Placemaking Is Dead, Long Live Placemaking!

We find ourselves in a political era where language is being weaponized. Leaders are saying the exact opposite happened from what we are directly experiencing. “Truth” is becoming more and more the opinion you can yell the loudest.

Our extreme circumstances reveal something that has always been true: language matters. The words we use and the meanings they hold are often the kernels that shape behaviors, our surroundings and our collective life.

And into this wake, we pronounce that placemaking is dead. Well, at least, the term “placemaking” is.

A Victim of Its Own Success

The truth is that placemaking is a victim of its own popularity: people have begun to recognize its importance as an approach and a need. This is the first complication. We have collectively identified that we need better places, that so much of our modern defaults are not very good. But we don’t have a common understanding or agreement about what makes a sense of place, even though we all want it. Into this void enters the catch-all term “placemaking,” which can now refer to an action, a process, an outcome or a project toward an undefined end by different people at different times.

Like so many other concepts that become buzzwords (often due in part to some real success and value), and then get used ad nauseum, “placemaking” has lost most of its functional meaning. When a once-specific concept starts to require qualifiers like “standard placemaking, “strategic placemaking, “creative placemaking,” “tactical placemaking,” or “placekeeping” to know what someone’s even talking about anymore, you know we’ve lost our way.

This lack of consensus has led to three major problems.

Three Fundamental Problems With the Term “Placemaking”

1. The vagueness of the term “placemaking” causes confusion between the web of professionals and community members who are involved in creating, stewarding and improving our places.

“We’re going to do some placemaking elements here.” Huh? What does that mean? Public art? Landscaping? Seating? Food options? “Placemaking” gets thrown around as an identifier for one-time actions that are now seen as “creating a place” or “a sense of place.”

At best, such language indicates siloed thinking, that the mere presence of an object we like is going to create a good “place,” even though we don’t have a shared understanding about what that even means. Worse, it can be the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig, a token effort, to try and attach something nice onto something that is mostly ugly or unpleasant. At its worst, such words can indicate a deliberately exclusionary strategy of creating signals to attract the wealthy without care (or with actual intent) to displace existing patrons.

2. The success of efforts under the banner of the term “placemaking” has led to it becoming a fundable priority.

Well-intentioned foundations and governments jump onboard to grant money for placemaking projects in an effort to improve the communities they care about. So naturally, people, orgs and cities who need financial support for their work contort existing efforts to be framed as placemaking. Sometimes they’re not wrong that what they’re doing could contribute toward improving a place (that is, it could be a part of a larger, more holistic placemaking effort), but nonetheless, the consequence is that “placemaking” has gotten attached to many different types of efforts and projects that aren’t necessarily making places stronger or better, which of course dilutes the meaning of the term. Other worthy concepts like “sustainability,” “equity” and “resilience” have suffered the same fate.

As a result, unsuspecting communities, clients and professionals alike can think they are getting something much better and more impactful than what really materializes, and they wind up being disappointed.

3. Placemaking has gone from a verb to a noun, turning an approach into a thing.

Placemaking at its best is a lens through which any activity relating to the built environment can (and should) pass through. Construction, operations or events can all be place-making, or place destroying. Nothing is inherently good or bad. Placemaking describes an approach with positive outcomes.

But with “placemaking” becoming ever more confined to grant-funded and project-based efforts, “placemaking” ends up being one-shot additions; single events; or short-lived, dead-end pilots. With no mechanisms for continuation, the chance of those efforts having lasting impact is low. Unsuspecting communities, clients and professionals alike are led to believe they are getting something much better and more impactful than what really materializes, and the results are disappointing.

So, we have had a lot of people trying to make places better, but often without success because of bad assumptions about what placemaking can and should be. The proliferation of qualifiers we’re seeing for the term is a symptom of that confusion. People are trying to differentiate between all the nuances of what this practice has become, but consequently, the term itself has lost its utility.

And so we pronounce placemaking to be dead.

Long Live Placemaking!

But long live placemaking! Just because the word may have (currently) lost its meaning doesn’t mean the practice isn’t still both effective and essential to creating places that support community and commerce. It was true before the term existed and it will be true after the grants run dry.

The essential thing is to reclaim the term as an ongoing practice, a process, an approach.

As stated above, any action can be place enhancing, or place destroying. Therefore, placemaking is not something you do, it’s how you do something. It’s an orientation to how you build, operate, program, fund, govern and so on. It’s a process that leads to an outcome of a strong place. And it is inherently holistic. If you’re not talking about a holistic approach to creating a sense of place, then please just don’t use this word. Instead say that you’ll be adding physical features, or doing an event, or adding some nice landscaping, etc. Placemaking is an integration of these actions, not the specific actions in and of themselves.

How to Help Placemaking Live Long and Prosper

The most important message we can impart, at the end of the day, is that we need to continue doing work that makes places better. Ironically, the term “placemaking” is now getting in the way instead of supporting that work.

Here are three recommendations:

1. Get away from all the modifiers for placemaking. Modifiers easily become jargon, which makes communication worse instead of better. Don’t be lazy! Describe what you’re actually doing instead of leaning on buzzwords.
2. Let’s reclaim “placemaking” as a verb that needs to be presented with a lot more context when used in proposals or conversation. When you set out to create something, you need to explain clearly what you intend to do: what’s the process, and what are the envisioned outcomes?
3. Consider using a more accurate term like “public art,” “tree canopy,” “seating,” “play equipment,” or “public events.” If done well, these things will add to the sense of place and be part of a placemaking approach. In terms of impact, a term like “activation” or, more precisely, “do things that bring more people here on a regular basis” often more accurately describes the goals of such efforts in a way that avoids the confusion of unspoken assumptions by the speaker or audience.

Language matters, and if you hear someone using “placemaking” to describe their intent for a project, challenge them on what they really mean. Don’t let them fool you or themselves. When everyone is imagining their own version of what this word means, collaboration becomes impossible. Get sunshine on what the goals are and methods to make it happen. At the end of the day, the terms we use for this work may change and evolve, but the places we create are what we really want to last forever.

[[divider]]

This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Max Musicant's Practice of Place, which focuses on the art and science of creating thriving public and shared places. It is shared here with permission.