The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking

This Handbook is the first to explore the emergent field of ‘placemaking’ in terms of the recent research, teaching and learning, and practice agenda for the next few years. Offering valuable theoretical and practical insights from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, it provides cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the placemaking sector.

Placemaking has seen a paradigmatic shift in urban design, planning, and policy to engage the community voice. This Handbook examines the development of placemaking, its emerging theories, and its future directions. The book is structured in seven distinct sections curated by experts in the areas concerned. Section One provides a glimpse at the history and key theories of placemaking and its interpretations by different community sectors. Section Two studies the transformative potential of placemaking practice through case studies on different places, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. It also reveals placemaking’s potential to nurture a holistic community engagement, social justice, and human-centric urban environments. Section Three looks at the politics of placemaking to consider who is included and who is excluded from its practice and if the concept of placemaking needs to be reconstructed. Section Four deals with the scales and scopes of art-based placemaking, moving from the city to the neighborhood and further to the individual practice. It juxtaposes the voice of the practitioner and professional alongside that of the researcher and academic. Section Five tackles the socio-economic and environmental placemaking issues deemed pertinent to emerge more sustainable placemaking practices. Section Six emphasizes placemaking’s intersection with urban design and planning sectors and incudes case studies of generative planning practice. The final seventh section draws on the expertise of placemakers, researchers, and evaluators to present the key questions today, new methods and approaches to evaluation of placemaking in related fields, and notions for the future of evaluation practices. Each section opens with an introduction to help the reader navigate the text. This organization of the book considers the sectors that operate alongside the core placemaking practice.

This seminal Handbook offers a timely contribution and international perspectives for the growing field of placemaking. It will be of interest to academics and students of placemaking, urban design, urban planning and policy, architecture, geography, cultural studies, and the arts.

Cara Courage is a placemaking, arts, activism, and museums academic-practitioner, and Head of Tate Exchange, Tate. Cara is author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (Routledge, 2017), and the co-editor of Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018).

Tom Borrup is an international consultant and author of The Power of Culture in City Planning and The Creative Community Builders’ Handbook. He is Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Minnesota’s Master of Professional Studies in Arts and Cultural Leadership.

expertise is comprehensive community revitalization, systems change, dynamics of race and ethnicity, and roles of arts and culture in communities. She is Institute Professor at Arizona State University and also has a long career in strategic planning, research and evaluation with philanthropy, government and nonprofit organizations.

Kylie Legge is the CEO and founder of place data analytics company Place Score and placemaking consultancy Place Partners. Kylie is a passionate advocate for human-centred design in cities and is the author of Doing it Differently and Future City Solutions.

Anita McKeown is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scholar, and educator with research interests in Sustainable Creative Placemaking and Open Source Culture and Technology. She is the Co-Director of SMARTlab Skelligs, research lab in South Kerry and SMARTlab's NAISC Skellig Kerry Diaspora Network Fellow.

Louise Platt is a senior lecturer in Festival and Events at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests predominantly lie in the role of festivity in places. She is on the executive committee of the Leisure Studies Association and the editorial board of Leisure Studies journal.

is a nerd, the Dean of the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design at Drexel University and a nationally recognized expert in the role that arts and design play in improving communities. He was the federal liaison to the design community in his role as Director of Design and Creative Placemaking Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts.