FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 6: Placemaking, urban design, and planning

Kylie Legge starts Section Six generously. She has never met anyone involved in city-making who does not want to make good cities that support happy and healthy citizens. The trouble is the lens. The planner sees land use and connectivity, the transport engineer sees ease of movement, the architect sees buildings, the landscape architect reaches for nature. Professional expertise is our strength and our limit, and if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

She calls placemakers expert generalists, or discipline agnostics, because place is not transport or architecture or landscape or art or events. It is the relationships between them and the people who hold meaning in them.

Philip Graus takes Sennett's divide between cité and ville to ask why good strategic plans keep producing poor physical places, using Sydney and Tokyo, and proposes three moves: an iterative rather than linear process, integrated urban governance, and a broader urban economics. Nigel Smith reads three Australian state government documents to test whether placemaking has actually been integrated into planning governance or only its vocabulary, and opens with an author's note acknowledging what his own research does not cover of First Nations relationships to land and country. Husam AlWaer and Ian Cooper on facilitation, and on three uncomfortable findings: that facilitators can be biased or manipulative, that the field over-relies on subject expertise, and that the social competencies the work actually needs get the least attention. Eliza Charley, Lucinda Hartley, Sama Choudhury and Harriet McKindlay on four years of The Neighbourhood Project in Melbourne, and the permits, fees and licences that stop residents improving their own streets.

Kylie closes on the smallest place of all. She starts with William Whyte in 1972, noting that some builders instruct architects to design out loitering, and argues that the public seat is the smallest increment of place, a piece of social infrastructure and an invitation extended to everyone or to no one.

Her verdict on the sector is blunt. If change is the only constant, these chapters show how stuck our planning and urban design systems still are.

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