Making Meaning of Placemaking: Re-Specifying Placemaking – From Ambiguity to Accountability
The Making Meaning of Placemaking series set out to critically map how placemaking is defined and deployed across different sectors and geographies. Over six field scans, the work examined Global North typologies, Global South praxis, property development logics, UK government and planning frameworks, arts and heritage sector discourses, and a cross-sector audit.
This final paper brings those threads together. It argues that placemaking is best understood not as a fixed concept, but as a plural and contested field - a boundary object whose openness has been both its strength and its vulnerability.
Three dynamics stand out as defining the field today. Strategic ambiguity allows placemaking to act as a bridging language across policy, culture, and development, but also obscures conflict and privileges institutional framings. Semantic capture sees the language of community, belonging, and creativity appropriated by developers, funders, and governments to legitimise agendas that may reproduce inequality. And a politics of absence continues to mark the field, with disabled-led, migrant, queer, working-class, ecological, and trauma-informed practices marginalised or erased from formal discourse.
If placemaking is to remain meaningful, it must resist these dynamics and be re-specified. This paper advances a vision of placemaking as an epistemic and political praxis: a way of knowing, imagining, and negotiating place that is accountable, situated, and relational. It calls for placemaking to be framed as:
An ethic, not a project: long-term stewardship, solidarity, and care.
Justice-oriented: confronting displacement, inequality, and colonial legacies.
Plural and contextual: locally defined, culturally specific, never one-size-fits-all.
Ecological and more-than-human: embedding environmental care as inseparable from social justice.
Trauma-informed: recognising wounds of place and embedding resilience and repair.
Evaluated relationally: privileging belonging, memory, and solidarity over simplistic metrics.
Governed differently: shifting from consultation to co-decision, embedding accountability and community power.
In other words, placemaking’s radical potential lies not in being all things to all people, but in holding complexity while refusing capture.
The series ends here, but its provocation continues: placemaking must be reclaimed as an ethic of justice, plurality, ecology, and accountability if it is to mean anything at all.
Read Paper 7 here: www.caracourage.net/place-landscape