities fulfill these needs for me, but there’s no reason why a smaller city, town, or even rural environment cannot also fulfill my desires.

When real estate developers use the term ‘placemaking’ they usually mean creating a vibrant, active, mixed-use retail area/residential/office and/or public space where people want to be and where people will spend money on goods, services, housing, and office space. Placemaking is a term used to describe many things: mixed-use development, active public spaces, sense of place, and the process to create these types of places.

What is a Place? How do you make it?

The term placemaking is problematic — everywhere is already a place. Usually it was a place long before you or I even knew of it’s existence. The creation of the place is a result of layers of history and people over long periods of time. The best places are made with love by the people who inhabit them. A place does not need to be named to be; a place doesn’t need to feel trendy or hip or exciting to be a place.

What place means is different to different people. Private land ownership, a history of colonization, and the systematic erasure of people, culture, and languages in the United States, make the term placemaking troublesome because it assumes a place was not a place before. The term placemaking is heavily used in real estate, community development, and arts/culture spheres, but I think a better term for most projects is placekeeping because you may actually be trying to retain the sense of place not change or create it.

Placemaking Is… IN 2006, Project for Public Spaces asked people how they define placemaking and they got 750 submissions from all over the world. See them all here https://www.pps.org/article/placemakingis]

Placemaking Is… IN 2006, Project for Public Spaces asked people how they define placemaking and they got 750 submissions from all over the world. See them all here https://www.pps.org/article/placemakingis]

Definitions of Placemaking

“Placemaking is the process of creating quality places that people want to live, work, play, and learn in.” — this is cited in a lot of places but I can’t find source, please share if you know!

According to wikipedia, Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. According to Placemaking Chicago, Placemaking is a people-centered approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. 

For real estate development, placemaking seems to mean making of the place desirable to certain types of people and businesses in order to increase the value of the land for the land owner. For others, placemaking is a people-centered process, which creates social, economic, and health benefits to the community, not just the land owners. There’s also the issue of who the people are in the ‘people-centered process’ — are they local residents? Local home owners? Tourists? 

The process of making a place, strengthening a place, or creating a sense of place, are all things that someone might mean when using the term placemaking. While real estate developers, urbanists, and locals may all have a slightly different understanding of it, it does provide an umbrella term to get behind. Many local residents of gentrifying areas may perceive ‘placemaking’ and placemaking projects as signs of future or current gentrification, which is something to be hyperaware of as the very term may turn people away from a project.

"Placemaking is catching on as another way to improve the quality of various places in a neighborhood, and by extension, the community and region in which those places are located. However, the myriad uses of the term are sometimes confusing and contradictory, and this dilutes the value of the concept and undermines its utility in helping neighborhoods and communities imagine and create a better future.” — Mark Wyckoff, author of Definition of Placemaking: Four Different Terms

Creative Placemaking is a term used to describe initiatives that intentionally use art, culture, and other creative tactics to create or maintain a sense of place and ideally bring local residents together for social and economic improvement of their environment.

Perceived Benefits of Placemaking

In August 2016, ULI, Urban Land Institute, served its’ members about the value that creative placemaking adds to real estate. The results are promising as it shows many different perceived benefits of placemaking. Increased social connection and engagement of residents and businesses can be huge benefits for a local economy and public health, so it’s no surprise that creative placemaking is getting a lot of attention.

Crosswalk in Vancouver from my trip in 2016 for PPS' Placemaking Leadership Forum conference. Read more here http://www.stephanieecheveste.com/blog/2016/10/1/thoughts-on-placemaking

Crosswalk in Vancouver from my trip in 2016 for PPS' Placemaking Leadership Forum conference. Read more here http://www.stephanieecheveste.com/blog/2016/10/1/thoughts-on-placemaking

According to a study done in Vancouver’s West End neighborhood in 2019, spaces with 'greenery and spaces with a colorful, community-driven urban intervention were associated with higher levels of happiness, trust, stewardship and attraction to the sites than their more standard comparison sites’ and showed that ‘simple urban design interventions can increase subjective well-being and sociability among city residents’ (1). 

