Place-making Practices Research Articles

Missing the Present: Nostalgia and the Archival Impulse in Gentrification Photography

If gentrification is a violent form of “un-homing” (Elliot-Cooper et al., p. 494), then it is no surprise to witness an intensification of photographic practice in gentrifying areas; photography is, after all, fundamentally a place-making practice. Taking “home” to include the wider neighborhood and urban environment (Blunt and Sheringham 2019), this paper argues that the concept of anticipatory nostalgia is a useful way of understanding the recent wave of black and white photography in gentrifying areas. As well as signifying a sense of loss, anticipatory nostalgia, defined as missing the present before it has gone (Batcho and Shikh 2016), can also be seen as an aesthetic strategy of documenting places before they are lost to gentrification. Using the works of Colby Deal (Beautiful, Still), Jules Renault (Suspended in Time), and Lorenzo Grifantini (W10) as case studies, this paper argues that this type of photography, which explicitly utilizes an archival aesthetic, invites spectators to interrogate the intimate ties between home, memory, and identity. While melancholic, these images serve as a call to action and a form of speculation about the future—rejecting the shiny, computer-generated aesthetics of gentrification for a humanized, often gritty, and authentic version of home.

Deadly Entanglements: Resource Extraction, Cowboy Culture and Sexualized Colonial Violence in Alberta

Drawing connections between an extractivist economy, the forms of cowboy culture (and rugged, white, working-class masculinity) that have a long history of entanglement with extractivism on the territory now defined as the province of Alberta (in western Canada) and the high rates of sexualized colonial violence against Indigenous women in the province, the authors argue that Alberta has a transient white guy problem. By analyzing the Calgary Stampede as a case study of forms of white masculinity that are supported, encouraged, prioritized and, at times, glorified in Alberta, the authors demonstrate how this transient white guy problem is proving exceedingly dangerous to many Indigenous women in particular (as well as to women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people more broadly) and diverse local communities, the land and the environment. Their analysis aims to unpack how settler-colonial logics of extractivism and cultural practices of placemaking, too often viewed as innocuous and as central to an Albertan identity, come to be deeply implicated in ongoing violence against Indigenous women.

Black citizen participation in urban development policies and creative placemaking practices in Wilmington, Delaware

ABSTRACT A century of urban development policies in the United States demonstrates the importance of inclusive citizen participation mechanisms to ensure equitable outcomes for marginalized communities. In this paper, I examined Black citizen participation in Wilmington, Delaware’s urban redevelopment policies from the 1950s to the present. Using Critical Race Theory, this study used document analysis to compare state legislation, city ordinances, and community development plans and illuminated three stages of Black citizen participation mechanisms in Wilmington’s urban redevelopment history: Stage 1 (1951–1981) nonparticipation, Stage 2 (1994–1996) conditional participation, Stage 3 (2012–2022) tokenism and partnership. Black citizens’ exclusion in the earliest stage of urban redevelopment set the trajectory for future political exclusion. The findings illustrate how the dominance of White-corporate interests limits Black citizen participation. The paper includes recommendations for racially inclusive and equitable creative placemaking practices in future stages of urban development. This research contributes to understanding how the historical marginalization of Black communities in urban development policies and practices continues to shape Black citizen participation today.

(Mis-)belonging to the climate-resilient city: Making place in multi-risk communities of racialized urban America

ABSTRACT Through climate adaptation planning cities are transforming places and relations, most recently via green climate resilient infrastructure (GRI). Yet, GRI’s incorporation into existing, racialized infrastructure systems of urban development, regeneration and finance has raised questions about the socio-cultural impacts and justice dimensions of recent directions in climate adaptation planning and urbanism. While critical scholars highlight the exclusion of historically marginalized residents, this paper’s analysis of the impacts of GRI-driven planning for sense of belonging reveals a complex and multi-faceted experience of gentrification and displacement in the racialized, settler colonial city. Drawing on insights from civic actors about their lived experience of green and climate resilient projects in Boston, Massachusetts, we develop a novel understanding of belonging, which entails degrees of (mis)belonging. Our analysis uncovers three pathways by which climate urbanism shapes belonging into various alienated, subordinated, assimilated and emancipated forms, and reveals the kinds of political subjects and socio-cultural relations that emerge from the lived experience of climate adaptation projects. More broadly, this study sheds light on how less visible placemaking practices and alternative modes of addressing socio-climate vulnerability contribute to climate justice and injustice dynamics.

