‘Placemaking is dead. Long live placemaking.’

That title alone is enough to make many of us pause.

‍I want to celebrate this article from Project for Public Spaces, and it lands at a moment when the placemaking field feels both saturated and stretched. The article is a timely provocation, less about declaring an end, and more about asking what, exactly, we think we are doing when we say ‘placemaking’ now.

Because the truth is: the term has travelled. It’s been adopted, adapted, diluted, and, at times, instrumentalised. It sits comfortably in policy documents, development frameworks, and funding bids, but not always with the same meaning, intent, or integrity.

What this article does well is call that out. It reminds us that placemaking was never meant to be a catch-all label or a veneer. It was - and should still be - about people, power, participation, and the shaping of place through lived experience.

For those of us working in and around this space, it raises an important question: Are we still practising placemaking, or are we just using the language of it?

It echoes some of the questions I’ve been exploring in my Making Meaning of Placemaking series, particularly how the term shifts across different sectors and contexts.

Across that work, one thing is clear: placemaking isn’t a single practice. It’s a spectrum. And unless we stay critically engaged with its meanings, we risk losing what made it powerful in the first place.

So perhaps placemaking isn’t dead, but it does need constant re-examination.

https://www.pps.org/article/placemaking-is-dead-long-live-placemaking ‍

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