FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 5: Placemaking, environment, and sustaining ecologies
Anita McKeown builds her Section 5 preface on a single word. Oikos, the Greek for home, is the root of both ecology and economics, and she uses it to argue that these were never separable fields. What it opens up is a planetary domestic science, the systemic management of a household's resources, scaling from citizen to government and local to global. Financial capital, she notes, is consistently valued above social or environmental justice, and collective, locally scaled alternatives get dismissed as nostalgic utopias.
Her selection is deliberately more-than-human. The point is not humans making geo-locations while the environment absorbs the consequences.
Neil Brenner asks whether tactical urbanism offers any real alternative to neoliberal urbanism, reading MoMA's Uneven Growth exhibition and its speculative proposals for six megacities against what those cities actually face. Ian Wight on integral placemaking as wellbeing by design, and on placemaking as something we do from our own experience of place rather than at arm's length from it. Anita's own chapter takes the UN Sustainable Development Goals apart, arguing that a programme committing to harmony with nature while assuming continued GDP growth is trying to transform the world without transformative methods, and then sets out what she has been building on the Iveragh Peninsula in South Kerry instead. Lisa Eckenwiler on ethical placemaking for ecological subjects, and what governance owes beings who are, as Casey puts it, place-lings. Theodore S. Jojola and Michaela P. Shirley on Zuni Pueblo MainStreet, the first and only tribal MainStreet organisation in the United States, and on PlaceKnowing across seven generations. Cathy Fitzgerald on converting two and a half acres of monoculture conifer plantation in South East Ireland into permanent mixed forest, as placemaking for the Symbiocene. Jeff Baldwin on 3.5 billion years of non-human beings producing place, and what beavers might teach us about it.
Five years on, this is the section the rest of the field has been slowest to catch up with.
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