Australian placemaking and United Kingdom place management have come together in the creation of on-line course about boosting ‘pride in place’ and ‘putting partnerships place’ to improve the prospects of neighbourhoods, towns and city centres. The courses, which shares Australian and U.K. experiences, are pitched at respective domestic and international audiences.
In bringing together in the courses, Australian-based Placemaking Education and U.K. People & Places Partnership’s place management approaches, we thought it would be helpful to say a little about the similarities between the semantics.
International forces for people-powered places
We realise that clarity about how the respective terms are used, is important to the organisations such as Placemaking X and the Institute of Place Management (IPM) that have strived over decades to establish their respective concepts. At the same time, like us, both organisations would recognise that placemaking and place management are international movements that provide a combined force for good in how places are collectively shaped and progress. And the IPM is the first to acknowledge that place management partly has its roots in Australia.
An understanding of the shared strengths, and minor distinctions in approach, is also important to the communities, councils and commercial partners that can come together to help shape the evolution of places such as neighbourhoods, towns and city centres. At the core of both approaches is a powerful commitment to making and managing people-powered places through collaborative working and an understanding of the impacts of places on people’s lives.
And we also ask for forgiveness in advance from the purists, for inter-changing the two phrases or just using one as shorthand for both.
Place management explained
Chris Wade, Director of the People & Places Partnership and IPM Fellow
If pressed and paraphrasing a definition used by the IPM, I would describe place management as “a coordinated, area-based, multi-stakeholder, participatory, approach to improve places from neighbourhoods to town and city centres.”
Within such a definition of place management, ‘how’ things are achieved through an evidence-led, participatory and joined-up partnership approach, is crucially important.
Place management can be portrayed as an umbrella approach that includes or embraces place-based disciplines to create joined-up solutions. For example, urban planning, place branding and even placemaking, are variously considered as sitting within or alongside place management. Place management can contribute to the place-based delivery of issues such as health, education and housing.
Personally, I view placemaking as more tightly focused on improving public spaces within places and using techniques more towards the empowerment end of a spectrum of community participation. Placemaking to me, is like place management’s dynamic, exploratory and creative, alter-ego.
Placemaking explained
Dean Cracknell, Co-Founder of Town Team Movement and Creator of Placemaking.Education
Placemaking is an easy term to use, but hard to define and explain. That’s why I think it is important to go back to the original source of the expression and the ideas behind it.
Project for Public Spaces popularised the term in the mid-1990s. It defines placemaking as:
“As both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value.
More than just promoting better urban design … (and) with community-based participation at its centre, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and well being.”
Creating great places requires different perspectives and more skills than any one discipline can provide, says Ethan Kent from PlacemakingX, which is the global custodian of the movement.
Placemaking aims to improve not only the physical elements of a space, but also the way people think and feel about the world around them. It is like turning a house into a home, says David Engwicht. A place to feel deeply connected to, proud of and willing to contribute to improving.
Whilst there are many similarities between placemaking and place management, I think placemaking provides a philosophy and set of principles that can complement place management’s more structured and organised approach to improving places. They are complementary place-shaping processes that aim to work across interests, disciplines and perspectives to create more innovative, collaborative and holistic outcomes.
Try free ‘pride in place’ course
The free, online boosting pride in place course explains the first steps in how to nurture greater ‘pride in place’ by people coming together to shape how places evolve in ways that will help everyone to love them a little more. It has been created by Chris Wade, Director of the United Kingdom-based, People & Places Partnership and is hosted by Placemaking.Education. Though this course is particularly relevant for the UK, it can help generate new ideas, no matter where you are in the world. The course complements the People & Places Partnership’s wider work on ‘boosting pride in place‘ through hands-on support.
The more in-depth course on ‘putting partnerships in place’ is coming soon. It build s on the recognition here and in other connected courses, that at the heart of placemaking and place management, is a partnership approach that brings together key stakeholders from the community, businesses, council and other public bodies. Such partnerships can adapt to local circumstances and vary, for example, from hands-on town teams to strategic boards that influence issues like health, housing and transport in a joined-up and place-based way.