Postcard Motifs and Littered Landscapes: How the Inglorious Relationship Between Tourism and Waste (Re)Shapes Phu Quoc Island’s Appearance

Abstract Phu Quoc Island is famous for its sun, sand, and sea, but tourism struggles with visible plastic pollution. The colorful plastic waste disrupts tourists’ imaginaries of a pristine, tropical paradise. To counter the threat of image loss, local authorities and the tourism industry create both materially and symbolically ‘clean’ places that fulfil the scenery tourists seek. Drawing on my human geography background, I frame this making, maintaining, and manipulation of attractive environmental features as place-making practices. Yet, the creation of an appealing environment makes it necessary to find places to store the immense amounts of waste. I understand these places as ‘places behind the scene,’ referring to Goffman’s theatre metaphor of front- and backstage settings. The paper illuminates how waste-tourism entanglements foster the creation of front- and backstage places, which ultimately lead to an increasing socio-spatial fragmentation of the island.

At Home: Black Women’s Collective Claims to Environmentally Just Rental Housing

Environmental injustices have shaped how urban communities of color access, interact with, and are affected by indoor and outdoor environments in their daily lives. This includes access to and control of outdoor spaces, such as gardens, vacant neighborhood lots, and green spaces for growing food and plants and for coming together. For tenants in rented homes, it too often includes exposure to harmful indoor environments, such as toxic molds, rodent infestations, lead paint, broken heaters, and other unsafe and uncomfortable living conditions. Although geographers of race, nature, and environment have attended to rental housing through studies of green gentrification and racialized displacement, they have paid less attention to homes themselves and the survivability of Black women through everyday practices of resistance and placemaking. This community coauthored article focuses on Dubuque, Iowa—a predominately White, small Midwestern U.S. city with a growing Black population—and examines the cooperative practices of Black women tenants and community activists in pressing the municipal government to hold landlords responsible for living conditions in private rental homes. Together, they are working through institutional policy and procedural hurdles to confront anti-Blackness, cocreate livable urban environments, and “stay put” in the midst of gentrifying neighborhood revitalization plans.

Healing Places, Healing People: Insights on Spontaneous Critical Placemaking from the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre in Durban, South Africa

ABSTRACT Despite renewed interest in urban planning since the 1990s, the empirical focus has predominantly been on cities along the Atlantic Rim, with limited scholarly attention placed on African, Asian and Latin American cities. An examination of contemporary discourse and practices of urban placemaking reveals a worrying trend where concerns for, and interventions in, the interests of social equity are losing relevance, with almost no focus on placemaking efforts for the most vulnerable urban groups. While much has been written about urban placemaking and about responses to homelessness, not enough empirical attention has been focused on the intersection between the two. In attempting to fill this gap in the placemaking literature, the paper draws on the authors’ experiences of spontaneous and frugal institutional placemaking at the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre, a space dedicated to providing opioid substitution therapy to Durban’s drug using population since the COVID-19 lockdown. The paper suggests what placemaking for the marginalized could and should look like, emphasizing the importance of creating public spaces of dignity, while engaging meaningfully with a group of diverse stakeholders and neighbours. The importance of having a place that resembles “home” for homeless people with an opioid use disorder, and their re-humanization as a result, is core to the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre. Equally important is how this public space has transformed narratives within the broader urban community regarding homelessness and drug use, making it a potentially replicable model for critical placemaking globally. This is revealed through interviews with beneficiaries, and observational research that focuses on how the space is used. In telling the story of the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre, we invite a rethinking of traditional notions of placemaking, fostering a re-grounding of common understandings around what it means to make vibrant and truly accessible urban places. In so doing, we call for south–north learnings about using common space to enhance public safety and public health, concurrently demonstrating the interconnectivity of urban dwellers across social divides.

“Did You Hear? Mavericks Is Closing!” Punk Refusal of Gentrified Endings

Decades of experience with closed, relocated, and renamed venues, make punks very familiar with cycles of gentrification. Often established in edge neighborhoods, punk venues participate in reproducing the “grit” of urban decline and subculture. Urban revitalization plans that promise community, livability, and culture, rarely leave spaces for established punk community and subculture. The newly branded Retail, Arts, and Theatre District in Ottawa, Canada is a case study in cultural urban development that operationalizes creative placemaking and its future-oriented visions of urban revitalization through cultural spaces and activities. Although the city’s Official Plan celebrates that existing cultural venues add diversity to the district, the pressure placed on punk venues by surrounding development reveal that not all venues are to be recognized by the city as legitimate or desirable forms of either diversity or culture. Close readings of official city planning documents, urban histories, development proposals, and marketing literature are juxtaposed with auto-ethnographic, storytelling, punk histories, and song writing. I argue that punk counter-cultural placemaking practices provide counter-information, counter-environments, and counter-temporalities to space in the city to resist gentrification and refuse displacement as endings. Gentrification kills punk. But punk always comes back, finds new places, haunts old sites, and remembers its past.

