URBAN DESIGN

Chapter 7 | Placemaking| IV/II

Ar. Ananta Gautam

Pokhara Engineering College
Department of Architecture
Place

• “He went to that place”

• “Put that thing in its place”

• “Sense of place”
• “I feel out of place”

• “She found her place in the world”

• “He’s all over the place”
Space is transformed into place as it
acquires definition and meaning
• “I’m going to put you in your place” Each place is unique
• “This place is freaky” Places are dynamically co-created
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Place

Plants
Animals
Water

Climate
Human
Place Settlement
Land patterns

Economic
Religious
Forces
Beliefs
Cultural Political
Traditions Trends

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Placemaking

Placemaking is the process by which

people transform the locations they
inhibit into the places they live

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Placemaking

• Placemaking inspires people to

collectively reimagine and reinvent public
spaces as the heart of every community

• Placemaking process capitalizes (take

advantage) on a local community's assets,
inspiration, and potential.

• It results in the creation of quality public

spaces that contribute to people's health,
happiness, and well being.

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Placemaking

• Placemaking begins at the smallest scale

• Placemaking is not a new idea.

• In 1960s Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte

introduced ideas about designing cities for
people, not just cars and shopping centers even
though it became consolidated only decades
later

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Placemaking
• Placemaking is • Placemaking is not
• Community-driven • Top-down
• Visionary • Reactionary
• Function before form • Design-driven
• Adaptable • A blanket solution or quick fix
• Inclusive • Exclusionary
• Focused on creating destinations • Car-centric
• Context-specific • One-size-fits-all
• Dynamic • Static
• Trans-disciplinary • Discipline-driven
• Transformative • One-dimensional
• Flexible • Dependent on regulatory controls
• Collaborative • A cost/benefit analysis
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• Sociable • Project-focused
Strategies for Great Placemaking

• Improve streets as public spaces

• Street most common public space, but often hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, end up
congested with vehicular traffic

• Ideal street able to sustain different modes of transportation- car, rails, cycle, pedestrians

• Creating more pedestrian friendly streets will provide spaces for interpersonal interaction
and foster sense of community

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Strategies for Great Placemaking

• Create squares and parks as multi-use destinations

• The most successful public spaces are multi-use destinations with many attractions, variety
of choices and activities, where citizens can find a common ground and where ethnicity and
economic differences can go unnoticed.

• These spaces serve as safety valves for the city where people can find breathing room and
relaxation in a well-planned park space

• Planning of public squares and parks help build local economies, civic pride, social
connection and human pleasure

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Build local economies through markets

• Many cities in history originated because of market.

• Urban center has generally been at crossroads where people have come together to exchange
goods and ideas and public markets have been at the heart of most cities since ancient times

• Markets are traditionally the most productive and dynamic places in our cities and towns,
where the exchange of news, politics and gossip takes place and where people solidify the
social ties that are essential for healthy society

• Markets do many things for cities including but not limited to encouraging entrepreneurship,
sustaining farmland around cities, strengthening ties between urban and rural areas and
improving access to fresh food
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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Design buildings to support places

• Rapid urbanization around the world is leading to unprecedented building construction.

Massive gated communities are being built for the middle class, exacerbating the gulf
between rich and poor. Traditional neighborhoods are being replaced by towering
skyscrapers and civic institutions like schools and libraries often end up looking like
fortresses. This trend has spread around the globe and it is damaging the fabric of cities
everywhere.

• Buildings play an important role in shaping of the public realm through their visibility and
the way they interact at street level

• They should be built at a human scale, function as multi-use destinations and enhance the
liveliness of the neighborhoods they are in.

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Link a public heath agenda to a public space agenda

• A healthy city is one in which citizens have access to basic infrastructure such as clean water,
sanitation, and sewage treatment.

• It is also a place where healthy food is available to everyone, where women and children can
walk without fear, and where people can enjoy parks, squares, and other public spaces in
safety and comfort.

• Public places need to be recognized for their contributions to public health: markets can
provide fresh and affordable food, good streets with efficient transit encourage walking or
cycling and good public parks and squares can relieve stress and reduce amount of crime
through amount of people out on streets.

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Reinvent community planning

• Principle is about collective wisdom of those that know community best-its citizens

• When planning projects, it is important to identify talents and resources in community-

people who can provide historical perspective, insights into how the area functions and
understanding what its true meaning is to local people. Tapping this information at the
beginning of the process will help to create a sense of ownership in the project that can
ensure its success for years to come.

• Institutions and key community stakeholders should be brought in as partners to work.

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Power of 10

• The principle of power of 10 is the importance of offering a variety of things to do in one

location, making a place more than the sum of its parts

• If a neighborhood has 10 places with 10 different things to do, then neighborhood is on right
track

• Taking the next step, what if a city could boast 10 such neighborhoods? Then every resident
would have access to outstanding public spaces within walking distance of their homes.
That’s the sort of goal we need to set for all cities if we are serious about enhancing and
revitalizing urban life.

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Create a comprehensive public space agenda

• A city and its citizens should share and materialize a common public space vision i.e. both
top-down and bottom-up strategies are needed to develop, enhance and manage public
spaces
• Leadership at top is essential but grassroots organizing strategies are also integral to its
success

• An assessment is needed to create a city-side inventory of the performance of existing public

spaces. Using this inventory, public space goals can be created for community that strengthen
existing successes and improve areas that are underperforming
• This agenda should be linked to new development projects to preserve and enhance public
environments

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Lighter, quicker, cheaper: Start small, experiment

• Public spaces are complex, organic things. You can’t expect to do everything right initially.

• The best spaces evolve by experimenting with short-term improvements that can be tested
and refined over many years.

• Places to sit, a sidewalk cafe, a community event, a garden, painted crosswalks are all
examples of “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” changes that capitalize on the creative energy of the
community to efficiently generate new uses and revenue for places in transition. If one thing
doesn't work, try something else. If you have a success, build on it.

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Strategies for Great Placemaking
• Restructure government to support public spaces

• Government is not usually set up to support public spaces and placemaking. The achievement
of goal requires development of consensus building, city consultation processes and
institutional reform in order to enhance inclusion and build citizen engagement

• Government needs to develop and implement bottom-up policies, strengthening inclusion.

Removing bureaucratic obstacles helps to make participation momentarily feasible for all and
quickly implementable

• Empowering citizens through institutional restructuring helps drive all the other principles
necessary to create a positive public realm with healthy, attractive and well-used public
spaces that are a true reflection of the needs and values of the community they are in.

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Place Diagram
The Place Diagram is one of
the tools Project for Public
Spaces has developed to help
communities evaluate places.

The inner ring represents a

place's key attributes, the
middle ring its intangible
qualities, and the outer ring
its measurable data/indicators.

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URBAN DESIGN THANK
Ar. Ananta Gautam
Pokhara Engineering College
Department of Architecture YOU!

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