Kaela Chavez USP 189 Prof. Lewis TAKE HOME MIDTERM: Why Placemaking Matters What is placemaking? Why does it matter? What does the placemaking movement respond to (historical trends and current context)? The United States suffers from an epidemic of social isolationism and detachment, which is in part a result of the lack of neighborhood centers and monuments in both urban and rural environments. City Repair Guidebook explains how the lack of central community spaces is rooted in the grid pattern, which traces back to the creation of colonial settlements. Colonial settlements were planned in a way that emphasized efficiency and monetary gain, thus ignoring the importance of interaction between community members and the exchange of culture …show more content…
City Repair Guidebook defines placemaking as “the act of creating a shared vision”. This vision is rooted in the needs, resources, history, climate, and culture of the community involved. It is also important to note that while placemaking involves both the built environment (i.e. physical features such as seating, lighting, etc.) and a sense of community ownership and identity. Placemaking serves to bring the community together in the hope of the development of deeper, more trusting relationships that will create the momentum to spur change and find sustainable, community-oriented solutions to different issues and problems. These issues include food insecurity, lack of access to vital resources, and safety. As these issues are unfortunately deeply rooted in systemic hierarchies, placemaking serves to not only inspire the community as a whole, but also to grant individual community members the tools and the feeling of self-efficacy necessary to create …show more content…
While sustainable placemaking is designed to increase livability, efforts are often focused on bringing in cultural creatives, who have disposable incomes. This thus creates an equity deficit, which bolsters the divide and hierarchal structure that plagues many urban areas and neighborhoods, and often highlights a blindness within the placemaking movement to the intersectionality of community members different, daily experiences and histories. Therefore, an emphasis on sustainability and biophilia in the placemaking movement must include measures toward equity. This can be achieved through systemic changes and changes to the planning theory and practice that embrace the importance of cultural competency. Further, placemaking should incorporate the practice of place governance. Through place governance, community members are engaged, and interventions/programs are designed to meet the community’s specific needs at a given time, rather than implementing a project that is designed to promote a general benefit. Place governance heightens community ownership and responsibility, and equips community members with the self-efficacy and capacity to create change, whether it be economically, aesthetically, or socially. Placemaking thus is not a solution to problems, but a
Now, a normal sized town contains fast-food joints, supermarkets, malls, and superstores, but a small town lacks that appeal. The small-town could be the most beautiful landscape known to man, but lack the necessary luxuries in life that a typical American would benefit from. Carr and Kefalas make this statement that emphasizes the town’s lack of appeal, “Indeed the most conspicuous aspects of the towns landscape may be the very things that are missing; malls, subdivisions, traffic and young people” (26). The authors clearly state that they realize that towns, such as the Heartland, are hurting because of the towns’ lack of modernization. For all intents and purposes, the town’s lack of being visually pleasing is driving away probable citizens, not only the native youth, and possible future employee’s away from a possible internship with the town. The citizens with a practice or business hurt from the towns inability to grow up and change along with the rest of the world, yet the town doesn’t realize what bringing in other businesses could potentially do for their small town. Creating more businesses such as malls, superstores and supermarkets would not only drive business up the roof, but it’ll also bring in revenue and draw the
In conducting this assignment we visited the neighborhood of Washington Heights. During our visits we interviewed several of the residences; so that we could get a first hand prospective of what it is like living in the community, why they settled in the community and the many changes that they have witness durning their time in the neighborhood.
In conclusion, I believe that every place has one building that either makes or breaks the area in which it is located. I believe that my city has areas where some buildings bring the area down. As a resident of Saginaw I didn’t really want to bring the negative to this paper, I’d rather bring the positive buildings to my paper. I hate the negativity the world has on Saginaw. But what they fail to realize is every place has a downfall, and the rise of Saginaw is on its way!
