Placemaking for Civic Imagination
Thriving Communities is a collective initiative with a mission to help communities create radical enough change to thrive in the 21st century.
Given the broad value of public placemaking processes, we encourage all communities to embed effective placemaking into their radical change journeys. Here we outline our thoughts on why, along with plans for expanding placemaking action in south-east Europe.
Placemaking
Placemaking is an intentional and inclusive process of co-creation that builds capacity within communities to take ownership over their commons and public spaces.
Placemaking paves the way for a paradigm shift of the role of citizens in deciding and designing how their community assets are developed and managed. The process of placemaking also helps to build collective civic imagination capacity — essential to creating demand for better futures.
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.
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 imagine and test possible futures.
We should think of ‘place’ broadly as all of the public commons of a community, including: squares, streets, parks, community gardens, libraries, theatres, halls, stations, forests, rivers, national/nature parks and wilderness areas. While placemaking processes are often focussed on cities and urban development, applying placemaking approaches to more rural areas offers a new horizon for innovation in collective management of community commons.
While public spaces are not the most technically complex part of our communities, they can be some of the most socially complex and are also often subject to chronic under-investment. Therefore, working together to develop and manage public spaces helps communities to open their minds and hearts to the wider changes they really desire. Placemaking also helps citizens to develop their change-enabling ‘collaborative communities’ skills in communication, co-creation and collective management.
For these reasons, we see placemaking as being an essential part of creating radical community change.
Placemaking for Civic Imagination Programme
Because we think placemaking is an essential part of creating radical community change, members of the Thriving Communities collective are developing a Placemaking for Civic Imagination Programme to help expand placemaking action across communities in south-east Europe.
Our Placemaking for Civic Imagination Programme is designed to help:
- 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 develop civic imagination and community conversations about a desired future (which then underpin community missions).
- 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 — building confidence for other action.
- Demonstrate how placemaking processes can help citizens to make their voices heard on wider community development questions.
We have recently secured seed funding for this programme through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme of the European Union. The CERV programme is funding our project called Placemaking for Citizen-led Missions in SE Europe (PLACE). Through this project we will be delivering a series of local placemaking processes in Slovenia, Croatia and Sicily; while organising a number of international learning and capacity building events. Korimako is co-ordinator of the PLACE project, with project partners Placemaking Europe (working closely with Placemaking Western Balkans), KLIK and PUSH.
We will keep working to build from this initial investment to broaden the reach and depth of our Placemaking for Civic Imagination Programme.
Join Us
Please get in touch if you are interested to work with us on how we can better design and deliver placemaking processes that help to create radical community change.
We are looking for more members to join this collective work, especially in SE Europe, and investors that can help to expand and scale this work.
