FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 1: History and theory of placemaking
Jason Schupbach opens his Section One preface by telling you what he had planned to write, and then telling you that he wrote it before. Before the world turned upside down. Before public space could be assumed safe. Before the protests. He notes that the injustices were already bad, and had become horrible.
His warning is the one the field needed: that the worst response to a crisis would be for privileged placemaking experts to treat it as licence to experiment with broken urban policy. He quotes Alissa Walker on urbanists who simply retagged their existing arguments as COVID content and carried on insisting that cities need only denser neighbourhoods and open streets to become fair.
The chapters do the history properly. James F. Lima and Andrew J. Jones begin with the Great Migration, and with the housing discrimination, exclusionary zoning and federal mortgage policy that codified who lived in the city centre and who lived on its edge. Jen Hughes writes the NEA's own account of how the 2010 white paper became the Our Town programme and ArtPlace. Sarah Calderon and Erik Takeshita place creative placemaking in a much longer line of crisis response, from settlement houses to the WPA Federal Art Project to CETA in 1973, and set out four things the field needs next: imagining the future while remembering the past, advancing equity, building relationships, and working across sectors. Jeremy Liu tells it as a practitioner, from a Chinese seniors' community garden in Boston to Maroon settlements in the Great Dismal Swamp, casitas in the South Bronx and Indian Canyon on unceded Ohlone land, as places made by people resisting erasure. Kim Cook starts from a New Orleans phrase, 'I know this dirt', and argues that this work cannot be franchised.
Jason says plainly that these authors do not represent the full range of voices that need to be heard, and offers the section as a starting point for a conversation rather than a settlement.
Five years on, that framing is why it holds.
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