Placemaking in Practice: Reflections from Jacksonville

Last week I had the great privilege of opening the 2025 Downtown Vision Inc. Placemaking School in Jacksonville. Invited by the dynamic Kady Yellow and her team, this first session launched a six-week programme designed to build shared understanding, skills and ambition around placemaking in the city’s downtown.

I spent two days in Jacksonville, meeting Kady, her colleagues at Downtown Vision, and the first cohort of placemaking students. Their energy was remarkable: civic, creative, and deeply grounded in care for the city. This was more than a class; it felt like the bedding in of a movement.

What We Covered

Our session explored what placemaking is and isn’t, and why that distinction still matters. We traced where the idea comes from, how its values have evolved, and how it exists on a spectrum of practice that includes design, process, politics, care, imagination and systems.

We talked about the value of working with people in place rather than on place. Placemaking is at its strongest when it brings people together - residents, artists, civic partners, businesses... - to share stories, shape visions and act collectively. The simple act of gathering, of making space for dialogue and creative exchange, is itself a powerful social infrastructure.

In that gathering, people often discover not just what they want for their place, but who they are within it. Placemaking can help us understand the world and our place and agency in it. It invites people to see themselves as participants in the life of a city rather than as bystanders to its development. It helps communities move from consultation to co-authorship.

We also discussed the ethics of placemaking - questions of power, equity and care - and the artist’s role in holding the civic imagination. Placemaking, we agreed, is never finished. It is a long-term relationship between people and their environments, one that evolves through shared responsibility and attention.

The conversation in the room was rich and searching. Many participants spoke of placemaking as both a vocation and a mirror: a way of learning about ourselves as much as about each other and the places we inhabit together.

The Jessie: A Place that Embodies Its Purpose

The Placemaking School meets at The Jessie, Jacksonville’s Jessie Ball duPont Center. The building, a beautifully repurposed historic former-library, provides an extraordinary setting for this kind of work. It is home to a community of non-profits, civic initiatives, artists and entrepreneurs, co-located to encourage collaboration and shared purpose.

The Jessie is more than a venue; it is a living demonstration of what placemaking can achieve when imagination, investment and social mission align. It gives the city a civic heart and shows what it means to create infrastructure that is both practical and visionary. For other cities worldwide, it stands as a model of how adaptive reuse and partnership can turn architecture into civic agency.

The Power of the Downtown Table

Jacksonville is a city of big ambitions and strong partnerships. Working in Business Improvement District (BID) areas like Downtown Vision’s brings both opportunity and responsibility: the chance to animate downtowns in ways that deliver what I call a 360 of value, combining economic, social, cultural and emotional benefit.

Placemaking in BID contexts succeeds when every partner, from business to community, from artist to policymaker, sees themselves as part of one table. When that happens, the results extend far beyond footfall or aesthetics; they help rebuild civic trust and belonging.

Why It Matters

In a time when placemaking can easily become a catch-all phrase or a decorative exercise, Jacksonville’s approach feels grounded and purposeful. Here, placemaking is a process of connection, of turning shared intent into shared care.

This third cohort of students, drawn from across disciplines and across Jacksonville, are the city’s next generation of placemakers: practical, imaginative, and already embedded in their communities. Their questions and insights reminded me that placemaking is not a fixed practice but a continuous act of learning, one that grows through curiosity, conversation and courage.

Leaving Jacksonville, I was reminded that place is never static, and neither is placemaking. It is a living dialogue between people, histories, systems and futures.

The energy in that room at The Jessie made it clear that Jacksonville’s downtown is not only being revitalised but reimagined, by people who care deeply about what it means to belong, together, in place.