Forms Of Place-making Research Articles

Geographies of inland waterscapes: Thinking with watery places

AbstractHumans and water have a complex relationship that includes various dimensions such as sociocultural, political, legal and ecological. Considering the ubiquity of water, we need a more holistic perspective to help us see water not as a static entity but rather as one in constant movement, physically and conceptually; acknowledging the interplay between water and humans is essential to understanding societal narratives deeply embedded in places. In this special section, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explore inland waters, taking a water‐centric view instead of a land‐centric one. The special section delves into the emerging hydro‐social connections, diverse forms of expertise, governance models, collective and spontaneous actions, and resilience strategies within the context of inland water bodies, exploring how canals, rivers and wetlands are experienced and represented as places. The papers in this collection show that any form of placemaking should take responsible stewardship of water, embrace its dynamic nature, and present a realistic pathway towards sustainable solutions for present and future water challenges.

Performance enacting mobility and shifting borders – the global countryside?

ABSTRACT This essay considers how performances by Takayama Akira (founder of Port B) are made to explore experiences of mobility and migration among people who traverse geographical and geopolitical spaces in Japan and elsewhere. In making works that uncover hidden sites that are connected to diasporic and migratory passage, Takayama invites reflections on questions of borders, zones, regions, and the passages between them. Our paper will discuss how Takayama’s work is a form of place-making. His tour performances and mobile ideas of theatre create complexities around the meaning of place in terms of re-spatialized institutional strata and civic designations. We aim to explore how civic institutions and designations such as “rural” and “city” are being broken and/or made liminal. Our paper will outline how this spatial dramaturgy has ramifications for the “global countryside” (Woods) as something both institutionalized and yet to be.

Place-makers in the digital age: Lifestyle migrants and the emergence of lifestyle-oriented urbanization in China

ABSTRACT The increasing significance of lifestyle migration provides a compelling opportunity for exploring the role that lifestyle migrants play in urban changes. This paper establishes lifestyle migrants as place-makers to comprehend their profound influence on Dali, a city in Southwest China. Three forms of place-making, namely creative, transgressive, and aesthetic place-making, are identified in this paper, which have forged connections between the online and offline worlds and transformed the city into an attractive place for developers, investors, and migrants, thereby giving rise to a distinct mode of urbanization (termed “lifestyle-oriented urbanization” in this paper). By characterizing this urbanization mode and the triad of place-making, this paper illuminates how lifestyle migration has sparked off socio-spatial rearrangements in a peripheral place and how these changes, in turn, have sustained lifestyle migration. Through this exploration, this paper highlights the importance of further research on the interplay between lifestyle migration and urbanization.

Pacemaking and placemaking on the UK canals

AbstractThis paper focuses on the complex relationship between pace and place, offering a novel lens for understanding mobility within the context of canal boating. Drawing on fieldwork on the canals in north‐west England, the paper focuses on mobile placemaking practices. Canal boats act as physical and material but also ideological pacemakers, guiding the boaters towards subscribing to the idea of slow living, where certain canal‐based pace‐myths play an important role. Pacemaking on the canals is therefore a form of placemaking, realised through the mobility of the vessel, materialities of the infrastructure, tempos and temporalities, representations and stories about canal life as well as the bodies on board and on towpaths as canal boaters modulate and manage their experience and performance of pace. The investigation of the interplay between the slow pace, rhythms, embodied practices, canal infrastructure, and the prevalent pace‐myths offers valuable insights into the ways places are shaped by the pace of mobility, thus expanding the concept of placemaking. By foregrounding pace as a key concept in mobility studies, the paper demonstrates the need for a more nuanced understanding of the temporalities associated with different modes of movement.

Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer

Abstract I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.

The folklore-centric gaze: a relational approach to landscape, folklore and tourism

ABSTRACT Supernatural folktales have a long oral tradition in Scotland, embedded in local communities and the landscapes of the region. Recently, these folktales have been utilised by destinations as a form of place-making, and a driver for increasing tourist numbers and engagement. Drawing on a critical discussion of the literature, and case study examples from the Isle of Skye and Orkney Isles, this paper examines the challenges and opportunities of folklore tourism. It argues that while folklore tourism presents opportunities to increase tourism-based revenue, and for the preservation and dissemination of intangible heritage, it poses challenges to the authenticity and identity of local communities, and integrity of the natural environment. The experience cultivated by supernatural folktales may, however, also present opportunities to connect visitors with landscape and community through encouraging participation in liminal and enchanted spaces. By critically exploring the tourist gaze in relation to folklore, this paper invites further research into the value of developing a folklorecentric gaze through the perspectives of animism, and a heritagecentric approach. It is proposed that a folklore- centric gaze may engender a relational approach to landscape, folklore and tourism, and aid in the development of sustainable forms of folklore tourism for the future.

Seeing like a business: rethinking the role of business in regional development, planning and governance

ABSTRACT Rather than accept the mainstream view that the state needs need to be brought back in to regional thinking, the paper argues that the state – and the analysis of it – is restricting understandings of urban and regional change and leading to a state-territorial trap. Analysing over 40 years of literature on growth-oriented regionalism, the paper reveals important blind spots in the approaches to researching regions (and other forms of place-making) and the role of business in regional development, planning and governance. Presenting a comparison of two spatial governance projects in the UK – The Peel Group’s Atlantic Gateway Strategy and UK government’s Local Enterprise Partnerships – it is revealed how business-orchestrated regionalism is a new empirical reality, but one we are ill-equipped to understand. It argues that we need to move beyond the conceptual and methodological lock-in of business-as-usual approaches to start ‘seeing like a business’ and revealing the practical politics and pragmatism by which actors – both state and business – are engaging to effect regional change and shape regional futures.

PLACEMAKING IN TANAH ABANG: BETWEEN DIMENSIONS AND INTENSITY OF PEDESTRIAN WAYS

ABSTRACT
 
 Placemaking in pedestrian ways of a commercial area has its own characteristics, especially between central mode of transportation and shopping center. The area between Tanah Abang Station and “Blok A” Tanah Abang Market is bustling with variety of activities, especially temporary commercial activities by street vendors and hawkers as a form of placemaking. This paper explores the relationship between road dimensions and pedestrian intensity of placemaking that occurs along the pedestrian ways between the station and Blok A of The Market. The research method used is mixed method of quantitative data processing and qualitative analysis. Variables used include the dimensions of the pedestrian ways and pedestrian intensity on the path. Pedestrian ways’ dimensions cover the width and length of the pathway. Pedestrian intensity is measured by the amount, speed, and space of the pedestrian. Case studies include pedestrian ways on four streets, namely the Streets of Jatibaru Raya, Kebon Jati, Jatibaru 2, and Jatibaru 10. The results of the study show that all four streets have similar placemaking although they differ in dimensions and intensity. This shows the relationship between the dimensions of the road with the intensity of the road and it does affect the formation of place/placemaking. The narrower the width of the road and the shorter the length of the road, the higher the intensity of pedestrians, which is an indicator of the formation of placemaking in the pedestrian ways of Tanah Abang.
 
 Keywords: pedestrian way dimensions, pedestrian intensity, placemaking

Sustaining the Liveliness of Public Spaces in El Houma through Placemaking

This paper takes Algiers as a case study, highlighting the social use of urban spaces in El Houma, in the Algerian capital, as a form of placemaking, a people-centred approach aimed at improving urban spaces within a neighbourhood. El Houma is a word for neighbourhood in North Africa synonymous with Hara and Mahalla in the Middle East. El Houma is not a typical neighbourhood that only houses people, it is a socio-spatial product formed by social relations between residents of the same neighbourhood. It is, therefore, a way of representing urban space though social practices, creating a strong sense of community, a sense of place and social interaction. Based on theories and mapping techniques from urban sociology and urban design, the research applies a methodology of activity mapping, in order to investigate patterns of outdoor social activities in public spaces and their correlation with the physical design of the neighbourhood. The research will measure the liveliness of public spaces exploring how people adapted their lifestyle to the built environment and vice versa. The findings demonstrate how the different social activities are spatially distributed, and their impact on the liveliness of el Houma.

Planning, temporary urbanism and citizen-led alternative-substitute place-making in the Global South

ABSTRACT This paper argues that planning in the Global South needs to be embedded within a more complex and systemic framework based on understanding cities' functions and transformations, at both local and regional levels, whilst advocating for and incorporating informal and temporary dynamics. This is to differentiate between two competing processes: formal planning and citizen-led place-making, here considered as a form of reactive alternative-substitute place-making that occurs when there is no available alternative. The paper calls for a better integration of such impermanent, adaptable, temporary and alternative forms of place-making into the planning process for regional futures.

Historical Places and Identity of the Cities: Khuzam Palace Museum, Jeddah

Place identity refers to a cluster of ideas about identity and place in the fields of geography, urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and environmental psychology. Place identity has become a significant issue in the last 25 years in urban planning and design. Place identity concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users, and how these meanings contribute to individuals' conceptualizations of self. Place identity also relates to the context of mogdernity, history, and the politics of representation (Proshansky et al., 1995).Jeddah went through dramatic changes in the last 70 years after demolishing the old city wall and oil booming, which affected the identity, traditions, and lifestyle (Shiber, 1967). In order to eliminate the lack of city identity and change the people's attachment to Jeddah's new urban development, this paper will take Khuzam Palace Museum as a case study to express the relationship between the past and present in the city. The paper will have an analytical review of urban memory, place identity, and place attachment elements. At the end, the paper will set some recommendations to consider using and respecting the community memories from the past that related physical elements and social interaction that have to express into new forms of place-making in the future development to increase the identity and the sense of belonging in Jeddah city.

