Crafting place: Women’s everyday creativity in placemaking processes

Abstract

Amid a resurgence of domestic craft, this article contends that everyday creative practices of women are part of placemaking processes in the creative city. Specifically, the research focuses on Liverpool in the Northwest of England, the so-called (and self-proclaimed) 'centre of the creative universe'. This article utilized in-depth semistructured interviews with members of knitting groups and the city centre Women's Institute to explore how women use craft practice to create a sense of self and attachment to place. The idea of women gathering to craft is enduring, and is examined here to understand affective labour and the role that creativity plays in the urban experience of women. It is argued that the groups demonstrate a lack of engagement with the wider market and official placemaking processes, but instead demonstrate an element of self-valorization. The article challenges thinking around culture-led placemaking in cities like Liverpool, where discourses of creativity have been used as a driver for regeneration by shifting the emphasis onto seemingly banal settings on the edges of the so-called creative city. While urban placemakers have been more recently concerned with developing hubs of creative industries, the role of these groups that are not producing a profitable 'product' should not be underestimated or exploited.

“Wearing Me Place on Me Face”: Scousebrows, Placemaking and Everyday Creativity

“…Scouse women are known for making an effort, our brows reflect that". Taken together, our data add credence to the argument, raised by Platt (2017), that the everyday creativity practices of women (and, from our data, we argue men too), can be considered part of placemaking processes in the creative city. As such, our research extends Campbell's (e.g.…”

“…Here, we see that eyebrow grooming enables the women to establish their identities within the city and to contribute to placemaking, as discussed above in this paper, when they choose to do so (see also Platt's, 2017 discussion of women knitting in Liverpool). Arguably, this enablement to feel 'in place', when they so desire, is owing to the "cultural embeddedness" (see Goldberg et al 2016Goldberg et al , p. 1190 promoted by the microgesture.…”

Sometimes. . . Sometimes. . . Sometimes. . . Witnessing Urban Placemaking from the Immanence of “the Middle”

“…Place-making is term that has has become subsumed into the language and documentation of urban place-based policies (McCann, 2002), both in the Global North and for rapidly emerging economies across the world (Friedmann, 2010). Whilst there are valuable examinations of place-making instigated by citizens' everyday (inter)actions (for example: Dyck, 2005;Platt, 2019;Edensor, Leslie, Millington and Rantisi, 2009), our paper is not focused on adding to this canon of work. Instead, we are concerned with critiquing the idea of place-making as an interventionist process.…”

“Grandma never knit like this”: reclaiming older women’s knitting practices from discourses of new craft in Britain

“…Riley, Corkhill and Morris (2013) concentrate on the craft's therapeutic properties for combatting illness and loneliness, which has the side-effect of constructing older knitters as vulnerable and in need of (self-)care. Clarke (2016), Platt (2017) and Burke (2018) have also studied older women's knitting to varying extents. These studies exemplify the importance of the perspectives and experiences of older knitters and raise questions about how these may be different from those of younger practitioners and how this can be explored without reproducing the reductive 'hipster-versusgrandmas' rhetoric of popular media representations of knitting.…”