FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 2: Practices of placemaking
Tom Borrup wrote his Section Two preface in Minneapolis, in the week George Floyd was murdered, watching a large part of his own neighbourhood stripped and burned. A corridor the city had recently designated as cultural lost low-income housing still under construction, a library, a post office, nonprofit agencies and more than 100 small businesses, most built up over decades by People of Colour and migrants. The next day hundreds of residents and hundreds of volunteers turned out to clear up and board what was standing.
His argument is that all of it is placemaking. Not the clean-up as recovery from an interruption, but the whole cycle as the process itself, which never ends. He goes further, and this is the sharpest thing in the section: places exist and places change, but they are not made. Dakota and Ojibwe people lived with that land for thousands of years, and in that relationship the idea of making a place makes no sense. Invasion, as Wolfe put it, is a structure and not an event, and it travels into planning, into research, and sometimes arrives in the form of a well-meaning artist.
The chapters carry it. Shin Gyonggu on how the May 18 Democratization Movement made Gwangju a city that identifies through human rights. Xander Lenc on Palm Springs, where the celebrated midcentury modern architecture sits on Agua Caliente land, and where the queer preservation story and the settler colonial story are almost never told together. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman on Little Tokyo, arguing that the developments which really make place are contingent, which ought to unsettle any planner. Jason F. Kovacs and Hayun Park on Ihwa-dong in Seoul, where residents themselves destroyed two of the most famous murals in 2016, angry at overtourism and at benefits that never reached them. Dave Loewenstein on fighting an ArtPlace-funded creative placemaking scheme in his own East Lawrence neighbourhood, and then helping remake it into something fairer. Lyndsey Ogle on Ashley Hanson's Department of Public Transformation and the rural-urban divide. Sean Peacock, Aare Puussaar and Clara Crivellaro on children and smart city sensors, from a primary school in Newcastle.
Practice sections are usually the showcase. This one is closer to an honest ledger.
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