Growing a Community Placemaking Movement in Slovenia
What if we got a movement of community placemaking happening all over Slovenia?
And what if this community placemaking movement helped us to build the collaboration, confidence and imagination capacities that we need to create wider change?
Overview
Thriving Communities sees community placemaking as a vital part of creating radical community change. One, because fantastic public spaces have many direct community benefits. Then also because the process of placemaking helps us to develop our collaboration and civic imagination capacities, which are essential for creating wider changes. So, we think every community needs to be doing a lot of ‘placemaking for civic imagination’ work.
In Slovenia, we see a great need to build on progress that has been made so far with community placemaking; and to put in place support that will accelerate a movement of high-impact community placemaking right across the country.
Therefore, in this article we outline:
- What placemaking is and why it is important
- An overview of progress with placemaking in Slovenia (including examples from the PLACE project)
- A proposed support programme to help grow a community placemaking movement in Slovenia, with an indication of investment need and value case
We wish to work with people and partners who are keen to help build on this proposition and grow a transformative community placemaking movement in Slovenia.
We are certainly keen to connect with partners who would consider making some of the much-needed investment into this work.
Note: While this proposition is focused on Slovenia, we see a similar picture in countries across SE Europe. We are also working on transnational approaches to advance this work, so do also get in touch if this is of more relevance to you.
Placemaking
“With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and well being.”
Placemaking is the process that helps communities to reimagine everyday spaces and create wonderful places. Places where people can flourish.
Placemaking is both an overarching idea, and a hands-on approach to the process of collectively reimagining and reinventing public spaces at the heart of a community.
Public spaces are where citizens can freely congregate and collaborate, and therefore are where a collective community voice can best be developed and heard. Peace, progress, democracy and our wellbeing all depend on access to public spaces that are attractive, open, inspire creativity and are able to be enjoyed by everyone.
We should think of public space broadly as all public commons of a community, including: squares, streets, carparks, waterfronts, parks, community gardens, markets, libraries, theatres, halls, stations, forests, beaches, rivers, national parks and wilderness areas. The great thing about public spaces is that they can be quickly transformed into whatever citizens need them to be. This potential for fast, affordable and experimental transformations of public space is something that most communities need to use more to help to imagine and test possible futures.
When communities make space and time to see and capture new potential in their public commons, it helps them to see and reimagine the wider potentials of their whole community. In this way, the benefits of placemaking go beyond the direct benefits of better public space. The process of placemaking actually helps to regenerate civic imagination, which is absolutely essential to shaping better futures.
When done well, placemaking also helps to build capacity within communities to work together and take greater ownership over their commons and public spaces. This means that placemaking helps citizens to develop their ‘collaborative communities’ skills of communication, co-creation and collective management, which are essential enablers of change.
This is why we think every community needs to be doing a lot of ‘placemaking for civic imagination’ work that involves a majority of people.
Progress with Placemaking in Slovenia
There is already a great foundation of placemaking work in Slovenia.
The organisations that have been at the forefront of activating and curating this work include Prostorož, Hiša!, IPOP and the Urban Planning Institute of Slovenia — along with some early adopting municipalities. These organisations have enabled and delivered a range of placemaking projects and initiatives over many years. Some highlights include:
- Zunaj / Outdoors — A successful mechanism for supporting small placemaking actions in Ljubljana led by Prostorož and IPOP, and supported by Municipality of Ljubljana.
- Odprte Ulice / Open Streets — supported experiments with replacing traffic on urban streets with cultural activation programmes. This approach has been deployed across multiple towns — led by IPOP.
- Živa Dvorišča / Living Courtyards - a civic program of events (workshops, lectures, concerts, plays, storytelling, picnics and socialising) co-created with varied local actors and aimed at revitalising private courtyards in central Maribor. Led by Hiša!
- Kočevske Akcije / Kočevje action — following the model of Zunaj, and led by Kočevje municipality, encouraging residents to organize small actions in public space, improve their surroundings and benefit the wider community.
- Marko Plenčič Square, Solkan — process run by Prostorož for testing of town square redesign and activation with an event/market kiosk ‘Mobilet’.
- Park Tabor — series of events to activate the Park Tabor area in Ljubljana, which provided a starting point for various entrepreneurial and activist enterprises — led by Prostorož.
