Making Meaning of Placemaking – Strategic Ambiguity: Mapping Placemaking’s Lexicon in the Anglophone Global North
Making Meaning of Placemaking – Strategic Ambiguity: Mapping Placemaking’s Lexicon in the Anglophone Global North
If placemaking can mean everything, does it risk meaning nothing?
Placemaking is everywhere in the Global North. It features in policy strategies, regeneration frameworks, cultural programmes, and consultancy reports. Yet its meanings are far from settled. Is it a language of care and creativity, or a tool of development and branding?
Paper 1: Making Meaning of Placemaking – Strategic Ambiguity: Mapping Placemaking’s Lexicon in the Anglophone Global North takes a field scan of how placemaking is defined and mobilised. It examines the strands of practice - artist-led initiatives, policy-driven programmes, grassroots interventions, justice-oriented movements, and development logics - showing how each frames place, community, and culture.
These definitions are not neutral: they shape how power, resources, and agency flow through places. Some approaches expand solidarity and belonging; others risk hollowing placemaking out as rhetoric in service of markets.
This is a working paper, not a definitive account: a ‘lite’ intervention that gathers what is in play, highlights tensions, and asks where placemaking should go next.