Drawing As Placemaking

A parcel arrived in the post this week, and inside was 'Drawing as Placemaking'.

There is something apt about a book on drawing and place reaching you as an object to hold, its weight and edges part of what it argues. From cave walls to city walls, drawing has long been a way of saying 'I am here'. To open the cover and find mine and Dr Anita McKeown, FRSA, FIPM's introduction there, was a quiet pleasure.

Edited by Dr Simon Woolham and Jill Journeaux, the book gathers a global chorus of practitioners and thinkers asking what it means to draw place. Not place as location alone, but as memory, rupture, care and hope. A line can be a border or a bridge.

My thanks to Simon and Jill for the invitation to contribute, and for building a field that treats drawing as method and outcome rather than decoration.

Writing with Anita again was its own reward. We work as critical friends and fellow thinkers, and there is a particular ease in shaping an argument alongside someone whose practice you trust. Our introduction reads place through drawing as an embodied, situated way of knowing, one that feels more, not less, urgent in an age of digital abstraction.

I will be drawing on the book for some guest post-doctoral teaching in the year ahead, which is a happy way to keep its ideas in circulation.