Neighborhoods are comprised of communities of people who are closely related by either birth, heritage, clan, culture, tribe, or ethnic identity or language. Neighborhoods arose due to humanistic natural desires to socialize, associate and form relationships with others humans. The formation of a neighborhood is done to preserve their unique sense of identity, culture, cherished traditions, and common values. However, affordability is a huge element in determining the type of neighborhood a person might live, grow up and rear children. Choosing a neighborhood that will help foster positive, healthy children’s development is very important. A neighborhood that will help shield the child, help nourish positive growth and foster good education
One’s sense of place is determined by where they feel comfortable, at home, or simply welcomed. Millions of people consider their sense of place as being in an urban setting, but millions more are cast out of the urban space. What causes this “urban unevenness”? There are many factors to consider when thinking about the urban divide including race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and physical and mental health to name a few. Massey’s essay, “Global Sense of Place”, discusses what she calls “time-space compression” which can explain why some people feel included in an urban space and others are excluded. Massey’s idea of “sense of place” is furthered by looking at examples from Williamson’s accounts of the destruction
After World War II, the United States of America became a much wealthier nation. As America gained wealth and the populations in urban cities and transportation technology increased, many Americans spread out, away from the urban cities, to fulfill the common dream of having a piece of land to call their own. The landscape constructed became known as the suburbs, exclusive residential areas within commuting distance of a city. The popularity and success of the suburban landscape caused suburbs to sprawl across the United States, from the east coast to the west coast and along the borders between Canada and Mexico. By the 1990s, many suburbs surrounding major urban cities developed into being more than merely exclusive residential areas. The new kind of area developed out of suburbia, the post-suburban environment, has the characteristics of the suburbs and the characteristics of the central city, or what postmodern political geographer and urban planner, Edward Soja calls, ‘the city turned inside out' (Foster 1). The post-suburban environment, is “a fundamentally decentralized spatial arrangement in which a variety of commercial, recreational, shopping, arts, residential, and religious activities are conducted in different places and are linked primarily by private automobile transportation” (Kling 1). The multifaceted aspects of the post-suburban environment make it an attractive and dynamic space with opportunities of employment. Topanga Canyon, near Los Angeles, California, is such an example of a suburb space that's developed into a dynamic post-suburban space. Since the post-suburban space of Topanga Canyon is dynamic and filled with employment opportunities, it's attractive to Mexican immigrants who wish to have a better l...
"Building Partnerships to Revitalize America's Neighborhoods." HBCU Central (Winter 2002): 1-6. Winter 2002. Web. 2 May 2012.
Very few people would want to live in a place where they don’t have security. Whether it be in cities or subdivisions, Jacobs, if alive, would ascertain that there needs to be a sense of connectedness to maintain communal safety. Public living “bring[s] together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion” (Jacobs 55). Now that families typically center themselves around suburban lifestyles, residents should understand that the same connections that Jacobs says were to be made in cities need to now be made in subdivisions. Jacobs was scared that with houses being spread out in the suburbs, little interaction between neighbors would take place. In order to avoid this, neighborhoods need to promote a sidewalk lifestyle that they currently do not (Jacobs 70). With Kotkin stressing how urban areas are no longer preferable places to raise a family, saying only seven percent of their populations are children, he lacks compassion for the transients that now inhabit cities. Undoubtedly, those who now inhabit the city should also feel safe in their environments. Nowadays, members of a city isolate themselves from interactions with other citizens making it difficult to establish a social
The problem however, with these “renewal projects” is that the implemented changes are never usually intended to benefit the long time inhabitants of these communities, these changes are intended usually, to push out the element of poverty that exists in many of these communities (which is a direct result of decades of neglect) in exchange for the opportunity to cater to a more affluent (usually less “ethnic”) demographic. In laymen’s terms, city planners, elected officials, prospective businesses, and even law enforcement, all converge for the purpose of removing poor people from an area by simply making it too pleasant and by exten...
to acknowledge people's bonds to place, entrepreneurs' collision, and the regulatory function" (p. 41). Thus, the reality of places is constructed through social actions, including both individual and collective efforts, through informal associations and institutions of government and the economy, rather than through the inherent qualities (Logan and Lolotch, 1987, p.45). Hence, the conclusion is well-constructed. The authors effectively use the 'compare and contrast' structure and the 'cause and effect' structure in the chapter to build and enhance their argument. They also back up their arguments, citing various researchers throughout the chapter, in almost all the sections, making their argument more persuasive.
Everyday experience tells us that different actions need different environments to take place in a satisfactory way. This fact is of course taken into consideration by current theory of planning and architecture, but so far the problem has been treated in a too abstract way. ‘Taking place’ is usually understood in a quantitative, functional sense with implications such as spatial distribution and dimensioning. But inter-human functions are not similar everywhere, they take place in very different ways and demand places with different properties, in accordance with different cultural traditions and different environmental conditions.
The communities were built with an abundance of houses that would allow families with all of the same interests to reside as one and work together as community. These communities would have community events to bring the community closer. The citizens of these communities were the typical American families with cars and children that lived in the house with the white picket fence. The citizens of the communities would compete to see who had the best decorated houses and win awards. It kept the community members involved in the community (Hales, Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb). This type of community helped camouflage the lives of
Place can be mysterious, beautiful, calming, or sometimes it could sum up all of the feelings that someone could possibly have. For the Kiowas, the tribe the author is from, “place” presented itself with...
A city has to be beautiful, though the definition of “beauty” is so vague. The beauty can be physical, such as enjoyable parks, streetscapes, architectural facades, the sky fragment through freeways and trees; or it can be the beauty of livelihood, people, and history. As landscape architects, we are creating beautiful things or turning the unpleasant memorial.
Frequently however, issues arise amongst a community that need attention. In this essay I will outline and discuss some of these issues and the interventions, projects or programmes designed and used to tackle and combat them. The three models of intervention or, ‘Community Development’, I will discuss in this essay, "Social Planning", "Community Development", and "Social/Community Action", all have the same aim regardless of how it is accomplished and this is to improve and maintain the conditions which affect the lives of the community.