WHY DO WE NEED A DIALOGUE ABOUT “PLACE”?

“Placemaking” is suddenly in vogue among planners and architects. The terms “Place”, “Placemaking” and “Creative Placemaking” have become commonplace, but elude a generally accepted definition. The idea of “place” as a subject of study is not new (Tuan 1974, Lefebre 1991), but it seems that discussion of place and public space came to the forefront of public debate after the widely publicized confrontations over public space beginning with Tompkins Square Park in New York in the 80s, Tiananmen square in 1989, Tahrir Square and Zucotti Park in 2011, and many more.

Meanwhile, at a more quotidian level, communities are taking more direct action to populate, improve, and control their “own” public spaces through movements like Better Block, Guerilla block, Tactical Urbanism, as well as governmental initiatives such as New York City’s plaza program.

While a neglected topic in architecture and planning, “Place” has been a topic of interest among geographers and anthropologists for a long time. That dialogue is ably summarized in Tim Cresswell’s book - Place - An Introduction (Cresswell, 2015). But how do we explain this renewed attention on “place” among architects and urban planners? William Whyte’s study of the social life of urban spaces drew attention to place in the 1980s (Whyte 1980). Jan Gehl, the Danish urbanist turned our attention to the “Life Between Buildings” in the 1970s (Gehl, 1975, 2006). Jane Jacob’s famous battle with Robert Moses in the 19060s argued for the life of the street over traffic engineering in city planning (Jacobs 1965). But it has taken almost all of the subsequent decades for the tide to turn against the dominance of the traffic engineer, and for a new paradigm to emerge, of people-oriented planning and the idea of public space as the beginning rather than an afterthought of urban design. We now see city traffic departments speaking of “shared streets” and “complete streets” in which the life of the pedestrian is given equal, if not more importance than the flow of vehicular traffic in our streets.

At least part of the answer is, I believe, in the pressing need for cities to support the social life of the increasing flow of people to our cities. Dissatisfied with the alienation of the suburbs and its car-dominated lifestyle, the increasing popularity of urban living has much to do with the amenities the city provides; and part of that amenity is the life of the street and the public space in the city. Convenient, accessible, walk-able, people want, as Jeff Speck argues “...communities with street life, the pedestrian culture than can only come from walkablility.” (Speck 2012).

So the debate has turned to how we might best provide that walkability, and create the kind of streets and public spaces that support social life. The Pratt Urban Placemaking and Management program aims to educate a new cohort of planners and place-managers in the best ways to achieve that goal. The first such program in the country, we have had to look beyond traditional planning and urban design teaching to create a new curriculum that addresses the question of “Place”. We need a theory of Place on which to build that curriculum.

We can perhaps begin with the idea that Place is the physical location of social constructs - it is where social interaction happens, is supported and enabled. There is debate among theorists as to the primacy of place or social constructions - i.e. is “place” necessary for social organization to thrive or is the opposite true, that social organization comes first and that it creates “place” (Cresswell 2015, Dovey 2010). We can skip this chicken v. egg debate by agreeing that place and social organization are “mutually constitutive”- our concern is how to improve that mutual relationship.

Another issue we may need to resolve in order to develop a theory of placemaking is the question of “community”. Perhaps one of the most commonly used but least defined terms in planning, “community” precedes “placemaking” as the shibboleth of sociallyminded planners. “Community” implies more than simply the people located in a given area, or even an area which contains all or most of the elements of a complete social system such as political, economic, religious, educational scientific, artistic, ideological etc. “Community” also implies social interaction. How far is it desirable that urban neighborhoods be made into “communities”? How far is it practicable? Why is the idea of “community” so popular?

Part of the answer lies in a nostalgic reference to past physical models such as the rural village, the medieval market town or the center of workingclass towns in the past.

Despite the reality of the social inequity of these precedents (Williams 1973), the romantic image persists. And in fact despite these inequalities a sense of collective “community of adversity” may well have prevailed (Olmi 1978). The reality is that the idea of a “social system community” in a pre-industrialization sense is now the exception, even in a rudimentary sense. The typical city presents a picture of geographical, political and economic specialization, where community groups frequently set up to participate in local decisions are generally impotent, processing trivia of playgrounds and parking while major decisions are taken outside (MAS 2004?). It may also seem increasingly that social interaction depends less and less on spatial location. The proliferation of social media and the internet has created “virtual” communities that exist across space and that boast enormous memberships (Facebook had 1.3 billion active users in 2014). It might also be argued that mass communication, our increased mobility, and the globalization of commerce have all served to erode the importance of place in our lives. In fact, the homogenization of “place” that results means that all places become the same - that there is nothing that distinguishes them and they become detached from their local environment. The “Disney-fication” of place; the superhighways that “start everywhere and go nowhere” (Relph 1976). The result is the “non-place” urban realm (Auge 1995).

But if society no longer “needs” place, why have we seen phenomenon such as Zucotti Park and the Occupy Movement? Why has every new plaza created by the NYC DoT been immediately filled with citizens? Perhaps the answer is that there is a persistent need for placebased social interaction, and that social interaction as well as political protest cannot be addressed solely by use of social media. As people feel increasingly powerless in the face of globalization and loss of local control, public space is one are that can be immediately appropriated and used to demonstrate, at least symbolically and temporarily, a way to resist and to return to control of their own destiny. Also, in reaction to the homogenization of place there seems to be a need to model local “place” as a reflection of the culture of the people who use it, to provide physical manifestation of authenticity and collective memory and that this process reinforces the process of social interaction and gives a sense of greater autonomous local control. This modeling cannot be done in the “virtual” world; it requires the tangible, physical elements of architecture, landscape, street furniture, markets, public art and social programs.

Whether or not this sense of local control is illusory, as we might conclude from the lack of real change brought about by the Occupy Movement, it is one of the few means we have to change the way we live; to define ourselves rather than be defined. It may be that we can replace the romantic illusion of the rural community with a new urban reality in which “place” supports and defines a local community by reflecting its culture and values and by supporting its social cohesiveness. While the danger of “rejection by partial incorporation” persists because of the limits of local communities to seize control and effect change, “placemaking” seems a good place to start.

The Pratt program seeks to define the process of “placemaking” by setting public space in historical context and by exposing students to the numerous processes by which “place” is defined, created and maintained. The purpose of PlaceDialogues is to provide a forum for discussion of the place paradigm, since currently none seems to exist. We hope that PlaceDialogues will provide exposure to the increasing amount of research and other work done by placemakers and help extend this new paradigm to a wider audience.