Folder of Places

 

Basically, there is a rising urban planning trend of ‘placemaking’ – with a tendency towards a more ‘participatory’ form of urban planning and depending on city to city, something else is attached to it –values or aspirations. But we can say that ‘placemaking’ strategies have a look and feel to them. While we can criticize placemaking trends for being ‘more of the same’ urban means of (softer) control, I was interested to see how else we can think of urban planning’s placemaking.

 

So, I ended up looking at geography’s notion of place/space. (so if you have time, do read Robert Sack A Sketch of a Geographical Theory of Morality – it is my main point of reference to this set of ideas.) Helpful to understand how geography thinks of place and the difference between space and place. Geographically speaking, placemaking is a human activity that is necessary to create projects (make worlds) and something humans engage in on different geographic scales.  

 

The geographical notion of placemaking opens the urban planning placemaking up so that we can understand them both as geographical placemaking regardless of their scales. This is where Robert Sack’s focus on the moral qualities of place becomes helpful for us to see place in relation to other projects and ask if these places are good for the ‘world’. With it, we are not trapped by this thinking or sceptical outlook of top-down placemaking bad and bottom-up placemaking good. Instead, it is possible to think and judge the moral qualities in all places and discover allies within the ‘other side’.