Making Meaning of Placemaking - Placemaking in Practice: An Audit of Uk Arts, Heritage, Development & Agency Discourses

When every sector claims placemaking, whose definitions carry weight, and whose get lost?

Placemaking in the UK is everywhere: in arts and heritage policy, in developer brochures, in consultancy strategies, in university civic plans. But the term carries different, and sometimes conflicting, meanings depending on who uses it.

Paper 6 in the Making Meaning of Placemaking offers a cross-sector audit of these discourses. It compares how cultural agencies, heritage bodies, developers, consultancies, universities, and government frame placemaking. It shows where definitions converge - community, identity, sustainability - and where they diverge, from belonging and wellbeing to branding and compliance.

The paper argues that while this plurality can enable dialogue across sectors, it also risks conceptual drift. Without clearer articulation of community agency, cultural value, and accountability, placemaking risks becoming hollow rhetoric rather than an ethic of care.

Read Paper 6 here: www.caracourage.net/place-landscape