Deconstructing Placemaking

Needs, Opportunities, and Assets

Mahyar Arefi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317694922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

A new taxonomy of placemaking is needed; concerns have been expressed about the professionalization of placemaking through the proliferation of standards, zoning codes, and restrictive covenants. "Place matters" has become a mantra in many disciplines - architecture, urban planning and urban design, geography, and sociology to name a few. While conceptualized narrowly by individual disciplines, a holistic framework of placemaking is sorely missing. Mahyar Arefi seeks to fill this gap by exploring these questions: how are places physically created, socially mobilized, and politically contested?

This book explores three competing approaches to placemaking: need-based, opportunity-based, and asset-based. Using a case study approach, the book delves into each paradigm and its stages of physical formation, social mobilization, and political contestation.

Part 1 Discourses/debates

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315777924-1

My fascination with placemaking goes back to the late 1990s when I started working on my doctoral dissertation at USC. Being trained as an architect I always thought about the city, and that as a whole, it was much bigger than the sum of its parts – the buildings, parks, or its infrastructure. But my architectural training had not adequately prepared me to deal with it, let alone try to understand its complex dimensions. The quest to understand the city’s complexity, and how its parts, while having distinct identities and meanings, make up its whole, gave me the motivation and the courage to pursue placemaking as a rich multifaceted phenomenon. As such, placemaking embraces many fields of endeavor from engineering and economics to sociology, art, and architecture.

This book reflects my engagement in two different studies on placemaking over the last few years. I conducted the first study as part of a Goody Clancy Summer Faculty fellowship in Boston in 2005, and the second one during my tenure as a Fulbright Scholar in Istanbul, Turkey in 2006–2007. Even though incorporating two separate studies into a cohesive whole was not my original intent, I have of late been convinced that there is a larger story to tell. In other words, selecting Boston and Istanbul as the foci for the empirical part of this book was not by design, but I feel blessed and fortunate to have compiled them into one volume.

My original plan was to publish the Boston part of the story first. Boston, for me, epitomizes a city at the forefront of interesting and cutting edge ideas about urban planning and placemaking. Megaprojects such as the Big Dig or the Emerald Necklace to more recent efforts on green building, sustainability and Smart Growth represent a few of Boston’s legacies. When I landed a Goody Clancy Faculty Fellowship award, I felt extremely privileged that after many years theorizing and conceptualizing asset-based approaches to placemaking, I was finally able to launch it first-hand and in-depth in Boston. Goody Clancy provided me with all that I could have asked for from maps, documents, and reports to arranging for me to conduct interviews with people such as the legendary Mel King, who still had fresh memories of the 1950s when Boston experienced turmoil and unrest to set the record straight and achieve its social justice goals. I truly learned a lot from my interviews with him. When I first met him in a small office he was surrounded by young inner-city kids trying to read books and trying to hone their computer skills because a better education, they were convinced, was their ticket to a better future. I also feel fortunate to have been able to interview other truly energetic and dedicated individuals who believed in what they did. They were exceptional people with interesting stories to share, many of whom being practitioners in the field of architecture or urban design, university professors, or having experience working for public agencies.

I also feel extremely fortunate to have spent my Fulbright mission in Istanbul because it opened new doors to me – expanded my horizons beyond what I knew before. Istanbul lies at the confluence of three civilizations (Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires), not to mention being one of the most populated cities in the world, which makes it an ideal setting for studying placemaking. More specifically, Istanbul offers the best of both worlds: the world of mainstream planning and design as envisioned by well-known experts such as Kemal Ahmet Aru, who in the eyes of most Turkish planners and architects was a legend. He planned and masterminded one of the most memorable neighborhoods in Istanbul, which evoked a profound sense of place. In addition to its enigmatic ancient beauty, Istanbul also exemplifies a city that has its fair share of informal settlements. These settlements accommodate more than half of its population, a statistic that cannot be ignored. But without passing judgment on this aspect or trying to demonize Istanbul as an unsafe or unsavory city, it certainly offers unique opportunities for exploring placemaking not only as an intellectual discourse among experts who feel obliged to offer professional advice in how to deal with its urban ills, but also as a potent milieu for better understanding how people shape the built environment or give meaning and life to it.