- Krater — rehabilitation of an abandoned construction site in Ljubljana by a community of designers, biologists and artists using mobile elements for interim placemaking.
- PopUpUrbanSpaces - IPOP is working with Kamnik community on pop-up urban interventions to demonstrate streets and public spaces not dominated by cars.
- Urban Academy — mentoring program for urban creatives on public space planning, tactical urbanism, placemaking, temporary use, and other urban revitalization practices. Led by Prostorož
- Human Cities/SMOTIES — an EU platform working on improving small and remote public spaces through participatory design. The Urban Planning Institute of Slovenia is the network partner in Slovenia, and has worked on a number of sites around the country.
Complementing these actions, during 2023/24 the Placemaking for Citizen-led Missions in SE Europe (PLACE) project has supported these local placemaking processes and capacity building events in Slovenia:
- An Introduction to Community Placemaking training in Ljubljana that highlighted enthusiasm of participants to contribute to a placemaking movement in Slovenia, but that further training and co-creation sessions are needed — see insights here.
- Developing and testing a place-based trail connecting stories of prominent women of Škofija Loka with questions about the town’s future development — led by Zavod Tri.
- Testing a ‘Pestro mesto/Vivid city’ pilot process for accelerating and supporting locally-led community placemaking actions in Slovenska Bistrica (based on experience from Zunaj and Kočevske Akcije)
- Živa Dvorišča 2023 in Maribor.
- A pilot Placemaking Clinic in Maribor to help citizens to learn more about placemaking and develop ideas for local placemaking action.
All together, the above examples show that placemaking is happening and growing Slovenia, giving an existing body of learning on how to do placemaking well in this context, and pitfalls to try to avoid.
This overall experience shows that there is demand and energy amongst Slovenian citizens to work on community placemaking initiatives, but this does not come easily, and sustained activation and support makes a huge difference.
Experience also shows that in many Slovenian institutions there is still a relatively low level of knowledge and capacity, and high level of inertia, when it comes to community placemaking and other community development approaches. Very few municipalities yet have functions, teams or staff that are focused on supporting and activating citizen-led community development actions, including actions that might be considered placemaking. This reinforces the common trust and communication deficits between citizens and public institutions, and a gap in perspectives about who should be leading local action and change.
At the same time, when done well, placemaking processes can really help to bridge these trust and capacity gaps. As noted above, this is vital to unlocking wider community changes. So, while it can be hard work to get placemaking going across Slovenian communities, this work is important and needs to grow.
Hence, we believe that there is a great need to build from the progress that has been made with community placemaking in Slovenia so far, and to take a more strategic and ambitious approach to growing placemaking in Slovenia. Below we sketch out a plan for how we might effectively do this.
Growing a Community Placemaking Movement in Slovenia
What can we do next towards growing a movement of community placemaking right across Slovenia?
No doubt, there is a reasonable gap between community placemaking happening all over Slovenia and the good, but still relatively isolated, current examples of placemaking. To fill this gap, a comprehensive programme of placemaking activation, advice and acceleration support will be needed.
Programme Outline
We see that such a national support programme for community placemaking should be built around:
- A core team of local placemaking experts, advisors and champions, working through an organisational partnership model to hold the overall support programme for community placemaking.
- Capacity building, trainings, policy advice, advocacy, and programme co-ordination undertaken by the core team
- A network of placemaking advisors and coaches working with citizens and local community leaders across Slovenia. They would be embedded within a network of aligned organisations such as NGOs, companies, municipalities and development agencies. Ideally they would have regional public interface/ideation offices…
- Activation grants for local placemaking actions and processes.
Such a national support programme for community placemaking would have goals to:
- Develop the capacity of community-leaders, organisations and groups of local citizens to design and manage high-value placemaking processes.
- Ensure that placemaking processes are widely used to experiment and help to develop trust, civic imagination and community conversations about a desired future.
- Create impactful and practical community placemaking projects that deliver tangible social, economic and ecological outcomes and help the local community to feel change and progress, thus building confidence for other actions.
- Demonstrate how placemaking processes can help citizens to make their voices heard on development issues for their community.
- Test and demonstrate new collaborative community asset management approaches and models.