Reinhabiting Ecotopia: Weaving the Threads of People, Place, and Possibilities

Abstract: In the face of escalating environmental and social crises, this essay explores how it might be possible to reweave the threads that connect people to one another, collectively to place, and jointly toward possible futures. Highlighting the potential of a renewed human-environment interface across a range of perspectives and illustrations, and drawing upon concepts such as reinhabitation and practices of placemaking, it is considered here how making connections with people and places that might otherwise be taken for granted can help foster more grounded experiences and cultivate imaginations at the same time. Confronting apparent assertions from some quarters that humankind must move further away from “nature” to address current crises, the central aim of this intervention is to examine how a commitment toward deeper engagement with the world around us can stoke aspirations and attitudes for positive change.

Lan Xang Village: Place-making in Louisiana's Iberia Parish

Lan Xang Village:Place-making in Louisiana's Iberia Parish Davorn Sisavath (bio) In the wheelhouse, Papoose scans the two-way radio, and we overhear fishermen speaking Cajun English and French. We hear the twang of Texas oil workers heading out to offshore platforms and the exotic language of exiled Vietnamese shrimpers who've fished these waters since the 1975 fall of Saigon, drawn to America's own elaborate version of the Mekong Delta. Completing the ethnic gumbo are French-speaking Houma Indians, driven by European settlers over the centuries to the farthest ends of the bayou country where they now survive as expert fishermen.1 This passage from journalist Mike Tidwell's Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast (2003)—a regional and ecological history tracing the environmental losses occurring in Louisiana's Mississippi Delta—introduces the history of the Cajun coast and those who live along the bayous, including Texas oil workers, Vietnamese fisherfolk, Houma Indians, and Cajuns. It simultaneously sheds light on the socially and spatially uneven ways some stories are muted while others appear front-and-center.2 In fact, across Acadiana, nearly 15 percent of residents are Black, and in some parishes such as Iberia, Black residents make up at least 30 percent of the total population.3 [End Page 77] In Iberia Parish and Lafourche Parish, Latinx residents make up 4.3 percent and 4.4 percent. Building on Carl Bankston III's and Phanat Xanamane's scholarship on the stories of one such frequently overlooked group—a Lao community of about 400 people on the northern edge of New Iberia, the largest city in Louisiana's Iberia Parish—this article explores how place-making plays an integral role in belonging and experience for immigrants and refugees. Although this article focuses on how Lao immigrants negotiate their spatial practices and experiences in Louisiana, I also deliberately use data about Vietnamese and Cambodians and apply it to the Lao community under examination. This reflects both in terms of very little scholarship examining Lao immigrants in the region and as subjects of U.S. militarism and imperialism, Southeast Asian refugees experienced similar, yet different processes of displacement and resettlement to America. Set against Louisiana's coastal south landscape and local distinctiveness, Lan Xang village is home to refugees from Laos who resettled with sponsorship from the Catholic Diocese in the 1970s and 1980s, and through secondary migration after learning of federally funded job training made available. Like many newly arrived Southeast Asian refugees in the Gulf Coast, Lao refugees landed job opportunities produced by the oil boom, while others filled the demand for unskilled labor in peeling shrimp, shucking oysters, picking peppers at the Tabasco factory, and working in food processing and textile mills. As Bankston writes, "Laotians began moving into Iberia Parish during the early 1980s, the peak period of Lao resettlement in the United States. Their concentration in this area was a consequence of secondary migration in search of job opportunities.... Those who arrived in New Iberia came with little capital, often relying on the help of friends and relatives, and on the public assistance made available under the provisions of the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980."4 Today, the small community off Melancon Road consists of three residential streets and a main avenue. At the heart of Lan Xang village, a Buddhist temple serves as an ordination hall where monks are ordained, and a sanctuary and gathering center for the community. In their efforts to belong and stay, I suggest place-making practices by Lao refugees in Lan Xang village make visible their multiple displacements but also make evidence of their collective process to belong and endow their place with value and attachments in New Iberia. This practice can be seen in places where temples serve as the center of the community such as Morganton, North Carolina and Willington, Connecticut. I approach place-making as work-in-progress and as an active space imbued with purpose, identity, and meaning whose final form is always contested. This approach acknowledges the complex relationships between people and place, and the stories created and shared. In "Space and Place," Yi...

