Making Meaning of Placemaking – Decolonising Placemaking: Reorienting through Global South Praxis and Power
What does placemaking look like when survival, emancipation, and vernacular knowledge shape the practice?
In the Global South, placemaking emerges from different histories and urgencies. It is less about branding or regeneration, and more about survival, solidarity, and making culture in the face of structural inequality.
Paper 2 in this series offers a field scan of Global South definitions of placemaking. It explores practices rooted in lived experience - from favelas to townships, and across indigenous, community, and justice-led contexts. It contrasts these with Global North typologies to highlight how placemaking can function as knowledge production, resistance, and transformation.
This ‘lite’ working paper is not exhaustive; it gathers the practices in play and asks how the field can learn across geographies without flattening difference.