Abstract
Despite its cultural cachet and popularity, placemaking has come under scrutiny in recent years for its conceptual ambiguity, lack of inclusivity, and complicity with top-down, market-driven agendas. However, as a strategy and ideology, it continues to hold significant currency. Placemaking enjoys a prominent position in the urban planning vocabulary, from where it informs discourse and practice across disciplines and geographies. While many are familiar with the use (and occasional abuse) of the placemaking litany, far fewer are acquainted with the movement’s rich past and contested role shaping the American city. The City Creative offers an unprecedented and refreshing history of creative placemaking, from the postwar era to the recent aftermath of the Great Recession. Michael H. Carriere and David Schalliol carefully examine the concept of sociability through the evolution of placemaking, describing how the latter expressed and negotiated tensions between individual identity and communal belonging.
With compelling photography and hundreds of examples, the authors skillfully unravel a double narrative that characterizes placemaking and urban planning in contemporary American cities. The first half of the book situates historical and theoretical foundations of “mainstream” placemaking, drawing from an extensive bibliography of scholars, activists, and policy makers. The second half of the book flips the coin to introduce original “counter narratives,” supported by case studies of grassroots initiatives across the country. These stories, which take place after the financial crisis of 2008, adopt a more holistic approach to value-generation. The authors personally visited—and photographed—many of these case study sites. It is through community voices that we learn how the field of creative placemaking is slowly being reinvented and democratized.
In chapter one, The (Near) Death of the Postwar American City, Carriere and Schalliol trace the origins of the placemaking movement to a tenuous time of postwar suburbanization and urban renewal. Drawing from the works of urbanists and social scientists, many of whom are household names, the authors describe key concepts that saved American cities and gave birth to the placemaking creed. Jane Jacobs celebrated mixed uses and urban vitality, while William H. Whyte advocated for rediscovering city centers and infusing small urban spaces with social life. Christopher Alexander and Kevin Lynch emphasized the importance of place, its legibility and identity. Alarmed by the culture and crisis of individualism, Richard Sennet defended the world of strangers as essential for solidarity in the public realm. Less convinced by diversity alone, others like Robert Bellah argued for more robust community building. But placemaking was also conceived in an increasingly neoliberal climate that underscored the growing threat of “broken-windows” and the need for different set of “eyes on the street”—not from neighbors, but rather police and private security. Famously, Ray Oldenburg introduced “thirdspaces” and the “paradox of sociability,” which made coffeeshops and the like a must for any placemaking endeavor. Advocacy groups like the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) helped institutionalize the movement and paved the way for mainstream placemaking. Importantly, the authors contend that placemaking’s intellectual history and bibliography falls short, failing to substantially challenge broader systems of oppression, such as capitalism, state power, and racism.
The concept of placemaking continues to crystalize in chapter two, The Roaring ‘90s. Under the stability and optimism of the time, placemaking became catalyst for economic growth, social capital, and redevelopment in the postindustrial city.
Communitarianism emerged as a philosophy that resisted private interest and celebrated social networks, while urban scholars emphasized the political power of place and the burgeoning cultural economy of cities. Insightfully, Carriere and Schalliol argue that creative placemaking facilitated the rebirth of the urban planning profession. After years of identity crisis and questionable political efficacy, planners appropriated placemaking ideas to regain authority and agency in their profession.
Simultaneously, the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) advocated for sociability through the revival of the neighborhood, form-based zoning, and stylistic conservatism. Their support for human-scale planning and public participation left a lasting mark on placemaking practice, as did a growing disdain for the government’s involvement among neo-traditionalists. New Urbanist ideals are immortalized in the dystopian film The Truman Show, which was shot in the so-called “placemaking laboratory” of Seaside, Florida. Placemaking advocates at the time advanced a revanchist-like narrative in which urban citizens were victimized by city governments. The way forward for New Urbanists and many others would be to shift the responsibility for providing urban amenities into private hands. Market-driven placemaking responded to urban crises and uprisings and served as a catalyst for gentrification and community policing. These placemakers drew from an emerging body of literature that reframed civil society, social capital, and the pursuit of public good. Yet, as the authors assertively point out, they continued to overlook inequity, especially in deindustrializing cities.