Programme Investment Need
To shape the scale of this programme, we need to define ‘community placemaking happening all over Slovenia.’ Given the critical importance of placemaking processes to building wider community change capacities, we think a ‘mission orientated’ goal for the programme would be to involve 1/4 of Slovenian citizens aged 15+ in a community placemaking process within 4 years. This is about 100,000 people per year.
If we assume a good local placemaking process can involve about 50 people on average, then this would be 2000 local placemaking processes/actions per year. Placemaking can of course take many different forms, and therefore requires different levels of resources. But even at the simplest level, experience-to-date indicates that unlocking a good community-led local placemaking process might require a €1000 activation grant and 2 person-weeks of coaching and design support. For 2000 local events this would come to €2 million of activation grants per year, and 4000 person-weeks of support (about 100 FTE).
This means that the network of placemaking advisors and coaches working across Slovenia (from within a network of organisations) needs to reach 100+ people. Let’s assume that if the programme provides core funding for 50% of this (about 50 FTE), then this would unlock the other half from other funding sources. Again we are looking at about another €2 million for advisors and coaches per annum. So, we are at €4 million/year total.
Adding 20% for core programme work (capacity building, training of advisors and coaches, advocacy, policy advice, engaging international expertise, communications and programme co-ordination), would bring us to a round number of about €5 million/year that is required for a comprehensive national support programme for community placemaking — a programme that could meaningfully target the mission to involve 1/4 of Slovenian citizens aged 15+ in a community placemaking process in the next 4 years.
Of course, this could be scaled down. But lower ambition comes with wider costs of inaction.
The Value Case for this Programme Investment
The direct benefits of such a placemaking support programme are difficult to fully estimate without a more detailed study. But if we step back and consider the social costs of poor public space, and experience from other places, we can anticipate that the direct social return on this investment in better public places in Slovenia will already be significant. For example, Placemaking Europe have compiled a compendium of estimates of the Value of Placemaking. These provide valuable insights into the likely value to Slovenian citizens from a national placemaking movement. This value stems from benefits linked to local economy, health, safety, property value, biodiversity, and social connections.
Then, given that…
- We know the wider costs of not creating radical enough change in our communities will be devastating — eg. the costs of not acting properly on inequality, climate change resilience, air pollution and other systemic problems,
- Civic imagination and collaboration capacities are absolutely vital for creating community aspirations and strategies for radical change,
- Placemaking helps us to regenerate civic imagination and collaboration capacities,
…it becomes clear that investing the relatively small sum of €5 million/year into a comprehensive national support programme for community placemaking, is an urgent and important investment that Slovenia cannot afford not to make.
A 4-year programme would cost about €20 million, which to give some perspective, is well under 1% of the EU cohesion funds that Slovenia has for the 2021–27 period. What better investment to make in social cohesion in Slovenia?
So, let’s make it a mission: to grow a movement of community placemaking in Slovenia that involves at least 1/4 of Slovenian citizens aged 15+ in a community placemaking process in the next 4 years.
Conclusion
We can get a movement of community placemaking happening all over Slovenia. It is going to take some hard work, but it is very achievable.
Given the experience of how placemaking already benefits other communities, we can expect that such a placemaking movement will directly generate a wealth of community benefits for Slovenian citizens. It would also help greatly to build the collaboration, confidence and imagination capacities that are needed to create wider change in communities across Slovenia.
If we make it a mission: to grow a movement of community placemaking in Slovenia that involves at least 1/4 of Slovenian citizens aged 15+ in a community placemaking process in the next 4 years. We believe that an investment of approximately €5 million/year is needed, to fund a comprehensive national support programme for community placemaking — that provides sufficient activation, advice and acceleration support.
We wish to work with people and partners who are keen to help to build on this proposition and to help grow a transformative community placemaking movement in Slovenia.
We are certainly keen to connect with partners who would consider making some of the much-needed investment into this work. We believe the case for this investment should be most compelling for the Slovenian government, making good use of the EU funds that are available to Slovenia for social cohesion and collaboration.
Interested? Get in touch with us by email
This article has been prepared by Korimako as part of the Thriving Communities initiative and PLACE project which is funded through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme of the European Union. Other PLACE project partners are PUSH, KLIK and Placemaking Europe.