Thus, this story offers, among other things, a taxonomy of placemaking practices. Placemaking is, by nature, contingent, complex, multilayered, and contested. It is contingent because its nuances, to a large degree, reflect the circumstances in which people create them. Its complexity – using Lefebvre’s (1991) conceptual triad – emanates from how places are conceived, perceived, and lived. It is multilayered and embraces physical, social, and political dimensions. Places reflect physical realities: they are big or small, near or far, accessible only by cars or by other modes of transportation. They also reflect socio-economic realities: some places are crowded, affluent, poor, socially homogenous or diverse. They represent contested political realities too: as repositories of meaning they symbolize people’s identities, attitudes, perceptions, and aspirations, and justify political struggles. Struggles for local identities sometimes intensify ethnic, religious, or sectarian divisions in places such as Jerusalem, Johannesburg, or Belfast. At other times, places such as New Orleans epitomize the ways in which people come to terms with shared problems by having faith in the future. Nonetheless, places unfold stories about how they come about, transform, and become contested. Geographers, planners, and political scientists have discussed the contested nature of place in its growing literature.

My goal here is not to repeat what has already been said. Theories of “social justice” (Harvey, 1992) or “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968; Lynch, 1981), for example, articulate how social and political economic forces shape the conditions in which places are made the way they are. The intent is to craft a larger story of how places are made, transformed and perceived or framed based on the case studies, and to glean some lessons from them. The overarching story of placemaking here is to show how each of the studied places were physically built, socially mobilized, and politically contested (Mitchell, 1995). This approach allows me to revisit placemaking as an unfinished, evolving project, and part of an ongoing physical, social, and political discourse.

Hence, the aim is twofold: to discuss four case studies followed by making observations and drawing generalizations from them. The extant literature has been probably more successful in exploring placemaking in terms of distinct physical, social, or political attributes rather than in offering compelling taxonomies that incorporate them. Some have viewed the importance of placemaking as a physical strategy, or an effort in improving the local image of a place, and acting as an engine for inducing local economic growth. Others have seen it as a social agenda for mobilizing people behind certain objectives (i.e. affordable housing). Yet, others have focused on place not so much merely as physical or social realities, but as a conduit for political action. Places generally have distinct political boundaries with political representations of sorts. Different aspects and genres of placemaking are important and point to its complexity, multilayered quality, social and symbolic significance, and contested nature. This book asks three interrelated questions:Each of these interrelated questions addresses a specific aspect of placemaking. The first question addresses its dynamic nature and seeks to identify the contingent relationships between places and people who create them. Three such contingent relationships will be examined: need-based, opportunity-based, and asset-based. Each of these relationships gives rise to a different kind of place with a different kind of trajectory and evolutionary process. The second question focuses on those who build these places and their reasons for doing so. This question is closely related to the first one. Sometimes, places reflect government interventions in response to specific needs while at other times they emerge from uncoordinated, bottom–up, spontaneous efforts to pursue certain opportunities in hopes of gaining political recognition or social and economic benefits. Yet, in some other cases, places do not so much reflect government policies or bottom–up action, but instead highlight partnerships between two or more cultural, professional, social, or political entities. Each of these cases, as will be seen, not only yields to different types of outcomes, but different types of futures as they unfold. Each of these future scenarios reflects the conditions under which it was initially created, and how it shaped, or, was in turn, shaped by social, economic, or political realities.

1. Can we offer a taxonomy of placemaking practices?
2. Who engages in placemaking efforts and under what socio-economic or political circumstances?
3. How do places transform, evolve, and become contested?

Forces driving placemaking: Needs, opportunities, and assets

Placemaking responds to the need for connections and feeling of security – not just shelter. Identifying, evaluating, and responding to people’s present and future needs constitute governments’ important responsibilities. Planning for needs often becomes a daunting task due to internal pressures such as rural–urban migration, natural population growth, demand for new housing, or external forces and pressures including natural hazards, flooding, earthquakes, or famine. Governments react to local, regional, or global pressures in different ways. In cases where rural–urban migration and the massive influx of people continue, they mobilize resources by taking appropriate measures such as building new settlements or planning new towns, or relocating squatters who occupy the floodplains to safe places. Of course, these efforts vary widely from country to country and from time to time. Depending on the conditions and pressures that justify government intervention, settlements vary widely in scale and scope. Government-led placemaking projects typically arise in response to an array of needs (e.g. housing, job, health care, and so on). Assessing and quantifying needs takes place based on the universal principles of planning and scientific rationality.