The Problems with (CREATIVE) Placemaking

Besides the name itself and the different understandings of what placemaking is, I think there are a few problems with creative placemaking as is currently being practiced.

We know a sense of belonging, greenery, art, cultures and diversity of types of spaces make great places, but there’s no real formula or standard process and success can be defined in so many ways depending on who is judging the place. Sometimes success is keeping a place just the way it is, which is actually rejecting certain real estate initiatives that may increase rent or housing for the very rich and not the working class. It’s also hard to measure culture and the value of it. Too often then not culture and community assets are simply ignored when a developer or even an arts organization starts a new, shiny placemaking project.

  1. Placemaking thought leadership is made up of mostly white men and is ethnocentric.

  2. Placemaking often starts without proper asset mapping of a community.

  3. PLACEMAKING projects are often done to benefit the landowners, not the local community.

  4. Creative placemaking projects are often left to the last minute.

  5. Creative placemaking projects often have ambiguous budgets or come from funds that are not known until the final hour of a development.

  6. Copycats are rampant.

  7. Locals don’t have much say in what a real estate developer does regarding creative placemaking, even if it was mandated as a condition in order for the developer to do the development.

  8. THere’s little follow through once a real estate developer does a creative placemaking project as to if it actually benefited the local community.

I’m noticing a problem of copy, paste, fail going on the real estate development community. They’ll see a cool project (sometimes online) that they think creates a great place (for consumers or people/businesses who will pay high rents) and copy the components that are visible—like a mixed used ground level retail space or lobby or mural—without incorporating local communities or artists. If the place isn’t filled with people (the right people usually, homeless people don’t seem to count) after the one-time fix, then the project is considered a failure or the project just actually fails because it is sterile and doesn’t bring all the perceived benefits of placemaking.

There’s also a trend of street artists commodifying their own work and doing the same thing everywhere or a developer wanting a specific type of artwork they saw somewhere else, giving places similar-looking art instead of allowing local artists create something that represents the distinct place.

Think think these problems arise in the how and why of placemaking. There are lots of case studies that show interesting projects, but they often lack the specifics, like how long did it actually take, how much did it actually talk, who did they need to get on board, and how did they measure the progress and success and to whom.I’ll be exploring these issues further in this blog series.

Why does this matter?

This matters because many of our spaces in the USA are privately owned and government owned spaces often have lots of rules and regulations that prevent or stifle community management or involvement.

I never really thought about land ownership, besides my parents owning our home, until I worked in real estate myself. I’ve been drawn to walkable environments with art and culture present in someway. I’m more and more realizing how little agency individuals have to change our build environment because we have so little control over it. The good news is, anyone can be critical of their neighborhood and we can hold the landowners more accountable for how they develop and manage new and existing buildings and land.

“Including culture within development has often been understood as starting with a list of cultural possibilities and forcing one of them to fit the development. This guide presents six steps that will achieve far richer results, backed up by case studies learning from diverse developments” — Urban Land Institute UK Urban Art Forum in Including Culture in Development: A Step-by-Step Guide. 

The Urban Land Institute UK Urban Art Forum just came out with a guide Including Culture in Development: A step-by-step guide . It includes clear on how real estate developers can work collaboratively to create an art or cultural element on their sites. Steps include: agree on a vision of success, establish benchmarks and measurements, select the cultural engagement, build an inventory of resources, create th strategic opportunity and engage a cultural professional, agree on the cultural brief.

I see this as a step in the right direction, but there’s still so much work to be done. More thoughts on why and how to do this work coming up next!

What do you think about when you think about land, ownership, place, and beauty? What is art and culture and how does it relate to land?

Footnotes

1) Field analysis of psychological effects of urban design: a case study in Vancouver by Hanna R. Negami, Robin Mazumder, Mitchell Reardon, &Colin G. Ellard, Published online: 29 Jan 2019 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23748834.2018.1548257

Further Reading & Exploring:

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Thank you!

Thank you for reading this very long blog post and for supporting me by being a reader. If you have any thoughts or future ideas on this post, please email me!

-Stephanie

PLACEMAKINGStephanie Echeplacemaking, art, culture, land