Cultural placemaking

To urban theorists and practitioners, placemaking is the creation of a distinct place-centred identity via design. With a cultural turn, others see it as the value-led practice of building communities and the creation of public spaces that help us interact with each other and contribute to individual and communal wellbeing. At its very prime, it’s a means to explore and question our relationship to place and what we want that place to be like. It has transformation at its core, can happen in planned and ad hoc ways, and is as much about the built environment as it is the cultural and psychological one. Placemakers endeavour to build built environments that people enjoy living in and placemaking involves that community in its design.

In practice, because of its propinquity to design and the public realm,

placemaking is prosaically realised in the commissioning of public artworks. These might have an applied or aesthetic output but may share an artist-led process, working with the stakeholders of a development, its resident community being one. Artists can be from across the creative genres and engaged to both elicit and articulate community opinion and needs, as well as in the creation of an artwork.

Such projects show how bringing an understanding of culture into a placemaking approach elevates it from being a mere token intervention in the public realm to something more collaborative and ergo, meaningful to the lived experience of place. Cultural placemakers are concerned with the psychosocial relations of place – between individuals, their community and their location. These practitioners prompt those they work with – and often live amongst – to look again at where and how we live and create debate around the value of space, its perceived ownership and use. These practitioners are situated to create participatory projects that relate communities to place, uncover relationships and ambitions for places, and collaboratively work with those communities to improve it. More than a routine creative consultation, cultural placemakers use the arts and their position as artists to engage those who for whatever reason may feel excluded or disempowered from formal or informal placemaking. Cultural placemakers will listen to what is said as much as what isn’t; will articulate these views with the authors of them; and jointly communicate them to the audience, from neighbours to policy makers.

The benefits of cultural placemaking can be manifold. Artists and their commissioners can join in creating new ways of experiencing public places and interpreting the built environment along more than just functional lines. Places are created that are both remarkable and stimulating. The exploration of creativity in placemaking contributes to both economic and civil wellbeing. Cultural placemaking offers an opportunity to examine the role that arts and creativity play in the built environment and its development, the role that resident communities have a right to in this, and the communities’ right to be heard and involved as citizens. Cultural placemaking thus has a role in the debate surrounding the Big Society.