Chapter three takes us Into the Twenty-First Century, as creativity, finance, and urban regeneration were synthesized under the placemaking banner in cities across America. The return of the neighborhood as a social concept and the rise of the creative class cemented the belief in place-based value generation. As urban vitality and community life were increasingly understood in terms of prosperity, creative placemaking became a preferred strategy for entrepreneurialism. Emerging theories of culture as business suggested that art could foster both social and economic capital. Cultural industries therefore increasingly relied on placemaking narratives to justify and fund their work. While scholars produced the intellectual framework to support a commercialized, cultural agenda for placemaking, dozens of civic organizations, government agencies, and corporate consortia built the multi-million-dollar placemaking enterprise. Carriere and Schalliol recognize that hundreds of sites across the country were substantially improved and that the benefits were not exclusively economic. But they also lament that “mainstream placemaking” failed to explicitly address glaring urban issues of exclusion, poverty, and racism.
In chapter four, Growing Place, Carriere and Schalliol expand the definition of creative placemaking and add important counterhistories that were missing from discourse. The chapter describes a grand awakening among practitioners, who break free from the constraints of market-driven placemaking. The authors challenge metrics that only measure economic outcomes but ignore uneven distribution and intangible benefits. They argue that placemaking can and does work outside the postindustrial city. This section of the book reveals new ways in which place is literally grown, as Carriere and Schalliol highlight grassroots gardening initiatives that employ modest DIY tactics. Initially under the radar, these projects have been successfully scaled into city-wide development strategies. A rich case study in Milwaukee demonstrates how food production is a way of generating equitable benefits for the local communities. The authors find abundant evidence to demonstrate that urban agriculture can grow a lot more than food; it can generate nonmonetary outcomes like ethnic solidarity and civic identity. These approaches can also be educational, regenerative, and even spiritual.
Building on home-grown examples of farming across America, chapter five, Producing Place, calls for a new, more “holistic” understanding of labor and the economy. In this chapter, the authors explain how creative placemaking can foster a different kind of economic development that does not cater exclusively to the creative class. The secret is to be found in urban centers, where a culture of making things is having a comeback. Carriere and Schalliol take readers to sites where small-scale manufacturing activities drive spatial regeneration, but also foster inclusive employment and urban development. Especially in the years following the Great Recession, these “underground approaches” reach underserved communities that have been systematically overlooked and negatively impacted by top-down placemaking.
The final chapter of the book, Creating Place, argues that there is still a place for the arts in the placemaking movement. When an artistic intervention is not conceived as a revenue-generating amenity, it is much more likely to engage with issues like unemployment, abandonment, and gentrification in a meaningful way. Drawing from dozens of examples, Carriere and Schalliol describe the transformative effect of artistic practices that may function at various scales, off the grid, on a temporary basis, with and without government support. Muralists confront troubled histories and capture people’s imagination with bold statements about the future. Others reclaim remnants of the built environment for reuse and renewal. Some practitioners engage community members as active participants, allowing them to inscribe their voices into place. At the heart of these artistic interventions are counter narratives that nurture a new sense of ownership and belonging that was not there before.
At times, creative placemaking does feel conceptually overstretched and practically exhausted. And to be fair, the authors do not deny that the movement’s parameters and vocabulary are problematic, if not “wrong” all together. Perhaps the emerging and inspiring efforts reflected in the book’s case studies deserve a term of their own. In any case, the authors certainly clear a promising path for future activists, researchers, and urbanists who may want to apply this new placemaking logic.
The City Creative is an exciting invitation to look past outdated practices of trickle-down urban development. The book offers a much needed and long overdue history of placemaking that acknowledges its shortcomings, incorporates more inclusive ideas, and celebrates novel practices. With honesty, rigor, and remarkable visual appeal, Carriere and Schalliol encourage readers to seek more holistic outcomes and benefits that can be distributed equitably. In doing so, they recast placemaking in a broader, more generous light.