Making Meaning of Placemaking – Cultural Placemaking as Praxis: Memory, Imagination and Relational Accountability in the UK
When every sector claims placemaking, whose definitions carry weight, and whose get lost?
In the UK arts, heritage, development, and agency worlds, placemaking has become a shared language. But that language is used in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways.
Paper 5 in the Making Meaning of Placemaking series audits these discourses of placemaking. It examines how funders, cultural organisations, agencies, and developers each define and deploy the term, and how those definitions influence practice on the ground. It highlights the risks of semantic capture - when placemaking becomes a proxy for pre-set policy outcomes or development branding - while also pointing to its cultural and civic potential.
This ‘lite’ working paper offers a map of the competing currents, and a call for clarity, care, and accountability.