Augmented Placemaking: Urban Technologies, Interaction Design and Public Spaces in a Post-Pandemic World

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a sudden and widespread reorganization of public spaces, underpinned by digital technologies. The impromptu, ad hoc and collective character of this reorganization of shared places for social interactions echoes traditional practices of placemaking otherwise advocated for liveable cities, now applied to the new—physical, virtual and, increasingly, hybrid—public spaces people started to inhabit. In this article, I define the notion of ‘augmented placemaking’, referring to a particularly new form of digital placemaking, unleashed by the pandemic. First, I identify key new scenarios for the design of urban interfaces that emerged or gained impetus in response to COVID-19. Following that, I synthesize a model for augmented placemaking based on emerging topologies, discussing the opportunities and challenges they posed, and their potential to inform future HCI. I then conclude by proposing guidelines to inform the design process of augmented placemaking initiatives going forward. Categories and subject descriptors: cities; pervasive computing; smart cities

Strengthening place attachment through place-sensitive participatory regional policy in a less developed region

ABSTRACT Disrupted identities of inhabitants in old industrial and other less developed regions are seldom an issue of regional policies, even though people’s attachment to their residential environment can influence territorial development. It is the aim of this paper to assess the reach of regional policy to strengthen place attachment and the place identity of inhabitants. We do so by analysing the development and implementation process of the novel participatory and place-sensitive policy programme #heimatruhr. The programme aimed to renew residents’ attachment and emotional bonds with their neighbourhoods in the old industrial region Ruhr in Germany through arts and social innovation-based initiatives. It was designed in an experimental process and followed an open, co-creative, and transformative proceeding. The key to place-sensitivity was the integration of participants during the entire programme development and implementation from the early phases onwards. Our findings suggest that supporting people-centred place-making practices as part of regional policies can positively influence residents’ place attachment. Therefore, place-based policies should not only target local economic development but also include an explicit people-centred perspective.

Critical Sensitivity in Digital Place-Craft to Unsettle Settler Sentiments of Place

This paper summarizes the methods and outcomes of my dissertation inquiry, which examined the potential that critical perspectives on digital placemaking practices may hold for art teaching with digital materials. Within this study, placemaking is the (often, but not always, intentional) shaping of the material qualities of a place. The study described in this paper examined how critical sensitivity to the material qualities of digital places (i.e. the actions and sensations places invite and inhibit) and critical sensitivity to the colonial ideologies digital places often materially enact and habituate, may inform the crafting of arts curricula as places, and inform youth artists’ crafting of digital places. Drawing on theories of digital materialism, curricula as digital places of learning, and critical and anticolonial framings of digital placemaking, the study summarized in this article suggests that habituating critical sensitivity to the material qualities of digital places is a viable approach to addressing ideologically-laden material qualities of the digital. The study also suggests that approaching curriculum development with critical sensitivity as an act of placemaking is a viable and valuable approach to navigating tension between structure and open-endedness in curricular design, and to attending to the ideologically-laden material qualities of curricular places.

Race and place-making in the rural Global North

Rural places in the Global North are transforming. Geographies of capital accumulation and distribution, environmental catastrophe, the global restructuring of food production, and state-based resettlement policies for people from migrant and humanitarian refugee backgrounds have reconfigured the social and economic landscapes of the rural Global North. Through these transformations, race figures in ways that are both profound and often elided within contemporary theorising of rural places. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, Race and Place-making in the Rural Global North, we attend explicitly to the intersecting logics and practices of race and place-making in an attempt to build upon and extend previous important existing interventions within rural studies. Influential approaches to rural diversity, we argue—including ‘rural cosmopolitanism’—too often fail to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of rural places as already-made-as-white, and do not sufficiently account for the colonial and imperial foundations of rural places in the Global North. Seeking to centre attention to race and coloniality in more explicit ways, we offer a conceptualisation of contemporary rural place-making in terms of three key modalities: practice, relation, and aesthetic. Through these, we argue for a double move in rural studies' engagement with race and rural diversity. This involves, firstly, a critical move towards interrogating whiteness as a force of power and inequality in rural places; and secondly a move away from whiteness in order to centre Indigenous, Black and Brown rural lifeworlds in their own terms.