The second approach to placemaking emerges from opportunities as opposed to needs whenever and wherever they arise. “Opportunities” typically exist outside a given community whereas the so-called “assets” exist within the community. A distinction can be made between needs, opportunities, and assets. Unlike government planning, which follows the assessment of needs for a certain community, opportunities reflect a unique set of circumstances not common occurrences such as responding to tangible shortcomings and deficiencies. This is particularly prominent in developing countries. Opportunity-based placemaking manifests in the formation of squatter settlements – particularly when rural–urban migration continues to rise. Need- and opportunity-based approaches vary in what they signify, and also how they transform, evolve and unfold over time. An asset-based approach neither occurs in response to needs nor from capitalizing on opportunities, but instead reflects a community’s willingness to invest in its own capacities, capabilities, and potentials. By this I do not wish to suggest whether responding to needs is less or more important than tapping into opportunities (or investing in assets for that matter) – although this is an interesting way to think about placemaking. But there is another intriguing aspect of the distinctions between needs, opportunities, and assets, which warrants attention.

When I think about needs vis-à-vis assets (or opportunities) I realize that they act on entirely different levels and under different circumstances. All communities have needs: more and better housing and schools, better health care, more police patrols, better amenities, infrastructure, public and green space and so forth. That is what – to some extent – makes thinking about needs common and universally possible and plausible. Even though houses may look different in different parts of the world, or even in different cities in one country, assessing or quantifying them based on certain universal principles still makes sense. Opportunities, however, emerge from different circumstances. Although squatting on public or private lands may yield future economic benefits for those who choose to do so, it does not reflect the needs and necessities of life as much as it shows being in the right place at the right time. Put another way, if the opportunity for occupying a given plot of land did not exist in the first place – regardless of the real need or lack thereof – squatters could not simply squat.

On the other hand, assets, which provide the third approach to place-making, mean different things to different people. There is something perhaps more subjective and spiritual and less tangible about assets than needs and opportunities. Assets epitomize cultural and spiritual values to some and not to others compared to needs and opportunities. For one thing, defining assets varies from place to place and depending on who defines them. What appears to be an asset in one community for practical or symbolic reasons may not conjure up in mind the same values in another community. For example, promoting multiculturalism by increasing youth access to downtown public spaces might conflict with the values of the mainstream society. The literature on public space has discussed such tensions in the context of Australian cities (Iveson, 2007) where draconian measures have been enforced to limit minority groups’ access to downtown public spaces. Hence, while some consider access by different segments of the population to public space as a social asset, it might be construed inimical to the mainstream social and cultural assets and values to others.

The 1990s and the 2000s have witnessed a surge of interest in community assets. Much research has focused on assets in general and asset-mapping, asset-building, and asset-based approaches to community development in particular. The proponents of social capital for example, argue that healthy communities exhibit healthy doses of social assets. Asset-mapping refers to ways to take stocks of different types of capital a community has. Physical capital connotes the physical infrastructure (e.g. the housing stock, roads, buildings, parks, and other amenities) while social capital comprises the ways in which residents socially interact (e.g. by forming informal social networks such as local clubs, churches and faith-based groups or neighborhood watch groups and so forth). These two types of capital in some fashion supplement other types of capital including what Zukin (1993) calls cultural or “symbolic capital”. Symbolic capital also means different things to different people, but at some level the residents of a community could culturally if not economically benefit from this type of capital by celebrating their cultural assets.

In addition to planning based on needs, planners, public officials, and urban decision-makers have started thinking about the roles played by assets in the stability and prosperity of a community. While policymakers have been promoting strategies toward asset-building as a viable tool for placemaking, they have also experienced and reflected on serious impediments in this regard. For example, Ostrom (1997) has shown that unlike other types of assets such as physical capital, social assets are easy to destroy and hard to amass. This is perhaps an important observation – especially when it comes to comparing the three approaches to placemaking discussed here.

In each approach – need-based, opportunity-based, and asset-based – different forces at work produce different outcomes, which are constantly unfolding, evolving, and eventually contested. This observation shows that placemaking is not an end product; it is a process’ an unfinished project, a work in progress. Regardless of the forces that shape placemaking, the study reveals its contested nature. This is perhaps a more important and general-izable finding – a common thread in the three distinctively different schools of thought in placemaking. In the need-based approach the contested nature of placemaking reveals itself in the tension between preservation versus redevelopment. With regards to the opportunity-based approach, the contested aspect of place highlights the tension between legalizing versus rebuilding. And finally, the contestation of an asset-based approach to placemaking reflects the dichotomy between affordability and marketability.

An important note warrants attention here. The goal of this book is not to criticize the need- and opportunity-based practices per se, or glorify an asset-based approach to placemaking instead. Although, in many ways the latter reflects improved ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 Discourses/debates
• PART 2 Practices/approaches
• PART 3 Stages/influences
• References
• Index