Five years ago, The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking was published.

On the cover is the street mural on 16th Street, Washington DC, painted overnight in June 2020 by city workers and volunteers, commissioned by Mayor Muriel Bowser, running two blocks north of Lafayette Square towards the White House. We put it there deliberately. It is an art practice that has become synonymous with placemaking, made by exactly the coalition of municipal and volunteer actors that placemaking always involves, and it was contested from the start. Black Lives Matter DC called it performative and a distraction from their demand to defund the police. All of that is placemaking. The politics is not a complication of the practice. It is the practice.

The book was in final editing through the first months of the pandemic and the beginning of the global protests after the murder of George Floyd. We held it and made room, because a handbook that could not account for what was happening in the public realm would have been out of date on the day it shipped.

Seven sections. 45 chapters. Every contributor wrote unpaid, alongside their professional work, through a year none of us will forget. Thank you to Jason Schupbach, Tom Borrup, Louise Platt, Anita McKeown, Kylie Legge and Maria Rosario Jackson, who curated the sections, and to Nadia Aziz, who gave us the cover image and asked for a donation to the Arab American Institute Foundation instead of a fee.

And an enormous thank you to Faye Leerink, who commissioned the Handbook and believed in it from the very beginning, when a volume of this scale on a field still very much finding its language was a genuine risk to take. Faye has just left Routledge to go freelance. Every writer and editor who has been backed early by someone who saw the point knows what that is worth. Faye, thank you, and every good wish for what comes next.

Through September I will post one section a week. My preface noted in 2020 that street murals like the one on our cover had already become sites of removal and painting over – and of course removing this mural was one of the first things Trump did. Five years on, that line is the whole argument.

More soon.

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