Nicola Dempsey, Harry Smith and Mel Burton (eds): Place-keeping: open space management in practice

Abstract

What is the relationship between capital investments in and the long-term use and benefits of open spaces? Well-intentioned expenditure on high-quality design in our urban fabric has frequently provided short-term results, but has often failed to maintain their impact over time. These bright new spaces have the habit of fading over time, sometimes into significant disrepair. Dempsey, Smith and Burton argue that an emphasis on place-making without full consideration of the long-term management of these open spaces is misguided and may lead to long-term costs in other areas, such as health care, in the opening and closing chapters of this edited volume. Place-keeping is an excellent attempt to address the shortcomings of place-making over time by creating a framework to think about long-term maintenance and management. It is a well-illustrated, accessible and succinct book that provides a cogent introduction to place-keeping. Building on work undertaken for an EU funded project: Making Places Profitable— Public and Private Open Spaces—this slight, edited, volume tackles the short-termism of capital investments in public spaces without planning for the long-term social, economic and environmental management of the space. A new institutionalist perspective is adopted as the theoretical framework to understand the dimensions of place-keeping across different contexts in the EU and illustrative examples elsewhere. Resultantly there is a repeated focus on the resources, norms and ideas that determine forms of place-keeping. The framework is briefly explained in chapter two and addressed intermittently throughout the book, before being explicitly tied together in the final chapter. More than a simple critique of place-making, Place-Keeping addresses a number of key questions including: who should be involved in it; where should finance come from; who shapes decisions; and where do attitudes towards place-keeping come from? Place-making is not dismissed as insignificant, but is relocated within a long-term approach to open