Dominique Hes - Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment

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While the placemaking movement has flourished in the last decade or two, the notion of place is not new. Placemaking is connected to practices that have been living for thousands of years as well as to new contemporary initiatives that thrive in our present-day culture. In Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment , the knowledge, experience and ideas of many academics, professionals and communities working in this field are shared with a view to expanding practice, furthering our understanding and enabling others through capacity building. While not a comprehensive account of an increasingly diverse and complex field, it does attest to the investment and energy engaging with place at all levels.

Placemaking can be understood as an intentional process of situating, revealing and creating meaningful environments. Places are diverse; they can be vibrant urban streets that come alive with neighbourhood gathering; stretches of wilderness for reflective walking; a residual space commandeered from under a bridge that serves as a meeting place or highly intentional creative endeavours like public squares that create a heart for a city. What is clear from the chapters in Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment is that place is about peoples engagement with environments, with ecologies, and with each other.

For me, the key outcome of placemaking, whether it has been intentional or through happenstance, is the sense of attachment we can feel to the place. Places enable connections; sometimes these are intense and formative to our sense of ourselves, and at other times, our attachment may be momentary and quickly dissipate. This place attachment, is what makes us feel that we are part of a place and that we belong. It gives us a desire to live in it, invest in it and share that experience with others.

Even though there is an increasing interest in place and in placemaking, there is no consensus on its definition. For some, placemaking is about fleeting events that disappear as quickly as they were made, and for others, placemaking is about permanence, materiality and transcendence across time. Perhaps, this ambiguity is placemaking and places greatest strength. Although we cannot agree that place is one thing, there is a shared energy that placemaking is a valuable contribution to the lives lived in cities, neighbourhoods and rural areas.

The case studies, frameworks and methods for and about placemaking presented here attest to a broad engagement with place across industry, creative professionals, institutions and governance. The collaboration and contributions are part of a momentum and a desire to be connected to where we live, work and play, to feel included in the places we inhabit. The contributions in this book are an invitation to reflect on how you might make your own place.