Placemaking Leadership Council Case Study

One of the aims of April’s Placemaking Leadership Council’s (PLC) inaugural meeting was to form an agenda for a global campaign for placemaking as a movement. The 300 delegates from around the world spilt into groups tacking different aspects of placemaking – from multiuse destinations and transport to entrepreneurial places and place governance. I joined the healthy communities group, which will be the focus of this piece.
The group was made up of a diverse cluster of practitioners from across the realm of urban activity, from housing services, universities, from the PLC founders, Project for Public Spaces (PPS), regeneration professionals and those that work in creative and grassroots placemaking. The aim was to examine the role that placemaking has vis-à-vis healthy communities and to share and discuss best practices, the opportunities for and challenges of this work, and feed into the PLC agenda formation and create messages for the placemaking campaign.
A noted challenge was the need to build a broader support base for such work to enable its impact across the sector and across a region or country via policy. Jargon-free communication was viewed as a barrier to any placemaking campaign, and the
The compelling messages taken from the two days discussion were to reclaim the notion of ‘the commons’, that our streets, our public spaces, our air, our water need to be taken care of to benefit everyone; and to focus activity on those that have the least access to power, those with physical, cultural, social and economic access