Placemaking

Placekeeping: Setting a New Precedent for City Planners
How a preservation-based approach to redevelopment and urban design can prevent displacement and honor legacy communities.

The Panacea of Outdoor Human Movement
Humans relish in over-complicating things, but the sweetest and healthiest things in life are the simplest.

Report: The State of Public Spaces
A 50-year-old institution takes stock of placemaking in the public realm today.

Appreciating Rural Cultural Resources
A focus on ‘placemaking’ too often obscures or exploits local culture and history.

Placemaking in the Barrio: Conceptualizing Infill Development in Disenfranchised Communities
How one San Antonio neighborhood could approach sustainable revitalization while supporting the existing community and drawing on its rich and diverse history and cultural resources.

Placemaking on the Halifax Waterfront
How small, incremental changes can create vibrant places.

Goat Blocks: A Blueprint for Urban Placemaking and Walkability
How one development harnesses placemaking tactics to build community at the street level.

Building Community Through Small Town Placemaking
A federal program works with rural communities to develop their assets and resources and build a sense of place.

Placemaking: Building on the ‘Soul’ of a Place
Placemaking is often mistaken for a form of manufacturing. Every place already has a story to tell—placemaking just brings that story forward.

What Makes Placemaking Work
New qualitative research into three example public spaces in the United States offers best practices and obstacles to avoid in the placemaking process.

Unlocking the City with Context Keys
The human memory is so powerful that a place on pavement suddenly can trigger a stream of imagery from the distant past, or a meaningful story of something that once happened there. We should champion such keys to the context of a place.

Pop Quiz: What Kind of Post-2020 City-Maker Are You?
The State of Place blog is offering a pop quiz designed to help you diagnose the kind of post-2020 city-maker you are.

Rethinking Place Governance to Advance Equitable Development
The Boston Foundation's first Place Leadership Network process offers lessons in how to build place-based coalitions to advance the cause of equity.

Do You Have The Place Gene?
Everybody does, says Bill Fulton. Here's how to hone yours—and talk to people who you think don't have it.

Seeing the Street
A San Francisco-based design studio describes the thought process behind an effort to push outdoor lighting design beyond the lowest common denominator allowed by bureaucracy and status quo thinking.

Legacy Cities, Post-Pandemic
The question of how the pandemic and all of its corresponding crises will alter the future of cities and planning has persisted since March. This article rightfully focuses those large, challenging questions of the Legacy Cities of the United States.

Placemaking for Place Marketing
Looking to boost awareness of the special charms of your unique city? Look for chances to leverage placemaking when place marketing.

Lessons in 'Transformative Placemaking'
Brookings has collected a year of data on an experiment it calls "transformative placemaking," with case studies from up and down the East Coast.

Recoupling Planning and Landscape Architecture
A closer marriage between planning and landscape architecture would mean strong connections between the processes of policy making and place making.

Dodger Stadium as Civic Space with a New Front Door
Janet Marie Smith, famous for helping plan Camden Yards in Baltimore, discusses how Dodger Stadium's 'new front door' will optimize transit and pedestrian access while preserving the field's historic character and sweeping 'postcard views.'
Pagination
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
Heyer Gruel & Associates PA
City of Moreno Valley
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Salt Lake City
NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
City of Cambridge, Maryland