Place making isn’t about making better developments as one colleague tried to explain to me recently, it’s about making places. Places aren’t just ‘good spaces’. Places hold the identity of the community, reflect community values and evolve to meet changing aspirations. Places reflect local distinctiveness whether that be social, economic, environmental or cultural – and most often a mixture of all these.
Places can’t be designed from afar nor can they be made alone. Place making is challenging, not because its too hard or too expensive but because it demands that professionals bring their heart and their head to the table. Place making has an intuitive side that relies on exploring our personal relationship to both space and place and imagining what that might be like for others.
Our intuitive understanding of places helps us decide where we want to spend the first day of spring, where we want to go to have a quiet moment in the sun, where to meet friends, where to go for that first kiss, where to blend into the crowd or the place where we can be the centre of attention.
Place making, as a formal process needs to bring this kind of thinking to the table. Strategic planning, marketing and communications, design, governance etc are all essential tools but unless the end objective is clear and the stakeholders aligned you could end up with anything…from Los Vegas to Paris, or the dreaded in between – the non place.
Let us not slip into ‘place wash’ but engage in a real conversation about what we value as human beings and how, as professionals, we can make more of that happen in our cities.
Kylie Legge
www.placepartners.com.au
