Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Placemaking

Abstract

Historically, planners, community development groups, and other place-engaged organizations and practitioners have worked to elevate the importance of place and placemaking in economically, socially, and environmentally responsible development. However, recent studies have presented the concept of placemaking from professionally different perspectives using a variety of definitions to both rationalize and operationalize this still somewhat nebulous concept. This ambiguity surrounding the term placemaking is further compounded by the use of three different types of spellings for the term in the research literature, with none of the spellings having a clear, consistent, or universally accepted definition aligned to it. Without a common understanding of placemaking as a concept, or how placemaking works theoretically, measuring the value or impact placemaking has as a process on community development is conjectural. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the academic research literature related to placemaking over the past 5 years, describe the current state of placemaking as a concept based on the issues raised in past literature, identify key theoretical principles that consistently support placemaking as it is being used in the research literature, and then use these principles to propose a theoretical model describing how placemaking works as a process. The theoretical model proposed in this work is offered for further examination, description, and testing and as a foundation for future research on the role placemaking plays in community development professional practice.

Toward A Conceptual Framework for Evaluating the Quality of Urban Open Spaces

“…Therefore, this study subscribes to the premise that if the quality of urban open places can be predicted Fig. 3 Types of placemaking integrated into urban practices (Source: Adapted by Author from (Ellery et al, 2021;Wyckoff, 2014))…”

“…As shown in Fig. 3, four types of placemaking -standard, strategic, creative, and tactical -were categorized, as to be integrated into different urban practices (Ellery, Ellery, & Borkowsky, 2021;Wyckoff, 2014). "Standard" placemaking is the common term for promoting the quality of place and was created by the PPS.…”

Rural placemaking for sustained community well-being

“…The concept of placemaking is understood differently by different disciplines, from cultural workers to architects (Ellery et al, 2021). For the purpose of this chapter, we tentatively define it as 'small-scale, citizen-informed … projects designed to improve, enliven and redefine the spaces of the city' (Sweeney et al, 2018) -or in our case, the spaces of the village, small town or local landscape.…”

Towards forming a socio-ecological action model for urban open spaces’ design in New Cairo, Egypt

“…Project for public spaces (PPS) organization in 2013 has found that successful public spaces usually share four main qualities: being accessible, engaging people with physical and mental activities are comfortable, and have a positive image, in addition to being perceived as sociable spaces [ 16 ]. After evaluating thousands of open public spaces around the world, PPS developed a model that is called “The Place Making Model” as shown in Fig.…”