Place making as an approach to revitalize Neglected Urban Open Spaces (NUOS): A case study on Rod El Farag Flyover in Shoubra, Cairo

In recent decades, urban renewal policies and continuous economic demand have caused the urban fabric of cities to become disorganized and detached, thus creating socially and economically inefficient spaces. These spaces are increasing, unoccupied, and purposeless, although they have so many potentials in terms of location, size, and history. They are military sites, vacant plots, industrial sites, deteriorated waterfronts, leftover space, oversized streets, and socially inefficient green spaces. All of the aforementioned spaces are called “Neglected Urban Open Spaces” (NUOS). This paper places emphasis on using a place-making approach to revitalize the NUOS, particularly “Leftover Space (LS)”. Such revitalization shall be accomplished through following the principles and forms of Place-Making, which proved that the integration of more than one form of place-making can achieve intertwined multiple social, economic, and environmental benefits. Besides, it highlighted that each section of place-making criteria does not have an equal interconnectedness with the main objective of Place-making, which is to “create successful spaces”. Thus, this result is considered as a methodological way to be generalized on the whole Egyptian community to develop NUOS particularly “Leftover Space, no matter how different the properties, characteristics, and circumstances of its population were. Finally, to demonstrate the validity of this approach, the paper applies it to Rod El Farag Flyover in Egypt, Cairo, Shoubra district as a case study of Leftover Space.

Travelling home: Diasporic dis-locations of space and place in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician

The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, a novel by Zimbabwean diasporic writer Tendai Huchu, adds to a growing body of global immigrant fiction. Huchu’s novel concerning Zimbabwean émigrés in the United Kingdom displays a heightened spatial consciousness that self-reflexively complicates the spatial tropes and trends of much migrant literature. The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician generates an unrelenting dialectic in which the national home, both for migrants and citizens, is often unhomely, while host spaces yield to various forms of place-making and belonging. City space, in this case the city of Edinburgh, is shown through the unique mobilities of the three protagonists to produce different senses of identity. However, the forms of identity that emerge ultimately succumb to the spatial implosion represented by the death (in contained spaces) of two of the principal characters, whose city perambulations are thus brought to a halt. The reader discovers, furthermore, that the third character is not the cartographer of his re-orienting mental map of the host city, but that his itinerary has been directed all along by a sinister Zimbabwean expatriate, to whom the third character, fooled by this regime spy’s buffoonery, condescends, and patronizes at his peril.

Futures, fakes and discourses of the gigantic and miniature in ‘The World’ islands, Dubai

This article takes the “island” as a key trope in tourism studies, exploring how ideas of culture and nature, as well as those of paradise (lost) are central to its interpretation for tourists and tourist industries alike. Increasingly, however, island tourism is blurring the line between geographies of land and water, continent and archipelago, and private and public property. The case of ‘The World’ islands mega project off the coast of Dubai (UAE) is used to chart the changing face and future of island tourism, exploring how spectacle, branding and discourses of the gigantic, miniature, and fake, alongside technological mediations on a largescale, reflect the postmodern neoliberal world of tourism and the liquid times in which we live. Artificial island complexes such as this one function as cosmopolitan ‘non-places’ at the same time that they reflect a resurgence in (British) nascent nationalism and colonial nostalgia, all the whilst operating in a sea of ‘junkspace’. The shifting cartography of ‘the island’ is thus mapped out to suggest new forms of place-making and tourism’s evolving relationship to these floating islandscapes.

The Politics of Urban Space: Modes of Place-making by Italians in Toronto's Neighbourhoods

This paper examines the politics of urban space through a consideration of three ways Italians in Toronto, Canada, create, make claims to and express their belonging in particular neighbourhoods in the city. The article considers forms of claiming and colonizing space that are not overtly violent or confrontational with respect to other groups living within the plural city but, in effect, are assertions of power over particular places with which others must contend. The three forms encompass a range of scales, temporal duration and purposeful collective expression by Italians in Toronto, and they include the quotidian shaping of neighbourhoods, the calendrical colonizing of public spaces during religious and secular celebrations and the monument building that attests to the permanence of Italians in the city. Ultimately, these forms of place-making must contend with the larger forces of commodification and popular imagery that influence the spatial representations of Italians in Toronto.

Simultanagnosia, Sense of Place and the Garden Idea

A pervasive theme in George Seddon's extensive oeuvre is sense of place. Over a number of decades he has explored and reworked the conceptual and phenomenological aspects of this theme. This article takes its cue from Seddon's more recent critical observations on sense of place and considers the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday experience in the informational age. Recent trends in gardening and garden theory are examined in the context of certain pathologies associated with this experience, and in particular cultural simultanagnosia: `unable to see the forest for the trees'. A key argument is that as contemporary experience tends to differentiate into discrete modules there is paradoxically also a tendency to reengage with the ecocultural world in the form of place-making, in symbolic performances of milieu.