Making Meaning of Placemaking – Policy by Design: How UK Government and Planning Define and Direct Placemaking
Is placemaking in UK policy a practice of care - or just a policy tool?
Across the UK, ‘placemaking’ and ‘place-based’ approaches now appear throughout government strategies and planning frameworks. But the two terms are not the same, and their conflation has consequences.
Paper 4 in the Making Meaning of Placemaking series maps how placemaking is framed in UK policy and planning. It explores the influence of the Lyons Inquiry on ‘placeshaping,’ unpacks how place-based logics operate in recent Levelling Up and regeneration, and contrasts these with placemaking as a generative, cultural, and community-rooted practice.
The paper argues that when placemaking is reduced to technocratic policy language, its social and cultural richness is flattened into distributional logics.
This ‘lite’ working paper asks: how can UK policy better distinguish, and better support, placemaking as more than infrastructure delivery?