Exploring Participatory Placemaking in Malaysia Using Embedded Ethnographies with Practitioners Approach

Abstract

The transition to a place-based approach in urban regeneration has heightened the significance of increasing inclusion and capability for participatory governance, collaborative planning, and implementation of projects. Within place branding and global city competitions, smaller placemaking efforts have become an increasingly popular approach in urban regeneration, especially in the historic urban centres worldwide, including George Town, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. However, placemaking is a complex and ambiguous concept that may operate within the formal planning structure, or grow organically from the grassroots or appear in protests to a particular development due to emotional connection to particular places. Internal factors such as social-cultural, economic, political, and governance characteristics inside places were claimed to affect the ambiguity of placemaking, as were external variables such as global connections and market trends. This paper discusses the ethnography of case studies methodology adopted to understand the interaction between government-market-civil society nexus that shaped distinctive models of placemaking within the urban regeneration agenda in the historic cities mentioned above. Overt participant observation and semi-structured interviews were used in this research to gather real-life data on participatory placemaking from a constructivist and interpretivism epistemological stance. This paper provides a detailed description of the steps and processes of ethnographic research in the built environment, which may encourage other researchers who believe that ‘urban centres are constructed by the multiple realities of their context, which requires an emphatic understanding of human action’ to adopt a similar methodology.