Placemaking
Placemaking capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that improve urban vitality and promote people's health, happiness, and well-being.
It can be either official and government led, or community driven grassroots tactical urbanism, such as extending sidewalks with chalk, paint, and planters, or open streets events such as Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovía.
Good placemaking makes use of underutilized space to enhance the urban experience at the pedestrian scale to build habits of locals.
The concepts behind placemaking originated in the 1960s, when writers like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers.
Often times, the idea of placemaking centers around urban real estate development, centralized around a stadium or sports district.
These two factors are not mutually exclusive, as the arts and cultural economic activity made up $729.6 billion (or 4.2%) of the United States GDP in 2014, and employed 4.7 million workers in 2012.
Jamie Bennett, executive director of ArtPlace America, has identified the following four tools used by communities while implementing creative placemaking.
[11] Drivers of attachment include: Streets are the stage for activity of everyday life within a city and they have the most potential to be designed to harness a high-quality sense of place.
); in other words, mesoscale is the area observable from a humans eyes, for example: between buildings, including storefronts, sidewalks, street trees, and people.
Urban decision makers are increasingly attempting to plan cities based on feedback from community engagement so as to ensure the development of a durable, livable place.
These online neighborhood and event-centric groups and forums provide a convenient non-physical space for public discourse and discussion through digital networked interactions to implement change on a hyper-local level; this theory is sometimes referred to as Urban Acupuncture.