Reshaping social housing spaces as vibrant places Case study: Msaken el Magzar, Mansoura, Egypt

Developing a relationship to shape the integration of placemaking practices in social housing spaces is the main issue of this paper; where social housing is meant to be based on fulfilling the human needs of people in their places, while placemaking represents the suitable diverse, variable, and multi-scaled approach to root the social housing patterns in the urban context.This paper aims to extract a draft code to measure the applicability of placemaking characteristics of great places in social housing spaces to reach reasonable criteria for successful social housing places and to investigate the ability of these criteria to apply a new layer of socio-urban studies that deepen the relationship between man and urbanism yet enhances their impact on the environment. Through following qualitative and quantitative methods to deduct a formula to shape the relationship between social housing and placemaking, analyzing human needs theories to deduct social housing dimensions, integrating placemaking principles, and qualities to draft a code for social housing great places, and investigating the application of this code on the case of Msaken El Magzar in Mansoura, Egypt.Based on this, the research concludes with a proposed draft code of 3 levels 1) basic measurements of social housing dimensions and placemaking characteristics, 2) secondary requirements, and finally 3) standard indicators. The research suggests that this draft code should be investigated and activated through a set of questions to experts, shareholders, stakeholders, and, parties involved in the process of establishing and remaking successful places of social housing spaces.

‘Sauté Urbanisation’

Abstract In the last 20 years of economic reforms, China has embraced an explicit policy of urbanisation. In the literature, space and place-making are often perceived as distinct or conflicting dimensions of urban change, whereby the former is severed from or dominates the latter. By focusing on the multi-ethnic south-western frontier of Yunnan, this paper explores the effects of recent urbanisation on Tai ethnic minority communities in the expanding border city of Jinghong. It suggests that we need to conceptualise urbanisation in dialectic terms rather than as a dichotomy. Drawing on Massey (2005), it analyses space through the prism of ‘multiplicity’, ‘interrelation’, and ‘openness’ and place through its interconnection with the broader power geometries of space. Specifically, the paper argues that urbanisation can produce a two-way dynamic whereby space co-opts place and place permeates space through consensus, in the guise of ‘ethnic modernity’. The resulting ‘sauté urbanisation’ captures these mutually informing practices of space construction and place-making.

The Pagoda of the Gods: A case for Indigenous Karen sacred sites as Special Cultural Zones along Thailand’s borders

Burgeoning recognition of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and livelihood practices have led to ‘Special Cultural Zone’ designations for some traditionally Indigenous lands in Thailand. Simultaneously, the Thai government has designated 10 Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to bolster trade and investments along its borders without acknowledging the pre-existence of Indigenous peoples. SEZs intersect with sites of notable cultural significance, such as Kho Pho Lu (Pagoda of the Gods), a sacred site for Indigenous Karen near Mae Sot in Tak province. Detailed ethnographic and interview findings show the resilience of these sacred sites and embedded ritualistic place-making practices that persist despite a legacy of Indigenous displacement. Ethnobotanical findings of 39 sampled taxa in the sacred forest of Kho Pho Lu indicate that cultural and spiritual practices support local biodiversity conservation. Potential biocultural conservation approaches include the adoption of ‘Special Cultural Zones’ to promote Indigenous well-being and the preservation of biocultural diversity in Thailand.

Memorials to murdered women: A study of the dynamics of claiming, marking and making place in publics of commemoration

This paper examines the emergence and trajectory of a vernacular femicide memorial tree at Mount Gravatt (Meanjin/Brisbane) which is juxtaposed with established and regulated official commemorative placemaking practices in this social geography. The paper explores the implicit rules about marking gender in official publics of commemoration, arguing that they perform or conversely risk a doubling of women’s invisibility through assimilation into symbols and aesthetic conventions of seemingly settled history and settled subjects. They can become barely noticeable for the kinds of messages they may seek to publicly speak and breakthrough in encounter. Conventional commemoration of violence against women also risks positioning women as ‘victims’ by not unsettling that position through passive, familiar and assimilationist design forms and narrative tropes. Importantly, memorials that address violence against women and intimate femicide should contest ‘active forgetting’ by insisting that this is a public facing, collective issue of responsibility against resistant effacements, disavowal, and sequestration into the private sphere and personal life.

Mana Kia. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

Mana Kia. <i>Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism</i>

The Political Ontology of Corporate Social Responsibility: Obscuring the Pluriverse in Place

This article examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of political ontology. We contend that CSR is not only a discursive mean of legitimization but an inherently ontological practice through which particular worlds become real. CSR enables the politics of place-making, connecting humans and nonhumans in specific territorial configurations in accordance with corporate needs and interests. We discuss three CSR mechanisms of singularization that create a particular corporate ontology in place: (1) community engagements that form ‘stakeholders’; (2) CSR standards and certifications that produce singular sustainable environments; and (3) CSR reporting that erases ontological conflicts and enables the singularized representation (of the environment and the community) to travel to other locations of the corporate world. We argue that these ontological CSR practices obscure the pluriverse of other world and place-making practices that would create different kinds of sustainabilities based on less extractive and non-corporate ways of being in place.