FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 7: Researching and evaluating placemaking
Maria Rosario Jackson's verdict opens Section Seven and it is unsparing. Our prevailing concepts of comprehensive community development, and the dominant evaluation practices attached to them, are woefully inadequate. They work against us doing our best work. They can do harm.
Her larger claim is that creative placemaking, at its best, is an attempt to bring greater humanity into community development and planning, and that this obliges us to rethink how we gauge change at all.
Jamie Hand took over research at ArtPlace America in 2014 and walked into a field that had been formalised almost overnight, with grant programmes and philanthropic investment in place and no shared theory of change behind any of it. Victor Rubin on five years of the Community Development Investments initiative across six places, and on impacts at the organisational and field level, which evaluation almost never looks at. Maribel Alvarez opens with Faeza, a dentist who fled Iraq and came to Tucson as an asylum seeker, and who told her that Tucson Meet Yourself was the first time she felt at home in the United States, then asks how anyone is supposed to evidence that. Roy Chan on Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco, founded in 1977 out of the Civil Rights movement, and on cultural assets as central to a community's resilience rather than decoration on top of it. Patricia Moore Shaffer on building a theory of change inside the NEA, five years after Our Town launched.
This is the section I return to most in my own practice. A project can be funded, delivered, photographed, celebrated and still leave no account of what changed for anyone.
The Handbook then gives the last word to practitioners, with Rosanna Vitiello and Marcus Willcocks on how the city speaks to us and how we speak back, to send the reader back out to their own place.
Which is where this series has been heading. I wrote in the introduction that placemaking should create places that heal rather than harm, and in the preface that the street murals of 2020 were already being removed and painted over. Five years on, the field needs to be able to evidence what was lost as fluently as it evidences what was built.
Thank you to Jason Schupbach, Tom Borrup, Louise Platt, Anita McKeown, Kylie Legge and Maria Rosario Jackson, and to every contributor, who wrote this book unpaid, alongside their own work, in the middle of everything.
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