FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 3: Problematizing placemaking

Louise Platt opens Section Three with a developer's own words. Bruntwood's marketing for Circle Square in Manchester promises a green and pleasant place where minds will meet, randomly and intentionally, through what it calls an intelligent approach to placemaking. Louise adds her own inverted commas around 'green public' space, because she doubts how public privately owned land turns out to be. When Bristol City Council appointed a Director of Placemaking, the Daily Express called it a gobbledegook job.

Her point is that placemaking done intelligently to a place is precisely the problem.

Paul Graham Raven, who describes his chapter as at least as much polemic as research paper, positions placemaking as a living laboratory for the participatory production of new practices under climate change. Claire Edwards opens with Friedmann on the small and ordinary being invisible to those who wield power until, stepped on, it cries out, and examines how disabled people negotiate fear of violent crime in space that was never made with them in mind. Samantha Edwards-Vandenhoek on Warmun in the Kimberley, where the Gija community's position was that there was no place to be made, only place to be enacted and made visible. Morag Rose on Library Walk in Manchester, an ordinary path made extraordinary the moment the council called it dangerous and unloved, and the Friends who beat the bounds to say otherwise. Martin Zebracki in dialogue with Thijs Bartels on Amsterdam's Homomonument, 30 years after its inauguration. Graham Marshall, closing the section after a career in urban design and regeneration, concluding that optimism matters more to successful placemaking than any concept or theory of it.

Louise's own way out is Massey's throwntogetherness and a position in the middle: placemaking as always becoming, never started and never neatly concluded.

Five years on, this reads less like critique than forecast.

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