Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective

Since the 1990s, interest in place (as opposed to space) has surged across a spectrum of social science disciplines including planning. But the empirical focus has been chiefly on cities along the Atlantic Rim even as vast new areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were undergoing accelerated urbanization. This essay outlines a planning perspective to global place-making in the face of fierce inter-city competition for footloose capital. The question of how a place can be defined, and what criteria might serve to delineate a place occupies the first part of this essay. The definition proposed encompasses both a physical/built environment at the neighborhood scale and the subjective feelings its inhabitants harbor towards each other as an emplaced community. Specific criteria are discussed, with brief illustrations from Taiwan and China. But the art of place-making has not informed planners of the swaths of the urban in the newly industrializing global regions of Asia and elsewhere. Their principal preoccupation has been with the branding of cities and the advanced infrastructure required by global capital. In the process, millions of ordinary folks have been displaced and their neighborhoods erased, as speed, movement, and power have been valued more than the fragile social infrastructure of place-based communities. The essay concludes with an argument that place-making is everyone's job, local residents as well as official planners, and that old places can be “taken back” neighborhood by neighborhood, through collaborative people-centered planning. Examples from Japan, China, and Canada are used to illustrate these propositions.